Peter

Peter Jackson, Toronto 1994

PETER JACKSON'S LATEST HOBBIT FILM COMES OUT THIS CHRISTMAS, and barring a global Ebola pandemic, I can't see why it won't make millions. These portraits were shot at the beginning of his career, however, when he was at the Toronto International Film Festival to promote Heavenly Creatures, the sort of film that he really doesn't make any more.

As with any film festival shoot, it was shot at one of four or five hotels; the black and white portraits were done with window light, and in this case using my Canon EOS Elan autofocus - my 35mm SLR for most of the '90s. I was an assignment for NOW magazine, as usual, and they'd obviously decided that Jackson would get the cover, since I shot two whole rolls of black and white film and two rolls of 120 colour slide.

Peter Jackson, Toronto 1994

I didn't like shooting slide film; it took away the control I'd get in the darkroom, so I'm guessing that there was a deadline, and that the paper needed the colour cover shots quickly. I'd obviously brought along a flash - my Metz potato masher with a Speedotron battery - and judging from the reflection in Jackson's eye, I used a soft box, not an umbrella. The background was one of my old standbys - the back of a hotel curtain, draped over a floor lamp or a poster stand. Along with my Rollei case, this was my standard portable studio set-up.

I can't say that I'm taken with the results. It's a merely passable portrait, with a distracting background and a subject who's definitely posing. This was why I preferred shooting in the studio, where I'd have time to set up lights and backgrounds at leisure, and deal with the subject in relative tranquility, without a publicist behind my shoulder, ready to cut my time short.

Peter Jackson, Toronto 1994

The black and whites are more successful. He's still posing, but the compositions are tighter and the background's not an issue. I could probably go back and do better scans of these shots, but they'll do for now. I can't remember a thing about Jackson. He was clearly happy to be in front of the camera, as his career was starting to take off with a perceptible rush. Pretty good for a guy who, just a few years earlier, was best known for a film about puppets fucking each other.

Afternoon

Queen Street West afternoon, date unknown

I HAVE NO IDEA WHEN I SHOT THIS, though I'm pretty sure that's my friend Tim Powis walking away from the camera. Taken on Queen Street West here in Toronto, just by the corner of Peter Street, with a Rolleiflex, and printed with soft focus filters in the vignetted edges of the frame. It was in the 5x7 box, along with a few other similarly mysterious prints I took pains to print for reasons I can't remember any more.

By the early-mid '90s I'd become a bit of a Luddite, intent on holding back the computerized future, stubbornly refusing to buy a computer, still submitting work typed on my ancient Remington and striving to shoot as if it were 1958 whenever I could. The digital revolution in photography was a decade away from sweeping all before it, and whatever digital cameras were out there were experimental and expensive, so it was an easy pose to adopt. In many ways, just a few years from the dawn of the 21st century, we really were still shooting like Eisenhower was still in the White House.

Even though it's not quite twenty years ago, this photo feels like it comes from a distant era now. Nobody is looking at their cell phones, and in my mind I can recall the street as it was then - very different from when I'd first walked down it fifteen or so years before, and not at all like it is today. I wouldn't dare call it a clear and accurate document of the city as it was - a photographer like Patrick Cummins has done a much better job at that sort of thing - but for me it's a moment of vanished past, more mine than the city's, caught mostly by accident.

Iggy

FOR YEARS I INSISTED THAT I HAD NEVER SEEN IGGY POP LIVE, despite being a big fan. As with David Bowie, I presumed that since I'd missed seeing both of them at the height of their creative careers (which happened to coincide to just after the mid-point of the '70s,) I'd given them a miss whenever the opportunity came up, afraid of being disappointed.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I found this staring at me from a binder full of unedited colour slides:

Iggy Pop, Toronto 1990

Iggy Pop at the Concert Hall, shot during the Brick By Brick tour. I have no record of who the client might have been. I'm guessing it was shot with my ill-starred Nikon F3, and that I might have rented a 300mm telephoto for the occasion since I never owned a lens for the Nikon long enough to have gotten this sort of close-up from what I'm pretty sure was the side of the stage, just by the speaker columns.

Or maybe not. Brick By Brick was a pretty lousy record and I'd long since stopped caring about what Iggy was doing by this point, so I can't imagine that I'd have invested money out of pocket on a shoot that I didn't care enough about to remember as soon as it was over. Maybe I was close enough to use my mild portrait telephoto.

