Digital

My Olympus gear

THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION WAS COMPLETE by the time I was laid off by the free daily. It's not the most revolutionary thing that happened to photography in the last twenty years; it's close, but the wild changes that transformed the business (and the art) of photography happened alongside some other trends, some economic, some social, some aesthetic. All I know is that I had a ringside seat for it all.

When I started my gig with the free daily as the interim photo editor I still used film and my desk featured a much-used (and occasionally cranky) Nikon Coolpix 35mm film scanner. When the paper sent me to Peru I went with the very nice Canon 35mm SLR that I'd just bought, assuming that it would hold me over for a few years until they'd ironed the bugs out of usable digital cameras. The bugs were ironed out in less than a year, and I barely ever used the camera again.

The Canon cameras I used at the free daily

When Jodi, my editor at the free daily, put me back to work as the paper's photographer they bought a consumer level digital camera for me to use. In a couple of years it had become inadequate to the task and they replaced it with a much better Canon - a prosumer model that was in my hands for most of the time I began to start thinking (very quietly) about myself as a professional photographer again.

One of my beats at the paper was writing a technology review column, which meant that I had new digital cameras in my hands all the time. I reviewed digital SLRs and point-and-shoots by all the major manufacturers, including Canon, Nikon, Kodak, Panasonic, Leica, Sony and Olympus. The churn was pretty fierce as every generation of camera added new features and nearly doubled the size of the image sensors.

Some of the cameras I reviewed for the free daily

There were some interesting experiments - I particularly liked the Olympus E-330, which did away with the hump of the viewfinder prism somehow - but the basic form of the DSLR didn't end up really changing, and digital cameras on the market today still ape either film SLRs or Leica-style rangefinders.

It took me a lot longer to figure out how and why a digital image was different from a film negative. Some of the work I was processing as a photo editor at first was shot on film and scanned to digital, but while it very quickly became wholly digital, it was hard to concentrate on the difference in the heat of deadlines and the new speed and convenience of doing away with film processing and darkrooming.

Harbourfront, Toronto, 2011

It wasn't until a couple of years after I'd been laid off that I had time to think about how digital photography was visibly different from film. The catalyst was the shot above, taken while I was walking around the city's old harbour while on assignment for blogTO. It was a shot I took when the view caught my eye - the sun barely burning through a midday haze and giving an eerie light on a bunch of upturned boats by a sailing school.

There was a time when I might not have bothered taking the photo; I tried to keep my expenses as low as possible when I was a freelancer and, combined with my frugality, I might not have wanted to waste any frames when I had to save film for a job. That was the first thing that changed with digital photography.

I had hoped that the shot would turn out well when I snapped the shutter. It helped to be able to preview it on the LCD screen on the back of the camera, which let me know that I had something to work with before I was at home and in front of a computer. Taken together, it's hard to deny that digital photography gave me a control and confidence from the moment I took the camera out of the bag that I don't think I ever had with film, and for that I was grateful.

And finally there was something about the quality of the image - the lack of grain and a peculiar luminance that I began seeing in digital photographs as soon as the resolution passed a certain threshold and became competitive with higher ISO film at the very least. It's hard to explain, but I don't think that the shot above would have looked the same way even if I'd taken it on a roll of slide film. There's something about the way a digital photo arranges itself on the pixel level that it took me a long time to anticipate when I worked.

Olympus gear, 2018

When I was laid off I had to return the Canon SLR to the paper. I had developed a nice relationship with the PR company that worked with Olympus while writing the tech review column - I really liked their cameras. After the lay-off I contacted them to say that I had a whole bunch of Olympus gear that I was either finished with or hadn't had a chance to write about yet, and asked them how I should return it to them.

It goes without saying that I was pretty broke after being laid off, and both unwilling and unable to budget money for a new DSLR. That could have been the end of my photography career - again - but Olympus' PR told me not to worry. They said the gear had been written off anyway, that I should keep it, and thanks for all the good press I'd given them over the last few years. I think they might have felt sorry for me.

It was, in any case, an incredible gift, and if I believed in such a thing, it was almost a sign that I shouldn't give up on photography, even if my circumstances had never really been worse. I have used these cameras happily and often over the last decade, and I still have a feeling of fondness and regret when I pull them out of their bag now, having just made the switch to Fuji mirrorless cameras.

Man covered in bees, Canadian National Exhibition, 2011

The image above is perhaps my best argument for digital photography. I only rediscovered it in my files a couple of months ago, and the original didn't look much like this at all. Shot in harsh late morning sunlight with my Olympus E-30 at the media preview day at the CNE for blogTO, it was originally a horizontal 3/4 shot, in colour. The background was distracting and the light a bit harsh, but with a lot of work in Photoshop with the clone tool and serious manipulation of layers, I was able to produce something that looks like a studio shot.

