Jerzy

Jerzy Kosinski, Toronto 1988

ANOTHER PRINT FROM THE FILES and another early "hit," like the John Waters portrait. Hungry for subjects and still only a few years away from an incomplete bachelor's degree in English lit, I talked my way into accreditation at Toronto's International Festival of Authors and arranged shoots with at least a half dozen major writers, mostly in a little alcove off the lobby of the then-Harbour Castle Hilton. I budgeted my film tightly back then, and this portrait of Jerzy Kosinski is one of just 22 frames of the writer, shared over two rolls with portraits of Kathy Acker and Jay McInerney.

With only a minute or two with my subjects and whatever available light I could find, I was forced to do what I did best, and so I got up close with Kosinski with my Spotmatic. He obliged by raising an eyebrow to my lens, and I ended up with this cyclopean portrait that ended up in my portfolio for at least a few years.

I'm still very fond of the shot, but I'm pretty sure I took it out after his suicide in 1991, just three years later. By then his reputation was in tatters after nearly a decade's worth of a plagiarism controversy, and his once-considerable fame had tipped over into infamy.

Everybody I knew - or at least anybody I knew who read books - had read The Painted Bird. If they liked it, they'd probably read Steps or Being There. If they were a big fan, they'd likely made their way through Passion Play and Blind Date and The Devil Tree. If you subscribed to the notion that history was cruel and that life was perverse, then Kosinski was your cup of hemlock. Needless to say, he was catnip to a certain kind of literate youngster who'd graduated from Salinger to Vonnegut and was looking for stronger stuff.

Kosinski wasn't just a famous writer - he was a celebrity. He was friends with Roman Polanski and George Harrison; he married heiresses and aristocrats; he played polo. He barely missed being at the house on Cielo Drive the night Manson's kids killed everyone there. They made a movie out of Being There and Kosinski played Zinoviev in his friend Warren Beatty's film Reds. He was voted president of PEN - twice in a row.

Which is probably why his fall was so steep. He wasn't just a Holocaust survivor but the boy in The Painted Bird, or so he claimed. When this turned out to be not strictly true, he not only let down the readers who'd invested the author with so much of the harrowing story in his book, but the famous friends and literary gatekeepers who'd helped tend his reputation, and their betrayal was probably what did him in.

And so Kosinski has joined a legion of authors who were once giants in my youth - names like Mailer, Cheever, Vidal, Updike and Styron - but whose reputations now drift through used bookstores on battered hardcovers, their names in massive type on the torn dust jacket. (You can't help but wonder where they'll be when the last used bookstore is gone.)

They're gone, and with them a whole world that thrived but began dying before I'd reached my thirtieth birthday. A once impressive Upper West Side of the mind that stretched between the blue chip middlebrow and the highbrow, full of publishers staffed with prep school grads, chronicled in the Sunday New York Times and the New York Review of Books and Vanity Fair, where the streets were full of tweed and tuxedos and little black dresses and everyone had their favorite hotel bar.

Here's the thing, though: Fame and infamy become indistinguishable after a few years, and if I had to put together a collection of my best shots today, I'd probably include Kosinski. Not only as an example of the best of my first few years of work, but as a portrait of a man with a good story, someone a young person leafing through the pages might not have heard of, but would read about with interest once they clicked on a link.

Steven

Steven Soderbergh, Toronto 1993

STEVEN SODERBERGH WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE RETIRED FROM MAKING FILMS a couple of years ago, but he seems to be back at it, directing The Knick for Cinemax. I don't think anyone would blame him for walking away from feature films, but with cable becoming a far more rewarding venue for filmmakers nowadays, he probably shouldn't have bothered with the dramatic announcement.

I photographed Soderbergh twenty-one years ago, when he was swinging through Toronto doing press for his third feature, King of the Hill, just four years after he made his big debut with Sex, Lies & Videotape. He was a big deal, and the client, NOW magazine, had obviously scheduled him for the cover, back when they were still bullishly committed to the "2/3 whitespace" format. I can't remember much about the shoot itself - I can't even hazard a guess about which hotel we were in - but I do know that I was in the middle of a frenzy of technical experimentation at the time.

Steven Soderbergh, Toronto 1993

I was obsessed with cross-processing, and after I was sure I had a handle on putting slide film through negative chemistry, I discovered that you could develop selected negative films through slide chemistry and get striking results - mostly the sort of unnatural colour shifts that film companies spent decades of research and millions of dollars trying to prevent.

Steven Soderbergh, Toronto 1993

I did a roll of regular slide film, processed normally, and another of Kodak Gold 100, an amateur film that seemed to produce a fruity pink skin tone that I liked, in addition to a marked green cast everywhere in the midtones. I tested every film I could find to see what they delivered, but the results could be a bit inconsistent - a process I found exciting, but that made clients uneasy.

Steven Soderbergh, Toronto 1993

I also shot another 120 roll of Kodak Vericolor III, a professional slide film, which had an overall cyan cast but put an ochre tint into the highlights. Sometimes. Well, it did this time. I knew that NOW wouldn't use the 120 shots for the cover, and since they didn't print colour inside the paper, I obviously meant to shoot this roll for my own portfolio - a portrait that's more than a bit mid-period Cecil Beaton. In my first decade of shooting, I was obviously still trying to process my influences.

