Peru

Machu Picchu, Peru, 2003

IN THE SUMMER OF 2003, MY EDITOR AT THE FREE DAILY ASKED ME IF I'D LIKE TO GO TO PERU. He had run into somebody from their trade commission at a party and it had led to an invite to attend Peru Xport, a trade fair happening in Lima that September. He was either unwilling or unable to attend, so he asked me to go instead, maybe write an article or two, perhaps post a diary about the trip on the paper's website.

It would have been terribly selfish of me to say yes. We had a baby at home and, although my wife was on maternity leave, she'd be a new mother left alone for five days. She was also an ex-journalist from a family of journalists, who understood better than I did when an editor's request was anything but, and that it was best for me to accept. For my part, I had lived a very untraveled life, and was eager to go anywhere at all, never mind a place as exotic as Peru.

And so I found myself on a plane and, after a brief night's sleep in my hotel in Lima, on another plane early the next morning to Cusco, for a quick trip to Machu Picchu before the trade fair began, all paid for and organized by PROMPEX, Peru's trade commission.

Machu Picchu, Peru, 2003

I would recommend that anyone should visit any marvel of the world if you ever have the chance. Great Wall of China, the Great Pyramids at Giza, the Grand Canyon; anything that's incredible or improbable or awesome, whether man-made or not, will lift you from the banal and workaday, at least for a while. I had never imagined that I would see Machu Picchu until I was actually on the Peru Rail train heading there from Ollantaytambo to Aguas Calientes, the town where you get off the train and catch the bus to Machu Picchu.

It's fascinating that no one really knows the actual purpose of the ruins, which were only discovered just over a century ago by the explorer Hiram Bingham. There are educated guesses and vague descriptions ascribed to certain areas - the Guardhouse, the Temple of the Sun, the Room of Three Windows - but the only thing we know for certain about Machu Picchu is that it took an awful lot of effort to bring the building material and labour up from the valley floor to this breathtaking saddle between two mountains.

As for Bingham's discovery of the place, it's likely that it was found and plundered at least twice in the 19th century, and it appeared on maps in 1874. When Bingham arrived, there were families already living there, hauling up soil from the Urubamba river valley to the Inca terraces. I can tell you that the llamas that roam the site, acting as groundskeepers, are pretty scary when they come at you while you're walking along a narrow path without guardrails hundreds of feet above the valley floor.

Machu Picchu, Peru, 2003

The altitude sickness that I'd managed to avoid all through the trip to and from Machu Picchu hit me with full force that night in Cusco, but thanks to some coca leaf tea and the pure oxygen piped into my room at a very nice hotel, I woke up the next morning feeling better. Juan Jose, my minder from PROMPEX, took me for a wander around Cusco and then up to the hills above the city to the ruins of Sacsayhuaman.

In a way, Sacsayhuaman is more impressive than Machu Picchu because of its walls, built with massive stones chiseled to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. While much of the site was demolished for materials to rebuild Cusco as a Spanish colonial capitol, enough remains to be awe-inspiring, with the added bonus of being largely unvisited by tourists compared to the famous city in the clouds.

Cusco, Peru, 2003

Sacsayhuaman, Peru, 2003

Back in Lima, we got about the real purpose of my visit - the trade fair and the business of publicizing Peru's resources and products. I stayed in the Sheraton Lima, with its rooms laid out around a vertiginous atrium lobby that was almost as awe-inspiring as Machu Picchu. The fair itself was held on the grounds of the Pacific International Fairgrounds - an annual fun fair rented out for the occasion. (Don't look for it now - it was demolished not long after I was there.)

Over the course of the next two days I saw my second fashion show of the trip (the first one was on the train to Machu Picchu), talked to people dealing in everything from minerals to sweaters, ate a lot of food and drank a lot of pisco sours. At one point, standing around idly with Juan Jose, we were suddenly enveloped in the security entourage around the First Lady, wife of then-president Alejandro Toledo, and shifted along with it to a line of armoured SUVs, surrounded by a dozen hawk-faced men with mirrored shades and earpieces.