I'm guessing, though, because - like the Bowie show I shot the same year - I have no memory of shooting this at all. My wife has suggested that since I didn't see them when they were at their most vital to me - Iggy at Seneca Field House in 1977 with Bowie on piano, touring to support The Idiot; Bowie at Maple Leaf Gardens in either 1976 or 1978 - I had diminished the memory, since seeing them past their prime didn't count.

As I said before, shooting Bowie probably wasn't the most ideal circumstance - from some distant point in the local sports stadium, on the end of a long lens - but with Iggy I was in a modestly sized venue and obviously close enough to get these shots. So why didn't I remember seeing someone who was so hugely important to me?

Maybe it was the drugs.

But I don't remember doing any drugs by the turn of the '90s. I was too busy and too poor, but also too concerned with being in control, since I'd begun taking this photography thing very seriously and was desperate to make a living from it. I can't use the excuse about "getting old," since I clearly forgot about seeing Iggy weeks if not days after shooting these photos, and I wasn't even 30 yet.

Here's the thing: This sheet of colour slides is all I've got. I've combed the binder full of negatives from 1990 and there's no live Iggy to be found, so I obviously went in there with a single roll of colour slide film, then left when I filled it, clearly unwilling to stay for a few extra minutes to fill a roll of black and white. I don't think I wanted to be there, so it's not surprising that I couldn't be bothered remembering that I was.

Which is kind of sad, and in retrospect I think Iggy probably deserved better. In any case, here's another frame from the same sheet of slides, and something more like Iggy as I'd like to remember him.

Iggy Pop, Toronto 1990

Katrin

Katrin Cartlidge, Toronto, Sept. 1996

THERE AREN'T A LOT OF PEOPLE I'VE BEEN REALLY EXCITED TO PHOTOGRAPH. Katrin Cartlidge was one of them. Shot during my annual portrait blowout at the Toronto International Film Festival, I'm guessing the Hotel Intercontinental on Bloor, where I simply found the place where the window light starts to take on the flat, diffuse quality of north light.

Taken with a Rolleiflex on a tripod with Ilford black and white film - the simple formula that I used for most of the '90s. She was probably in town doing press for Career Girls, her best film in my opinion, and certainly my favorite film by Mike Leigh. I first saw Cartlidge in Leigh's Naked two or three years earlier, a film whose mood felt disturbingly too much like my life at the time. (David Thewlis, the film's star, admitted that was actually a pretty disturbing reaction when I photographed him.)

Shot on assignment for NOW magazine, where I was teamed up with Ingrid, always my favorite writer to work with. I must have managed to get into a press screening for Career Girls before I took this portrait because I remember Cartlidge being taken aback at how stoked Ingrid and I were about the film and about meeting her in general.

Cartlidge was an unusually intelligent actor, who shone when given room to work and was generally wasted when doing small roles in films like From Hell, which was unfortunately her last picture. She died the year after it came out, of an infection that came from an adrenal tumour, a sudden death at just 41 that shocked and depressed me when I read the news.

"The hardest thing of all is to face the unbearable truth that Katrin Cartlidge will never again make her magical contribution to my films," Mike Leigh wrote in a tribute after she died. "This devastating fact leaves me very sad indeed." I don't imagine that an actor like Cartlidge, had she lived, would have prevented movies from being any worse than they are today, but like the best performer, she might have improved them for at least the few moments when she was onscreen. 

The Church Shop

Mary, 1989

I PROBABLY WOULDN'T HAVE CALLED MYSELF A ROMAN CATHOLIC WHEN I TOOK THESE PHOTOS. As a friend - an Anglican priest - would tell me years later, "You were never not a Catholic, Rick."

Point taken.

Back when Queen Street West by Trinity Bellwoods Park was a sleepy strip of storefronts, either empty or failing, somebody took advantage of the cheap rent and set up an antique shop specializing in ecclesiastical cast-offs - statues and lecterns, pews and hunks of wood trim and ornament salvaged from churches, probably Catholic ones, and very likely from Quebec.

St. Peter, 1989

I was drawn into the place like a moth to a fluorescent tube; so much for my self-described agnosticism. One day I asked the owner if I could come by with my camera when the shop was quiet. It was quiet most of the time, and they said yes. A few days later I showed up with my Mamiya C330, a tripod and a few rolls of black and white and slide film.