I've never tried to duplicate the look of cross-processed print film in Photoshop, but I'm sure it could be done. These photos are far from raw scans - besides the usual painstaking dust removal, I was considerate enough to remove a big red zit from the middle of Soderbergh's forehead - a service I could not have rendered so easily back then.

Cross-processing was a big fad, and while I was hardly the only person doing it, I ended up being the Toronto photographer who'd tested every film and happily answered questions from anyone who asked. The appeal was simple - film had reached a technical plateau of sharpness and colour rendering that I was desperate to roll back.

Obsessed with old photographs, I was hoping cross-processing would help me get the look of vintage Kodachrome or faded colour slides. It never quite did, and I'd pretty much abandoned it by the last half of the '90s, moving on to manipulating my prints with filters and tissue paper after discovering pictorialism.

It's not only Soderbergh's white shirt buttoned up to the top and his baggy jacket, but the pastel blush of the cross-processed film that makes these pictures look dated. In my mind, this is what the first half of the 1990s looked like - a slightly toxic glow that's as period as Francis Fukuyama's "End of History."

Ronnie

Ronnie Hawkins, Peterborough, Ontario 1990

RONNIE HAWKINS IS A BIG DEAL UP HERE IN CANADA, partly because he's had a lot of famous friends, but mostly because he was an American who chose to live here for reasons we're far too polite to inquire about. He's big, loud and a shameless self-promoter - traits we deplore in the native-born but tolerate when they're imported.

I dug these pics out of the files at the request of my old friend Cadillac Bill, who's tall, British and a shameless self-promoter. He recently interviewed Ronnie for his TV show and needed some pictures to illustrate the segment, and I just happened to have had a brief encounter with Ronnie back around the time the Berlin Wall fell.

John Constable, The Lock, 1824

I photographed Ronnie in the winter of 1990, in the middle of my "English painters" phase when, after seeing a show of Joseph Wright of Derby's work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I became obsessed with taking photos that echoed Wright and Constable and a particular favorite, J.M.W. Turner. To that end I dragged my studio camera, the Bronica SQa, and a whole bunch of lighting gear to Hawkins' ranch outside Peterborough, and somehow managed to rent a wide lens for the Bronica. I may have even brought an assistant along, but I can't remember now.

The client was Country Estate magazine, and don't bother looking them up because they went out of business not long after I took this, a victim of the recession that began that year and took most of my clients with it. A local knock-off of Country Life aimed at Canada's propertied classes, they'd been around since the '70s apparently but became a big deal when the '80s boom made greed good and all that great stuff I didn't enjoy as much as I should have. Like most things that thrived before the internet, they haven't left much of a digital trail. I did all of three jobs for them just before they closed down, which I remember mostly for a lavish Christmas party they held just before I did the Hawkins shoot; in my mind these photos are relics of those heady days of publishing's last golden era.

Mr. Dynamo, Columbia Records 1960

Ronnie himself was a relic of another golden era - the gut-bucket rock and roll that thrived improbably in the pre-Beatles/army Elvis era, when the charts were full of pop trifles and the old-school managers seemed to have gotten a grip on popular music again. Ronnie and his band the Hawks were the alt-rock of their day - raw, rootsy and possessed of a presumed integrity that big deal chart acts were regarded as lacking. For some reason he decided to move up here in 1964, the year I was born, and for the balance of that decade he was the king of the Yonge Street bar scene, which finally got the three-part documentary treatment it deserved a few years back.

I remember the drive to Peterborough along snowy highways taking a long time, and telling the art director who'd hired me for the shoot that I was intent on winning her a magazine award. My gig at the magazine was illustrating their "road test" feature, where they gave a celebrity an expensive new car to drive around for a week or two. I'd shot director David Cronenberg a few months earlier on the beach near my studio with a C4 Corvette, and Hawkins had been given a Range Rover to drive around his farm. I would do one more job - some captain of industry and a BMW - for the magazine before it folded.

Ronnie Hawkins, Peterborough Ontario, 1990

We set up in the snow on an overcast day that made it hard to get the moody cloudscape I wanted for that Constable look, but the rented lighting kit I'd brought along helped darken the skies and a warming filter over the lens gave the slide film the ochre cast of a varnished oil painting. The dogs were a welcome accessory. At the end of the shoot I shot a couple of rolls without the lights and cross-processed the slide film through colour negative chemistry - a new look that I'd been experimenting with, and which would end up obsessing me for a few years after that, the successor to the "English painter" look that didn't end up winning me or anyone any magazine awards.

The Ex

Ferris wheel, CNE August 2014

STILL RECOVERING FROM OUR VACATION, the family made our annual trip to the Canadian National Exhibition yesterday. We've done The Ex every year since before the kids were born, and at this point in time it feels like we're hoarding Ex days waiting for the first August one of the kids says "Thanks mom and dad, but I'm going with my friends."