Sheraton, Lima, Peru, 2003

Pacific International Fairgrounds, Lima, Peru, 2003

Fashion show, Lima, Peru

Paraglider, Lima, Peru, 2003

At one point I finally got away from the trade fair and got a tour of the city when Juan Jose took me to interview the CEO of a mining company at his private club in Miraflores. My research for the trip had mostly consisted of reading Nicholas Shakespeare's novel The Dancer Upstairs, about Peru during the years of the Shining Path's terrorist bombings, and the movie version starring Javier Bardem.

It was amazing that the city had only recently experienced regular bombings and assassinations. Peru's government had become a major proponent of economist Hernando de Soto's "microfinance," which filled the streets with vendors and private bus lines. Once, while waiting with Juan Jose at a stop light, a hawker approached our cab with a big cardboard placard covered in bootleg DVDs - including a copy of The Dancer Upstairs.

Pacific International Fairgrounds, Lima, Peru, 2003

Lima, Peru, 2003

I took a lot of photos when I was in Peru. My workhorse SLR since the early '90s, the Canon EOS Elan, had finally given up the ghost not long before, so this was my debut outing with a really impressive new camera - the Canon Elan 7e, packed with more features than I ever imagined in the old EOS, including eye-following autofocus, a truly magical bit of wizardry that, for some reason, Canon hasn't featured in any of its subsequent digital cameras.

I bought the 7e knowing that it was probably my last film camera, and expected to be using it for at least a few more years. Peru was, in fact, the last time I would use it seriously, as the free daily would buy a Canon DSLR for me to use a few months later. The Peru trip was my first real shooting job in at least two years, and I had obviously decided to keep things simple - there's an awful lot of symmetry happening in these shots, and subjects located directly in the centre of the frame.

I had hoped that a long lay-off from taking photos would revive some of the inspiration I felt I was losing at the end of the '90s, when the frustrations of a flagging career had made me second guess myself more than I usually did. Clean, clear, unfussy - I wanted to find my way to taking photos that could be described this way, and I was encouraged by the results when I got back all those rolls of film from the printer. I particularly liked these photos of Inca mummies taken at the museum of archaeology in Lima. They looked like I felt.

Inca mummies, National Museum of Archaeology, Lima, Peru, 2003

Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe, Toronto, Dec. 2004

AT THE END OF 2004, AFTER NEARLY A FULL YEAR BACK AT PORTRAIT SHOOTING, I was offered a chance at a subject who had always been on my "list." Tom Wolfe had a new book out, and at probably the last moment when daily newspapers felt an obligation to cover literary stories, I was assigned to interview and photograph one of my favorite writers.

Looking back, I wish I had chosen to just do the shoot, but nearly everyone at the free daily was doing at least double duty. At the time, in addition to being the paper's principal photographer, I was writing a daily TV column along with book, movie and DVD reviews and features. The next year would add TV recaps to that list; the following year added tech columns and restaurant reviews. I remember once telling a good friend who worked at the Globe & Mail how much work I was doing. He told me he had people working for him who made twice what I did for handing in less in a month than I wrote in a week.

Tom Wolfe, Toronto, Dec. 2004

Wolfe was in town promoting I Am Charlotte Simmons, a novel about the chaotic sexual politics of college students at a prestigious American college that feels very dated from the perspective of 2018. History - and society - have moved as quickly from that moment as from the world of single sex dorms and chaperoned dances that Wolfe recalled from his own college days. In my interview with him, Wolfe observed the uneasy sexual climate on campuses that would lead to safe spaces, mandatory consent, self-identified gender and #MeToo:

“The thing with coed dorms,” Wolfe says, “is that anyone can enter these dorms, any time of the day or night. It makes things enormously easier on the one hand, in that there's always a bed available, and it puts unnatural pressure on the women on the other hand, because they don't really have a neutral, easy way out ... And there are many young men and women in colleges today who really don't want to enter into four years of orgy.”

