YESTERDAY I WROTE A POST ABOUT TAKING PHOTOS OF REALLY BEAUTIFUL WOMEN. As soon as I wrote the word "beauty" I was aware that the word is a subjective one, and that there is no one, definitive, empirical concept of beauty. I also wrote about how taking photos of beautiful people can be a dispiriting exercise for a photographer because the subject's apparent, intrinsic attractiveness will register with viewers almost equally in a technically great photo or a mediocre one.
I wrote about Great Beauties - those women (and men) who by some huge popular consensus set a standard for what we consider beautiful in a human being. I didn't talk about my own conception of beauty, and who I consider to be beautiful, since it's so often divergent from that consensus standard. There are women (and men) I consider to be beautiful who might not register at all with a majority of viewers, and Scottish actress Kelly MacDonald is one of them.
Kelly MacDonald, Toronto, Sept. 8, 2007
I was given the assignment to photography MacDonald and Monica Bellucci on the same day. I've said that I was nervous about photographing the Great Beauty, Belluci; I was just as nervous with MacDonald. I also remember that the reaction of the men waiting in the crowded hallways of the hotel was the same for both Bellucci and MacDonald. The former was glamour distilled, the latter a modestly dressed woman in sensible summer shoes, but this reminded me that the beauty standards of movies and magazines don't usually matter much to most men, whose concept of beauty is more about the impression of freshness and health and intelligence than imposing mystique.
The light I found in the room at the Intercontinental was much better for MacDonald - the sort of flat but focused light that it had taken me quite a few shoots to discover in those rooms, and a few more shoots to learn to work with from the moment I clicked the shutter to the finished digital file. She seemed a little nervous, so I remember giving a little more direction than I liked, mostly to get her to relax just enough for me to capture the very particular, approachable loveliness that I thought was at the heart of her appeal onscreen in roles from Trainspotting to No Country for Old Men to Boardwalk Empire.
THERE IS A BASIC - AND CONSIDERABLE - PROBLEM WITH SHOOTING REALLY BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE. This can be summed up with the maxim that the quality of the photo you take and the skill you've acquired on the way to taking it is largely immaterial, since most people will react to even a mediocre photo of a really beautiful person by saying "Oh, that's lovely."
They're responding more to the subject than the photo, basically, and it might bother other photographers less than it bothers me, but it's perfectly embodied in this shoot I did with actress Monica Bellucci at the film festival in 2007.
It has to be understood that Bellucci isn't merely an attractive actress - there are plenty of those - but one of cinema's Great Beauties: An actress whose beauty has often been the defining characteristic of roles she has played, much as it would have been with previous Great Beauties like Sophia Loren, Marilyn Monroe and others. And as soon as I was given the assignment to photograph Bellucci I felt a wave of panic wash over me.
Monica Bellucci, Toronto, Sept. 8, 2007
I've written about this shoot before but it's worth describing one more time. I showed up at the suite at the Intercontinental for the shoot to discover it was one of the rooms without much in the way of window light, but that a television crew had set up in the space. I politely asked one of the techs if it was possible to use their lights for my shoot as the room's ambient light was far from sufficient (or attractive.) He said yes, and I set up a couple of quartz heads in a crossfire next to a light wall; it wasn't the loveliest light ever, but it was bright and directional and just soft enough and I hoped that I could make it work.
Bellucci showed up with hair and makeup people in tow, and while they had no doubt done their job well, the light I chose was just harsh enough that I have done some considerable Photoshop work to smooth out the original photos. I was desperate to keep my subject looking as neutral as possible - I wanted something at least a little glamorous but I didn't want to encourage her to adopt any of the poses she might have learned over hundreds of previous photo shoots, so I gave her even less direction than I would normally. (Which is to say almost none at all besides "look at me" and "look away.")
The results are stark - I've tried to make them starker with considerable retouching - but still not quite where I'd have got them with a bit more time and preparation. Nonetheless, the shots I posted to this blog nearly three years ago have been shared around online with the expected reaction - look at these beautiful photos of a beautiful woman. Which just confirms my suspicion that a really beautiful subject requires a photographer concerned about their style over just taking glamour photos to work much harder. Mind you, it's a challenge I'm more than happy to accept.
SAM RILEY WAS THE CLOSEST I EVER GOT TO PHOTOGRAPHING IAN CURTIS. I was a huge Joy Division fan, so it goes without saying that a biopic about the man and his band - directed by Anton Corbijn, the photographer whose work with the band I idolized - was a very major deal for me at the 2007 film festival.
