DOING PORTRAITS AT THE FILM FESTIVAL WAS ALWAYS A REMINDER that there is more than one Hollywood. Decades ago, when I started shooting actors and directors there, I was aware of Bollywood, but I quickly learned about the massive film industry in Hong Kong and China, with stars and box office numbers as impressive as any studio summer blockbuster.
In this other Hollywood someone like Maggie Cheung or Tony Leung are as big as Nicole Kidman or George Clooney, and anywhere else but Toronto it's unlikely that I'd get access to them. It made shoots like this feel like a bit of a privilege, and by the time I did this shoot with Tony Leung I was as fully aware of his persona and intent on working with it in the scant minute or so I had with him.
Tony Leung, Toronto, Sept. 7, 2007
As I noted when I wrote about my shoot with Maggie Cheung, much of the allure of In The Mood For Love, Wong Kar-Wai's enigmatic romantic featuring Cheung and Leung as frustrated lovers, came from how good-looking they were onscreen. I approached Leung like a matinee idol, and tried to capture some impression of his cool intensity.
As with much of the 2007 festival, I was working in the dim rooms at the Intercontinental, where the right spot of light had to be discovered somewhere in the room, and rarely in the same place. I found it in a corner, and decided to ask Leung to do a little bit of acting for the horizontal shot above, playing at the hint of a scene from a film noir that could have been set in just such a dim room.
This is probably one of my favorite shoots from this festival, and I liked to imagine it printed in a Hong Kong cinema magazine. (Considering the blase attitude toward intellectual property in that part of the world, there's every reason to believe that one of these shots could still end up there, now that I've put them back into circulation.)
Self-portrait in an elevator, Art Gallery of Ontario, 2017
THIS BLOG IS FOUR YEARS OLD TODAY. If everything goes according to plan in the next few weeks, there won't be a fifth anniversary. I am running out of old photos to post and, if I'm perfectly honest, getting tired of talking about old work instead of making new work. But it's all good, and I find myself in a much better place than I was when I put up my first post here, four years ago.
On the first anniversary of the blog, I decided to feature some of the by-products the blog had produced, which ended up involving reprinted work that appeared in books and on CDs, and even in The New Yorker magazine. After a while, I started to hope that more new work would get out there than just reprints of old shoots, and with the end of this blog in sight, this has become my goal.
I wanted to talk about this in my last anniversary post but it was still in the works at the time. It turns out that my shoot with Fela Kuti when he came to town for a concert in 1989 - done on my own, without any client and unpublished until I started this blog - had some value after all, and getting my "lost" shoots out into the world had been a big reason to start the blog in the first place.
The blog post found its way to Rikki Stein, Fela's manager, and we began talks about featuring them in the fourth volume of a box set edition of Fela's LPs. Previous volumes had been curated by Brian Eno, Questlove and Ginger Baker; this one would be curated by Erykah Badu. As a huge Fela fan, this was a privilege I couldn't have imagined for all the years I basically sat on the shoot.
My photos ended up all over the big 12" booklet that comes with the box. The cover shot of Fela glaring at me past his cigarette (or was it a joint?) was one I'd never printed before, and I think it has a lot of impact. The rest of the book features live photos and sequences from the portrait shoot contact sheets, all displayed as big and beautiful as I'd always imagined seeing my work, and thanks to the "vinyl revival" my work is featured on a scale I never saw in the age of the CD.
Another big market for reprints of my old work has been documentaries, and the past year saw two or three films feature my photos. There was a documentary about a Canadian music industry figure (which I've never seen) and a French TV documentary about Depeche Mode that bought the rights to use one of my portraits of photographer Anton Corbijn, who had a big hand in creating the band's visual image. (I've also never seen that.)
Most exciting of all, though, was Right Here, a documentary about the Go-Betweens, made for Australian television. This was another shoot I did without a client, and which had never been seen until I posted the photos on this blog. It turns out I captured the band at a crucial time in their very fractious history; I'm a fan of the group, so it feels good to play at least a tiny part in telling their story.