Don't get me wrong - it was a privilege to interview the man who wrote Radical Chic, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and The Right Stuff. Wolfe was a giant of the New Journalism, and if forced to choose between him and his compatriot and competitor, Hunter S. Thompson, I firmly come down on the side of Wolfe. On the other hand, if I'd let someone else do the writing, I might have been able to concentrate a bit more on getting the best possible portrait of someone I never imagined I'd photograph.

Tom Wolfe, Toronto, Dec. 2004

I did the interview and shoot at the Windsor Arms, a venerable old hotel that had recently been torn down and rebuilt so that it looked the same on the outside while the interior was completely updated to the standards of what we would call a boutique hotel today. As nice as it was, the rooms were relatively small and dark, and as soon as I pressed "stop" on my tape recorder, I had seconds to figure out how to light my portrait of Wolfe.

I ended up taking the shades off some table lamps and placing them on the floor by the entrance to the suite's bedroom, a trick I'd tried a few years earlier. There weren't any neutral backdrops, so I figured that posing Wolfe in a bedroom would be appropriate to a story about sexual mores. In the back of my mind, I knew that my Canon digital SLR wasn't stellar at finding an optimal white balance, and that Wolfe's trademark white suit would present no shortage of problems. (Handing in a selection of black and white images simply wasn't an option.)

Today, presented with an opportunity to shoot someone like Wolfe, I'd bring my own lighting and backdrop, forcing my subject into a context where I had that much more control. Back then, I was on the back foot from the start, overawed by my sitter and overcome with a lack of technical confidence that was inevitable after my long lay-off from portrait shooting. It has taken a lot of work to get these frames to looking merely presentable.

On the other hand, there is something more than a little unsettling about these photos. Imagine: You return to your hotel after a long day of work and a bit too much socializing. You find the right room and sigh with relief when your key card works in the lock. You toss the key card on the credenza with the minibar and throw your coat on the suitcase open on its metal stand and note that housekeeping has tidied up and lowered the lighting in the room.

Suddenly, you catch a flash of white on the edge of the bed reflected in a mirror and hear a genteel, Southern-inflected voice call out, "I was wondering when you'd finally make it back..."

Jessica Biel

Jessica Biel, Toronto, Nov. 2004

ANOTHER SHOOT WHERE I CAN ONLY TAKE CREDIT FOR EVERYTHING THAT ISN'T THE SUBJECT. Esquire magazine voted Jessica Biel the "Sexiest Woman Alive" the year after I took these photos, and from a purely objective point of view it's hard not to see why. Which is a roundabout way of saying that, for most people, the composition, quality of light, choice of pose and colour manipulation in these photos - the parts that are mine - are entirely irrelevant to their response.

Biel was in town promoting Blade Trinity alongside the film's director. (Wesley Snipes was either unavailable or unwilling to do local press.) She was on the first steep gradient of her rise to stardom, with more supporting than starring roles on her brief resume, but that would change quickly. This is, by and large, the point where I photographed most of the big names in my portfolio.

Jessica Biel, Toronto, Nov. 2004

I was on solid ground setting up these shots - the old Four Seasons in Yorkville, the shallow alcove by the big windows, a big wash of midday sunlight bounced and filtered around the bright room. I had spent almost a year with the paper's Canon digital camera and had a pretty good idea what I could get out of my digital "negatives." I felt close to regaining the stride I had lost years earlier and during my three years of retirement from the business.

Additionally, I no longer felt the pressure of needing each shoot to be a calling card for new business and the advancement of my professional reputation. I was essentially working incognito, though in plain sight, and the lifespan of each new portrait that made it into the free daily was roughly the time it took to go from the newsstand to the recycling bin.