We bought ride bracelets for the whole family, which meant we gorged on the midway more than the unhealthy fair food. Did a rollercoaster (but not the scary Crazy Mouse) and both ferris wheels. The kids hit every fun house they could find and we did the Alpine Bobs twice and the Polar Express - the best ride on the midway - three whole times. It was great.

Looking up. CNE  August 2014

Late in the evening, settled in while waiting for the Polar Express to start up, I took in the scuffed plywood, the chipped paint, the light bulbs radiating out from the ride's hub, and wondered whether this might be the pinnacle of my life. Surrounded by my children and the woman I love, my health basically OK; I know it's never been better than this, but is this the best it will ever be?

It's a question that's been on my mind a lot lately as I've been excavating my photo archives, confronted by the possibility that the fury of work I did in the '90s was some sort of zenith, professionally if not creatively. I'll still take photos, and some of them might be among my best work, but there's every likelihood that my profile and earnings might never match what I managed twenty years ago.

Vacation

The road to the sea, PEI 2014

I'VE BEEN AWAY FOR A WEEK. My sister offered us her cottage near St. Andrews Point in southeast Prince Edward Island and it was a great week by the water. I brought a camera or two, of course.

Crab!

Grass

I once joked with my friend-I've-never-met-in-person Sean McCormick that while his landscape photography was all about the beauty of nature out in his prairie neck of the woods, mine tended to look like crime scene photos. I hope I've improved.

Wind farm

Well, maybe not.

Montague harbour

If you're a landlubber like myself, it's hard to avoid the stock images of a maritime setting, mostly because they're so foreign to my experience. The temptation of the picturesque can sometimes be hard to ignore.

Old pier footings

Bridge

I could spend most of my time shooting this sort of stuff - a genre of landscape work I like to call "Earth five minutes after the humans have left."

Driftwood

Not groundbreaking stuff, of course, but a pretty good set of snapshots of what the world looks like to me, pared clean and catalogued. Available for framing.

Trees

Trees, High Park, Toronto, date unknown

ANOTHER PRINT FROM THE 5x7 BOX, printed at leisure some time in the late '90s, I think. Rolleiflex with Ilford black and white film, printed through dry mount tissue in the darkroom. In my mind, I can imagine myself in the makeshift closet in my old Parkdale loft, huffing in the stewing developer, stop and fixer in the tiny, unventilated room before taking the prints to the rinse bath in the kitchen. I'm sure I shaved a few years off my life in that little room.

There's a real "chicken or the egg" dilemma whenever I remember this part of my career. Work as an editorial portrait photographer was starting to dry up by the second half of the '90s; a lot of my clients had gone out of business, and a few of the art directors and photo editors who I relied on for work a few years previous had moved on up or out of the business. I'd come to rely on NOW magazine for most of my income, which was becoming a tenuous proposition as my own politics started to veer away from my employer's doctrinaire leftism.

I had also gradually begun to lose interest in photographing people, which is a bit of a problem if you're a portrait photographer. My files are full of still life work and landscapes during my last years in the Parkdale studio, and the only exhibitions I took part in during the '90s were strictly still life work. I didn't know how I was going to make a living doing this sort of work, and to make up the shortfall I slowly returned to writing after a decade of just taking photos for a living.

Here's the thing - did I start favouring still-lifes and landscapes because I was getting less work doing portraits, or did my growing preference for unpeopled photographs take the creative energy from my portrait work and alienate clients? To this day, I still don't know.

McGinnis

Mount Hope cemetery, Toronto

THE HEADSTONE OF MY FATHER'S PARENTS. A few years ago - about a decade, maybe less - I decided to find where my grandparents were buried. I made a couple of calls to make sure I'd find them there, then packed a bag with a Rolleiflex and a couple of rolls of film.

Mount Hope is the "old" Catholic cemetery here in Toronto, opened after St. Michael's Cemetery, just down Yonge Street, had filled up. The "new" cemetery is Holy Cross, way up in Thornhill, where my parents are buried. My wife keeps telling me we need to start thinking about funeral plans, and while I'd do anything to avoid this, if I had a preference I'd like to end up At Mount Hope, if only because it's closer to the parts of the city where I've actually lived.

It didn't take me long to find the Murphys, my mother's parents, but the McGinnises were a tougher hunt. I eventually found this faded white stone cross, probably put in place when Robert McGinnis, my grandfather, died in Christmas of 1914, not long after the family emigrated from Lesmahagow, Scotland. He'd taken a job at the Swift's Edible Oil and rendering plant in the stockyards north of the Junction - a short walk from where I live now. Typhoid had an affinity for stockyard workers, unfortunately, and he left behind a wife, a daughter and four sons including my father, who'd leave school shortly afterward to help support the family.

His wife, Isabella, would survive for almost three more decades, ill for much of that time, dying in the summer of 1943, when my father was in the air force. He'd put off marrying his fiancee due to his mother's health, and so a few months later he was able to get leave, took the train to Toronto, got married and took my mother for a brief honeymoon in Montreal before heading back to base in Rockcliffe, just outside Ottawa.

I never knew any of my grandparents.