Sacred Heart, 1989

I must have worked for about an hour, setting up on anything that caught my eye. I treated the statues like portrait subjects, but even more of a breakthrough, started focusing on details and the bits of gesture and texture that seemed to tell a better story than any attempt to capture the contents of the crowded shop.

Fallen Angel, 1989

At that point, labouring under a heavy burden of anxiety of influence, I'm sure my inspirations were equal parts Josef Sudek and 4AD album covers. I didn't worry about that at the time - you shouldn't when you're young; the influences will sort themselves out - but moved from spot to spot in those rooms filled with plunder from the Quiet Revolution.

Sacred Heart, 1989

I was still unsure how to work the Mamiya even a couple of years after I'd bought it, and it was easy to accidentally double-expose images. I ruined a few frames this way, but on at least one contact sheet, I discovered one of those lucky accidents that it would take me years to learn to treasure.

Jesus and Joseph, 1989

Most of these images sat unprinted for years, and I don't think I looked at the slides again until I scanned them this week. But I took the portrait of Mary at the top of this post in and out of my portfolio for years, unsure about what clients would think and, even more, what it was saying. I should have been more confident; I still think it's one of the best portraits I ever made.

Greg

Greg Dulli, Toronto 1998

THE AFGHAN WHIGS ARE PLAYING RIOT FEST here in Toronto next month, part of a 2-day bill that also includes The Cure, Social Distortion, The National, Death From Above 1979, The Buzzcocks, Bob Mould, Thurston Moore, The New Pornographers and Paul Weller. We've never taken the kids to an actual, for-real concert yet, but for a moment the wife and I considered spending a lot of money and dealing with no small amount of discomfort and whining to expose our offspring to the sort of music we used to love before they were born.

After a moment, sanity returned and we decided it was a bad idea.

I was a big fan of Greg Dulli and the Afghan Whigs during the long terminal phase of my life as a single man, from my mid-twenties and long into my thirties. If you had come to believe that relationships were a minefield, that men and women could visit some truly amazing grief on each other, and that love was a fire we chose to thrust our hands into, then Dulli and the Whigs were the band for you. I was not a happy camper.

This was taken with a Bronica SQa in my Parkdale studio in the fall of 1998, when Dulli was doing press for the 1965 album, which would be their last before they broke up in 2001. The client was NOW magazine, and when I got the gig I contacted the publicist and asked if it was OK if I wrote things all over the seamless backdrop behind Dulli - stuff like "The only woman I have ever loved is my mother" and "I will never lie to you."

She said she'd talk to Dulli and get back to me. A few days later, I got a call saying Greg thought it was fine - as long as I wrote everything in Italian.

A quick call to my friend Vince took care of that, and on the morning of the shoot I laid the charcoal seamless down on my studio floor and began writing in a thick pastel chalk, carefully copying Vince's translation. Later, when Dulli arrived at my studio, I proudly pointed to the backdrop, hoping that it would pass muster and that I wouldn't have to come up with a plan B on the spot. He seemed mildly amused. I reminded him that he'd requested everything in Italian.

His eyes quickly darted to the publicist and he stifled a chuckle. "Oh, did I say that?"

The shoot went well. I gave it my customary treatment in the darkroom with dry mount tissue and vignetting and put it in my portfolio. I'm not sure I ever shopped that portfolio around for work.

I met my wife the year I took this photo. I haven't listened to the Afghan Whigs in ages.

Dog Park

By Grenadier Pond, High Park, 1990s

I DON'T KNOW AT PRECISELY WHAT POINT I began losing interest in editorial portrait work, but it was definitely just before I took this picture. At the turn of the '90s I would have told you that taking portraits of people for magazines and newspapers was pretty much all I wanted to do; on the verge of the millennium, I was desperate to do something else entirely.

Taken with a Rolleiflex in High Park, likely while on assignment for another job - I rarely just hit the streets with a camera and no task at hand. Influenced by people like photographer/illustrator Matt Mahurin, I'd begun using long shutters, selective focus and, in the darkroom, dry-mount tissue and diffusing gels to take the sharpness out and inject a lot of grain back into my photos.

I was desperate to put this sort of work in my portfolio, but hadn't a clue how to use it to sell myself for jobs. And I've never understood how the world of galleries and fine art photography worked. And so I took these photos furtively, storing prints away with no audience in mind. This one was found in the 5x7 box which, as I sift through its contents, is starting to feel more like a hope chest of frustrated ambition from the second decade of my career as a photographer.