Like most beautiful women, Biel knew how to look at the camera as if there wasn't an unshaven, underslept photographer behind it. (My first daughter had been born the previous year and her sister would be born less than two months later. My principal memories of this time mostly involve exhaustion.) If these portraits have any value, much of the credit has to go to the subject.

Jessica Biel, Toronto, Nov. 2004

David S. Goyer

David S. Goyer, Toronto, Nov. 2004

I DIDN'T KNOW IT AT THE TIME, BUT DAVID S. GOYER WAS THE FUTURE OF MOVIES. Four years before the release of Iron Man and the inception of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Goyer was a self-professed comic book nerd writing, directing and producing movies that took superheroes into dark places. When I took these photos in a room at the old Four Seasons in Yorkville, Goyer's script for Batman Begins was in production and Hollywood was about to go all in on troubled men in tights.

Goyer was in town promoting Blade: Trinity, the only film he would write, produce and direct. He also wrote the scripts for Nicholas Cage's Ghost Rider films and the recent Superman reboot, which is the point man for DC's effort to close up the big lead Marvel took in the superhero movie market, and created the TV series Krypton, which takes the Superman story back before his birth. The Unborn, the last film he directed, is an intriguing sounding horror film based on the Jewish myth of the Dybbuk.

David S. Goyer, Toronto, Nov. 2004

I must have been feeling ambitious near the end of my first year back at shooting, as I tried to pull a bit of a Penn by posing Goyer sitting on a freshly made bed, against the clean white wall of one of the Four Season's suites. I wouldn't have handed it in to the free daily as a black and white shot, but I definitely saw it as a monochrome photo when I shot it, with Goyer's rather expensive-looking leather jacket as the main shape and texture in the shot.

Liane Balaban

Liane Balaban, Toronto, Sept. 2004

I'M VERY FOND OF SAYING THAT PORTRAITS ARE THE HARDEST KIND OF PHOTO TO TAKE - in fact I said it to someone just the other day. Not coincidentally, I've spent most of my career taking portraits - alongside concert photography, news stories, street photography, landscapes, travel photography and still life work. Which means that I think I have some authority to make this sort of statement, but your mileage may vary.

The weak point in this idea is the fact that you can't take a bad photo of some people, thanks to their physical beauty or - back to the Duane Michals rule - the simple fact of their fame. The combination of the two explains why paparazzi were able to make money in publishing when editorial portraiture (my specialty, unfortunately) had effectively died. I'm reminded of this when I look at shots like this one, of Canadian actress Liane Balaban, the last one I did at the 2004 film festival.

Liane Balaban, Toronto, 2000

I had photographed Balaban before, just after her breakout role in New Waterford Girl, when she was just twenty years old. (I have no idea who I did this job for - it might have been the National Post - but I do know that that this might have been one of the last portrait shoots I did with my beloved Rolleiflex.)

I was a big fan - of her, and of the film, which was that rare thing: A Canadian movie I didn't hate. Balaban put me in mind of Winona Ryder, and her role in New Waterford Girl was like the ones Ryder would take at the beginning of her career. She came off as pretty and smart - the sort of combination that I loved in my favorite actresses of the '30s and '40s, like Jean Arthur or Rosalind Russell or Myrna Loy.

Liane Balaban, Toronto, Sept. 2004

Balaban showed up for my shoot with her at the festival done up for photos - hair and makeup and clothes. As I wrote in an earlier post, she immediately put me in mind of Cecil Beaton's photos of Audrey Hepburn, posing with a similar gamine confidence. After just a few frames I knew that this was going to be a good shoot.

But I can't take too much credit for the results, or with any other shoot where my subject brings some mixture of beauty and glamour and charisma to the room. Liane Balaban was ready, willing and able to be the subject of a captivating portrait; I don't know that I've seen any other shots of her taken that day, but I'm sure a few of them might be as nice as mine, which is a good reason to be humble even when you're feeling proud of your work.