You could, of course, manipulate film images. It required hours of work and costs in paper and chemistry even if you didn't end up re-photographing the photo on the way to making a relatively seamless composite. It was the sort of work I tended to avoid then, but rarely shy away from now - the creative options available with a digital image are almost limitless, and it's made me a more technically competent photographer than I could ever have been with film.

There have, of course, been major changes to photography that have nothing to with cameras and more to do with the way we produce and consume photographs. They have been, by and large, proof of the most extreme scenarios imagined by Joseph Schumpeter's "Creative Destruction." The launch of Instagram was over a year away from the lay-off that changed the direction of my "career" once again, but that's a subject for another post.

Colm Feore and the Lay-Off

Colm Feore, Toronto, Jan. 27, 2009

THESE WERE THE LAST PORTRAITS I DID FOR THE FREE DAILY. I didn't know they were, but I must have had some idea that my days were numbered, because I had started looking around for a new job at the time. I didn't want to get surprised; other newsroom staffers had been planning or making exits at the time and it seemed the more dignified way of leaving. But that's not what happened.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, fellow staff writer and photographer Chris Atchison had already left and I was taking up the slack, doing interviews and photo shoots. Colm Feore was in town promoting his role on the latest season of 24, as the husband of the first (fictional) female U.S. president. We did a lot of coverage of 24 back then - it was a monster hit and probably one of the last must-see series produced by a U.S. network.

Colm Feore, Toronto, Jan. 27, 2009

What I remember most about the shoot was that Feore didn't seem terribly interested in talking about his role on 24. Michael Ignatieff, an esteemed writer and academic, had recently been made interim leader of the Liberal Party of Canada - then the official opposition - and would soon be elected its leader. Feore was incredibly excited about him. He spent much of the interview and shoot talking about how fortunate Canada was to be able to vote for a real intellectual as its leader.

Feore had made his reputation in Canada playing legendary figures like pianist Glenn Gould and Pierre Elliot Trudeau - longtime prime minister and father of our current PM - and I suppose he felt his opinion about who should lead the country was important. Mostly, though, he reminded me of another actor, Ted Danson, at a movie junket I'd been to in Santa Monica a year previous. Danson also didn't want to talk about the movie he was promoting as much as his friend, Hillary Clinton. If only we could sit down for a beer with Hillary, he told us - we'd know how great she was and why we needed to vote for her. That most of the table at the junket were foreign journalists didn't seem to register with Danson.

In any case, Michael Ignatieff's only election as head of the Liberals didn't work out so well. In 2011 the party - unofficially known as "Canada's Natural Governing Party" - came third in the polls, losing its status as the official opposition. Ignatieff himself lost his seat in parliament. As subsequent events have proved, Canada does not want an intellectual for a leader.

The Feore portraits are alright, I guess. They're stark and simple and part of the new direction my portrait work had started going since I'd been coaxed back into shooting by Jodi Isenberg at the free daily five years previous. It seems suitable that they were shot at the old Four Seasons in Yorkville; I'd done so much work in its rooms since the '90s, and I'd always appreciated the big, bright windows that looked north and west over the city. It wouldn't be long for the world - the hotel would close three years later and move two blocks east to a new building.

________________________

I WAS LAID OFF BY THE FREE DAILY on the morning of February 10, 2009, two weeks after I'd done the Colm Feore shoot. I had come in late that day - I had a job interview at the Toronto Star for the Queen's Park reporter position, though of course no one at the office knew that. Our new editor had insisted that I be in the office that day for a meeting, and I followed her all the way to the door of the publisher's office before I spotted Glen, our managing editor, out of the corner of my eye, being escorted out of the building with a box of his stuff. The shoe dropped just as she opened the door and I saw that the assistant publisher and our union rep were already waiting inside.

I'd been sandbagged. The editor said something about a "new direction" for the paper - one that required laying off all the writers (plus the managing editor.) We have called a cab for you. Don't return to your desk - its contents will be packed up and sent to you. They were about to take away my cellphone when I pulled it out to call my wife and I had to remind them that the phone was mine.

If I'm honest, once the anger and humiliation had passed I was grateful. The free daily hadn't been much fun to work for since Bill, the new publisher had taken over, and definitely since Jodi had been fired as editor-in-chief. Jodi was my friend, and almost anything positive that came from my time at the free daily had been because of her decisions and support. Even before she moved into the editor's chair, she had been a big supporter of making me the paper's senior writer after my contract as interim photo editor ended. It's hard to say definitively, but I might not have found my way back to photography today if Jodi hadn't asked me to go back to work nearly fifteen years ago.