I've frequently gotten requests from people and organizations to use my work for free. I tend to say no, but mostly because people go about asking the wrong way. The truth is that I'm happy to let someone use an image without payment, provided they promise that they'll use it respectfully, that they'll credit me prominently and try to link back to my website or this blog - and that they ask nicely.
In the first year of this blog, an artist did a very nice drawing based on one of my photos of guitarist Rowland S. Howard. I was flattered, and posted her artwork on the first anniversary of the blog. Earlier this year, California designer and teacher Edgar Garcia reached out to me to ask about using my portrait of rapper Ice Cube as part of a series of illustrations he was doing on old school rappers. He asked nicely, I liked what he was doing, and here's the result.
Richard McGrath is a designer, and the proprietor of the Terminal Press, who has been trying for several years to get permission to use my J.G. Ballard photos, which until I posted them here hadn't been seen by anyone since (I think) they were printed by Nerve magazine back in the '80s.
McGrath is a huge Ballard fan who has been putting together and publishing Deep Ends, a hardcover compilation of Ballard material for several years. It took a while, but my photos - and the text of my blog post - ended up in the latest volume of Deep Ends. It all looks pretty great, and it's nice to get these shots out in front of people who want to see them - using the sort of digital custom printing technology that I couldn't have dreamed about back when I took the shots.
Around two years ago Joel Wasson - an old friend of my wife and I from the city's music scene - contacted me about doing photos of his new band. Joel had gone through a rough divorce and had done something amazing to help move forward by forming a punk rock band with two of his sons. I shot promo photos that ended up on their first LP, and not long after Joel came back and asked if I'd do the next record.
He described his concept - "See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil," basically - and I worked out a way to execute it with a small, improvised studio set-up in my living room, a composite of separate photos and a lot of digital editing. It turned out to be one of my favorite album covers of all the ones I've done, made more special by being one of the few realized on a full-sized 12" LP jacket.
Just as exciting was seeing the LP design on a t-shirt, only the second time (that I know of) where my photos have ended up on a t-shirt. Mostly, though, it's been nice to have the support of people I've known for years from the local music scene, like Joel and Ian Blurton. I've quietly put it out that I'm offering a special "friends and family" discount for old scene friends like Joel and Ian - a low, low price for a shoot, with the proviso that I can mostly do what I want, though any kind of collaboration is appreciated.
Long Branch, Toronto, Jan. 2018
This offer got out to some more old friends in another local band, Long Branch. My connection is mostly with the rhythm section - bassist Sally Lee is my old roommate from the Parkdale loft, and drummer Don Pyle was our upstairs neighbour (and is now my barber.) They needed promo shots for their next record, so one wintry January day we met at Don's house and did a couple of setups inside before heading out into the snow.
I'm particularly fond of the shot above, which has the simplicity I always wanted in band photos. But even more, I was flattered that they asked, and grateful to be doing new work. Which is the point I'm at now, running out of old photos and eager to make new ones - an outcome I would have considered far too optimistic when I put up my first post here four years ago.
THIS SHOOT WAS MY SECOND ATTEMPT AT GETTING A PORTRAIT OF ANG LEE. A decade previous, back when I worked at NOW magazine, a request for a shoot with the director had been denied at the last minute, and I had felt frustrated ever since. I had been a big fan of Ang Lee since his Austen movie adaptation Sense & Sensibility had been a breakout hit, and had proved that he was more than just a director of particularly Chinese stories.
Since then, The Ice Storm and Ride With The Devil had confirmed his remarkable versatility, and made me an even bigger fan. There aren't a lot of masterful directors working today, but I'd put Lee among their small number, even though I still think his Oscar nominations (with two wins out of three) are for the wrong pictures.
Ang Lee, Toronto, Sept. 7, 2007
By 2007 I'd figured out how to use the very dim, peculiar light in the rooms at the Hotel Intercontinental on Bloor. The extreme drop off into shadow and necessity of using the adjacent walls of the very small, dark rooms pushed my style even further away from the Penn-inspired work I'd done for NOW in the '90s.