Liane Balaban, Toronto, Sept. 2004

Jeff Daniels

Jeff Daniels, Toronto, Sept. 2004

MOST OF THE PORTRAITS I'VE BEEN POSTING FOR THE LAST MONTH looked nothing like this when they ran in the free daily. These portraits of Jeff Daniels are good examples - I doubt if I would have handed in shots with such inky black backgrounds, or one where I'd drained most of the colour out in favour of a cool, greenish cast.

The original jpegs looked nothing like this - they were shot in the courtyard patio of the Hotel Intercontinental on Bloor with a red brick wall behind Daniels that I've burned deep into the shadows. If I'm honest with myself, I doubt if I would have even considered such radical treatments of those shots, but when I took the photos I've been showcasing here for the last month, I no longer considered myself a photographer in pursuit of a career as much as a writer with a camera, even if I spent the whole of the 2004 film festival shooting photos to go with another writer's stories.

Jeff Daniels, Toronto, Sept. 2004

Style was something I pursued when I still thought I had a career to pursue and a reputation to build. By 2004 that seemed like an illusion I'd finally discarded, and even when I walked away with decent shots - and occasionally something even better - it never occurred to me to hand in anything that didn't harmonize with the ad-stuffed pages of the free daily. I did my best to forget about this work in the years after I left the paper, and it's only now that it seems I've been allowed a do-over.

There has always been something patrician yet affable about Jeff Daniels, who I had doubtless seen in films like Terms of Endearment and Ragtime, but only really noticed when he starred in Jonathan Demme's Something Wild, nearly twenty years before I took these photos. That patrician quality was more plain in his roles in Ronald F. Maxwell's Civil War epics, and in the recent HBO series The Newsroom. I suppose that's why I had him pose in profile, and why I made these shots look more like portrait busts in my re-imagination of this shoot.

Gael Garcia Bernal

Gael Garcia Bernal, Toronto, Sept. 2004

I WISH I HAD MORE TIME TO TAKE MY PORTRAITS. I did, briefly - for a few years working for NOW magazine I had the luxury of getting subjects to come to my studio. After snatching shots in a few spare minutes in clubs and hotel rooms when I was starting out, I suppose it was arrogance that made me assume that this was a natural evolution of my career - a dividend from paying my dues. I had no idea that it was just circumstance, and that this privilege would be taken away just when I was given regular access to bigger names than I had ever had before.

Envy isn't a healthy emotion, but I can't help but feel a twinge of it when I look at my friend Chris at work, with time to plan and pre-visualize a portrait. He has, to be certain, earned this privilege. And if I'm honest I sometimes wonder just what I'd do if I was given the opportunity to think about light and props and wardrobe ahead of a shoot with a subject with either the openness or obligation to play along. The vast majority of my thirty-plus years of work has been about snatching moments and focusing on one simple, single portrait - like these shots of Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal taken at the 2004 film festival.

Gael Garcia Bernal, Toronto, Sept. 2004

I don't know if Bernal was at the festival for The Motorcycle Diaries or Bad Education - it might have been both - but two years after Y Tu Mama Tambien he was on his way to what became a major career. He was definitely dressing the part of the guerrilla revolutionary on the day I photographed him.

What I do know is that I shot precisely 21 frames of Bernal in that hotel room, beginning at 9:48am on Tuesday, September 14, 2004 and ending at 9:49am. Would I have preferred to photograph him in a hussar's uniform, or sitting at the bottom of a drained swimming pool? Well, yes, but that clearly wasn't an option, and hasn't been for most of the time I've had celebrities in front of my camera, so I've learned to find a spot of light and walk right into a subject's personal space with a short lens (a 50mm in this case) and hope that their entirely reasonable defensive reaction feels like intimacy.

After thirty years of scavenging portraits from fleeting encounters, I wonder whether I'd even know what to do if I was given time and opportunity. I do know that I'd still love to try.