At the Four Seasons Yorkville Avenue Bar photo show, Sept. 2007. Photo by Chris Atchison.

My first reaction when I realized what was coming in the publisher's office on that February morning was anger. I am not a team player by nature - another one of Jodi's great gifts was letting me work from home instead of holding down a desk in the office up in Don Mills, a 90-minute commute each way. (One of the first things the new editor did was to enforce an edict from the publisher ordering all the writers back to a desk in the office. I think he'd seen All The President's Men too many times and wanted to preside over a bustling newsroom. As anyone who's worked in one can tell you, newsrooms don't bustle.)

But there was a sense of camaraderie among the staff at the free daily; it developed slowly under P.J., our first editor, and really flourished when Jodi took over. I had worked harder for the paper than I thought myself capable, writing daily and weekly columns, reviews, interviews and features in addition to taking pictures. I had turned a daily TV column that I was only supposed to write for a week when someone else was on vacation and made it something more than just rewritten press releases and gossip cribbed from entertainment websites. When Jodi gave me the job I told her up front that I didn't really watch much TV because I didn't like it that much. I ended up writing over 1,100 daily columns.

I had invested more into working for the free daily than I had put into any job I'd had, and being laid off felt like a betrayal as much as a loss of income. (The wages at the paper were well below what any other paper in the city paid. I remember describing my workload to a friend who was an editor at the Globe & Mail; he told me that he had people who were paid twice as much to produce a third of my work.)

Sometimes it didn't seem like management really wanted to acknowledge our successes. Before he left, Chris had talked to the people at the Four Seasons, who said they'd be interested in putting on a show of our movie star portraits in the hotel's Avenue Bar during the film festival. It was a really big deal - an opportunity I wouldn't have dreamed of when I was a freelancer. He took the proposal to the publisher, who turned it down before Jodi talked him into changing his mind. But they didn't want to spend any money, so Chris and I ran around trying to get deals on printing and framing with just a week or two before the show was supposed to open.

The show happened, but the paper said they didn't want to spend any money on promotion or an opening reception, so it all came off like a wasted opportunity - a damp squib. No wonder I look so miserable in the photo Chris took for the story the paper ran - the only publicity our show ever got. Another reason why I have no enthusiasm for gallery shows any more.

Shooting an AK-47 for a James Bond story, Oct. 2008. Photo by Frank Monozlai.

It took the paper quite a few months to find a replacement for Jodi after they forced her out. They ended up hiring exactly the sort of person I was afraid they would - the Respected Industry Professional, complete with J-School teaching gig and a network of fellow professionals at her fingertips. Exactly the sort of person who hadn't built up the free daily from a start-up run out of a hotel room into a national chain of free dailies.

The free daily was no New York Times, and that was its great virtue. In an age of falling readership and failing confidence in the news media, Jodi had figured out that people wanted something light and entertaining to read on their commutes to work, and had delivered, filling the paper with TV and movie stories and unconventional personalities like Enza Anderson, a local trans celebrity who had run for mayor as Enza Supermodel and turned out to be one of the most professional writers I'd ever worked with.

Jodi knew who our demographic was, and delivered content to them without pandering. So my heart sank when the new editor took over and drove up in what I've come to call the Annex Clown Car. First she began canceling all the features that readers liked - TV recaps, movie and celebrity coverage, shopping and gift guides and, ultimately, much of what we produced in-house. Then she enlisted friends of hers - more Respected Industry Professionals - to write editorials and introduce politics into the paper.

It was an awful mistake. Politics - the hectoring, biased, often sneering op-ed political content that the news media has decided to favour since the budgets and staff that once researched features and covered beats were gutted from newsrooms. Jodi had made the free daily a success by avoiding it, and had made the paper grow as a result. It was one of the great errors of the passengers in the Annex Clown Car that their names and reputations attracted readers, and the new editor was intent on making the free daily resemble all the other failing papers and their op-ed shape-throwing. But falling readership at the big dailies was proof that the opposite was true, and nothing that's happened in the decade since I was laid off has reversed the trend.

It was, in all likelihood, time for me to go anyway, but I'm not grateful for the push out the door. I wouldn't be the last to go; in the months that followed there was an exodus of staff, and almost exactly a year later the new editor was fired, followed by Bill, the publisher. The free daily still exists and its competitors are all gone, but the name has been changed and it barely resembles the paper I worked on with Jodi, Tina, Jonathan, Fermin, Chris, Nate, Liban, Jen, Brian, Sarah, Saleem, Kasia, Steph, Mike, Christine and everyone else who I annoyed constantly when they were forced to share a newsroom with me.