So is it fair to say that I went about photographing Sam Riley, the actor who made his debut in Control playing Curtis, much the way I might have imagined shooting Curtis, had I ever got the chance? Judging by these pictures, I don't think there's much doubt about that.
Sam Riley, Toronto, Sept. 7, 2007
To be fair, Riley was virtually unknown when he arrived in town with Corbijn and Control. (Fun fact: Riley played Mark E. Smith, lead singer of the Fall, in Michael Winterbottom's 2002 masterpiece 24 Hour Party People, but was left on the cutting room floor.) Curtis was the only material I had to work with trying to pre-visualize his portrait (and I did spend some time trying to imagine how to pull this off.)
In the end, I did just what Corbijn himself had told me to do twenty years previous, when Chris Buck and I interviewed and photographed him: I found the spot in the hotel room where the light from the window dropped off to something low but flat and took photos that I knew I'd process with as much contrast as they could bear. You could say that it took me that long to fully digest that lesson, and that - like many of my influences - I was finally free to move beyond their circumscribed orbit.
PETER SARSGAARD WOULD BE ONE OF THE ACTORS I'D NAME TO PROVE MY POINT that character actors are far more interesting than leading actors today. It's worth noting that Sarsgaard had been listed among the 26 Sexiest Men Living by Salon magazine the year I took this photo, which probably says something about Salon magazine or the times or both. (Also on the list - Ira Glass, Jon Hamm and Strong Bad.)
Sarsgaard had made his reputation mostly playing villains, fuck-ups, oddballs and the occasional Decent Man Overwhelmed by Things. His stock in trade is a sort of uncomfortable intensity that he attributes to his Catholic upbringing. "In Catholicism, you're supposed to love your enemy," he told the New York Times. "That really
impressed me as a kid, and it has helped me as an actor...The way
that I view the characters I play is part of my religious upbringing. To
abandon curiosity in all personalities, good or bad, is to give up hope
in humanity."
Peter Sarsgaard, Toronto, Sept. 7, 2007
Someone like Sarsgaard is the perfect subject for how my portrait style evolved during the height of my one-minute-hotel-room shooting period. Hardly a cipher, it was easy to sit down in front of him in a dim room like the ones at the Intercontinental and command just enough of his attention for a minute or less to get a glimpse of the strange intensity he used in his performances.
The "dim room" probably works better for this portrait than, say, the "bright rooms" at the Four Seasons; it certainly lends just enough of a hint of unease or even menace, appropriate to the subject. Before I started looking at these shots again, I remembered this period as a terrible compromise - serviceable work being done under severe constraints - but it's only at the remove of time that I've come to appreciate the creative decisions those dark rooms at the Intercontinental forced me to make, whether I knew it or not.
I DIDN'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT TANG WEI WHEN I PHOTOGRAPHED HER at the 2007 film festival. She was having a fairy tale screen debut - a leading role opposite movie star Tony Leung in a film directed by Ang Lee. Tiny and very pretty, with a very intelligent face, she seemed like she had lucked out big time, whether her career was going to be in China or Hollywood.
What happened next, however, was a very Chinese story. Her sex scenes with Tony Leung in Lust, Caution had a fervor that has made people speculate to this day about whether they were acting or not. It was too much for the Chinese government and the film was banned by the State Administration of Radio Film and Television. Tang was dropped from subsequent roles and didn't appear in another film in China for three years.
She was rumoured to be taking classes at university in England, and went to Korea to make her next film, Late Autumn. Her presumed rehabilitation with a role in a film about the founding of the Chinese communist party ended up in the cutting room floor when she was apparently edited out at the request of Mao Tse-Tung's grandson. By 2014, however, she was starring alongside Chris Hemsworth and Viola Davis in Blackhat, her first major Hollywood film.
Tang Wei, Toronto, Sept. 7, 2007
I was pretty sure I took these shots within an hour of the portraits I'd taken of Tony Leung and Ang Lee, and a glance at the exif files proves my hunch right. It was the middle of the afternoon, so there was just enough light coming through the windows of the Intercontinental to illuminate Tang but keep the room in darkness. Much as the bright, flat light and off-white walls of the Four Seasons around the corner set the style for my earlier work at the free daily, the dark, earth-tone walls and scant light of the Intercontinental changed the way my last two or three years worth of portraits looked.
It would have been better, of course, if I'd known a little bit more about Tang Wei when I photographed her, but I would have had to understand Mandarin and watch a lot of Chinese television (or have been clairvoyant) to manage that. In hindsight, though, her subsequent career travails in her homeland might give these shots a hint of editorial context that I obviously didn't plan.
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.