These shots are probably as perfect an example of whatever typifies my "hotel room" style as I'll find in all the work I did for the free daily, and the fact that they're really just small variations on a single pose underlines the unvarying conditions of those shoots: They were usually done under intense pressure, and often in less than a minute.
Lee was in Toronto promoting Lust, Caution, one of his periodic returns to Chinese stories that seem to be the only constant in a career that's included a superhero film (Hulk), his "gay cowboy movie" (Brokeback Mountain), a docudrama about the Woodstock Music Festival (Taking Woodstock) and a metaphysical fantasy film based on a book by an annoying Canadian (The Life of Pi). His Wiki bio teases future projects that include a sci-fi film and a movie about the 1975 Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier match that was supposed to be filmed in 3-D. It's a mark of Lee's talent that even his failures are more interesting than most blockbusters.
ROSAMUND PIKE BEGAN HER FILM CAREER AS A BOND GIRL, but unlike many actresses who got their big break with 007 (Daniela Bianchi, say, or Barbara Bach), she managed to thrive despite this distinction. 2007 turned out to be my Bond Girl year, as Pike shared the job in Die Another Day with Halle Berry, who also recovered nicely from the experience.
Pike was at the film festival to promote her starring role in Fugitive Pieces, a Canadian production based on an award-winning novel, directed by Jeremy Podeswa, a local-boy-made-good who went on to direct episodes of Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones. Pike would return to Canada a few years later for a role in a movie adaptation of Mordecai Richler's Barney's Version; her luck held and her career survived these excursions in the Canadian film industry.
Rosamund Pike, Toronto, Sept. 6. 2007
Pike is one of cinema's current great beauties, an English Rose with actual talent to back up her looks. Whenever I've been assigned to photograph one of these beauties, I feel an uncommon mix of dread and relief. Relief because I know that, as long as the light is good and the camera is focused, I'll like get a photo that most people will call "lovely." Dread because, well, that really isn't enough - beauty is a crutch, and it's hard to make a portrait that's both beautiful and interesting.
I tried to work around Pike's obvious beauty by holding her full center in the frame with the Intercontinental's very tapered light behind me. I gave her more direction than I usually do, but nothing really specific, hoping to catch a few of those "in between" moments that can't be posed. I'm still not sure if I was successful, but I do know with some certainty that I've rarely seen any photos of Pike that look like mine.
I SUPPOSE I PHOTOGRAPHED CHRIS TUCKER IN THE MIDDLE OF A CAREER CRISIS. Perhaps that's why he was a more than usually tense subject, even for a big celebrity. Or perhaps Tucker just isn't very relaxed in front of some random newspaper photographer for whom he's obliged to make faces. I'm pretty sure I might be the same way, were I in his situation.
Tucker was in Toronto promoting the third film in the Rush Hour series. He'd had his breakthrough alongside Ice Cube in Friday, then become a celebrity with three films in 1997 - Money Talks, Jackie Brown and The Fifth Element. The first Rush Hour film was a monster hit, and for the next decade he didn't seem to do much but team up with Jackie Chan for its sequels.
An actor with his status should have probably been working much more often, which is why I interpret this period in his career as a crisis, but knowing the kind of money a hit franchise can generate, perhaps he was simply thinking "Why work if you don't have to?" (But then again, Tucker would end up settling a $2.4 million dollar tax debt seven years after I took these photos, so maybe I was right.)
Chris Tucker, Toronto, July 19, 2007
Technically, this was like much of 2007 - "another shoot, another camera." This time I was testing out the Olympus E-510, which was a bit of a shift in their DSLR line, from a Kodak CCD digital sensor to a Panasonic MOD sensor. Whatever that means, the result was a much more smooth and detailed jpeg than I had been used to working with up till then. It also marked a shift to a fixed 3:4 sized sensor from the more film-like 2:3 aspect ratio.
It has to be noted that digital cameras during this period were evolving pretty quickly, increasing in resolution with each new generation and improving their sensitivity in low light and at higher ISO settings. By contrast, digital photo technology seems to have plateaued a decade later, with only minor improvements being offered with new models.
I was a bit wrongfooted by Tucker's very reserved attitude as a subject, so I just went into a default look for much of this shoot and had him adopt an old Hollywood screen idol kind of pose - the result of which is the frame at the top of this post. The shot at the bottom is the result of looking at the jpegs again for the first time in over a decade and finding something interesting in the unnaturally smooth colour rendition the camera produced; pumping a bit more warmth into the image in Photoshop gave it a quality that I associate more with digital photos than film, where even the most basic portrait (like this one) takes on a plastic, processed quality that lends the image a faint strangeness I wouldn't have seen through the viewfinder.
SHE REALLY, REALLY TALKED A LOT. I mean, a lot; I actually felt sorry for David Bowie at a certain point. I imagined that he didn't get a word in edgewise at home, and had this image of him holding up his finger and saying "Yes, dear - " and "Of course, darling, but..." For the first time in my life I had a reason to imagine David Bowie's home life as an old radio comedy about a retiring, milquetoast husband and his firebrand wife.
Supermodel Iman was in Toronto promoting her role in the Canadian franchise of Project Runway, which was a huge hit at the time and the subject of much coverage in the free daily. I was, of course, more than a bit overawed to be photographing Mrs. Bowie - I can't lie about that - but the prospect of having one of the world's most famous models in front of my camera was also intimidating, and I wondered if it would be possible to get anything where Iman didn't merely slip into studied poses.
Iman, Toronto, May 30, 2007
The shot at the top is very nearly what I imagined I'd get, and much of the shoot - done on the terrace of a penthouse suite in one of the new boutique hotels downtown - is like this: Iman in autopilot, presenting the sort of face that I imagine Peter Beard or Patrick Demarchelier or Richard Avedon would have tolerated for a few frames before imploring her to pretend that she cared.
It was the shot I handed into the free daily, in any case, but going through the shoot years later I noticed the frame just above. There's a bit more happening here - perhaps a bit of impatience coming through: The seasoned model concerned that this rather silent newspaper photographer isn't up to capturing her best face. If I flatter myself, it reminds me of a still from an old Italian movie - Anna Magnani or Gina Lollabrigida building up to a fierce tirade at some hapless male co-star. In any case, my closest brush with fashion's upper echelon.
THE FIRST TIME I SAW THIS IS SPINAL TAP, AT A DOWNTOWN MULTIPLEX, a long-haired metalhead dude ahead of me on the escalator after the movie turned to his equally long-haired metalhead buddy and said, "I don't get it - why make a movie about a band that sucks?" Even if the movie wasn't as seminal as it is, this anecdote alone would endear it to me for all time.
Similarly, Harry Shearer would be a legend to me even if he hadn't co-wrote the film and played bassist Derek Smalls. So I was a bit overawed when I got the assignment to do his portrait when he was in town, promoting either A Couple of White Chicks at the Hairdresser (unlikely, as I don't think it was ever released outside the U.S.) or The Simpsons Movie (more likely, though he might have been in town for some completely different reason.)
Harry Shearer, Toronto, April 25, 2007
The assignment was at a hotel I'd never shot in before - the Grand Hotel & Suites at Jarvis and Dundas East, which I remembered from when the building was the RCMP headquarters. We did the shoot in a meeting room on the main floor instead of one of the suites, which probably explains the chair - hyperbole in the form of furniture - and the generous shooting space, not to mention the dismal lighting, from overhead fixtures and pot lights.
The mixed lighting sources means that this shoot is nearly unprintable in colour, so I've rendered these frames in black and white. I've also played with the focus in processing, subtly with the bottom frame, more dramatically in the one at the top, to give the look of a very wide lens with a very, very narrow aperture, or a view camera with the focal plane shifted.
I had my doubts about even posting these photos until after I'd managed - with considerable effort - to correct the shortcomings of the original images. Which is another reason for me to be grateful for the digital revolution.