Village Voice

Voivod, Montreal, December 1989

THE VILLAGE VOICE IS DEAD. If you've never read, or even heard of the Village Voice, I doubt that you care; one more newspaper gone in an age when newspapers go out of business every month. Even for people who care, it's hardly news - for fans or readers or former employees the paper essentially died last year when it ceased print publication and went completely online.

My first proper assignment for the Voice was nearly thirty years ago, when photo editor Edna Suarez phoned me and asked if it would be too much trouble to hop up to Montreal to shoot the Quebec prog metal band Voivod for the paper's next Rock & Roll Quarterly supplement. I'm not sure Edna was aware of the distances involved getting from place to place in Canada, and even before I did the math in my head I knew that whatever I made probably wouldn't cover the cost of a return ticket on the overnight train.

But I didn't mention that and of course I said yes. This was my first real gig shooting for an American publication and I couldn't blow it, so I packed nearly my whole studio - my ProFoto strobe kid and light stands and two cameras - and hauled it all down to Union Station and onto the VIA Rail train. I arrived in Montreal the morning after a blizzard and went upstairs from the Gare Central to the Queen Elizabeth Hotel for breakfast, stowing all my gear by the wall next to my table in the fancy restaurant across from the Marie, Reine du Monde Cathedral, where I waited for the band's manager to meet me. The cost of breakfast ate up the last of whatever I'd make from the shoot.

Aki Kaurismaki, Toronto, Sept. 1988

I think I sold my first photo to the Voice nearly two years earlier. Preparing for his big move to New York, my friend Chris Buck had already started doing work for them, and he arranged for me to send the Voice a print of my shoot with Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki (a big deal at the time, at least in film fest circles) on spec. They might have used it, but I can't be sure; I've never been good at keeping tearsheets, so what got sent and what got printed is sometimes hard to match up.

Another big assignment for the Voice was one of the only examples of sports photography I've ever done. Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson had been a gold medalist at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, but had the medal taken away when he tested positive for performance enhancing drugs. He attempted a comeback three years later, which began at the Hamilton Indoor Games. Edna called me up and asked if I'd do the shoot. I had never shot a sporting event and knew I'd have to rent something like a 300mm/2.8 lens to pull it off, but of course I said yes.

Ben Johnson, Hamilton, 1991

I only remember a couple of things about the shoot. The first was Johnson's visible disappointment when he learned that he'd finished second, which I was lucky enough to capture in a few barely-sharp frames. (I actually think the slight camera shake enhances the shot of that heartbreaking moment, and in any case strict focus and sharpness is overrated.) The other was a phone call from Edna.

I was working with a local writer on the gig - a friend I'd known for a few years. A few days before the Hamilton track meet Edna called me to firm up details, then said "I thought you said the writer was a friend of yours." I insisted that he was, but Edna told me that he'd been calling the paper trying to get me taken off the job so his sister could shoot Johnson.

"Of course I said no," Edna told me.

I never said anything about it to him, not in the car there and back to Hamilton, and not in the decades since, but I don't think I was ever able to trust him again. It was a sobering moment for me - the  first time I realized that loyalty is situational for many people.

James Tenney, Toronto, January 1989

Ice Cube, Toronto, 1990

Sonic Youth, Montreal, 1991

William S. Burroughs, Toronto, 1991

Much of the work I sold to the Voice was reprints - portraits from my files bought to illustrate stories. I could see why they might turn to me for a portrait of James Tenney - an American composer who lived in Toronto and taught at York University. What I never understood was why the Village Voice would have needed my pictures of a New York band like Sonic Youth, or someone like the writer William S. Burroughs, who must have been photographed by the Voice countless times since the paper was founded in 1955.

I liked to think it was because my shots were good, but I was probably flattering myself. In retrospect, it might have been because they were different - nobody in New York or the U.S. had seen them since they'd appeared in whatever publication assigned them up here. Getting assignments to shoot for U.S. media like the Voice was difficult in Canada - almost anyone would either live or perform or do something in New York City before they'd show up in Toronto. But work done up here at least had the advantage in the pre-internet age of being obscure and unseen by art directors and photo editors in Manhattan.

Joe Kramer, Toronto, 1991

This shoot with gay erotic massage therapist (and former Jesuit seminarian) Joe Kramer is a pretty good example of the sort of work I might get assigned by the Voice. It's really the kind of subject anyone who shot for an alternative weekly might find themselves shooting back in the '80s and '90s. I'd photographed people like Kramer for NOW - no surprise since the alternative weekly probably wouldn't exist if there was no Village Voice.

I don't know when I started reading the Voice - probably since before I owned a camera. I know that I bought it religiously every week for over a decade, which is why this shot of Joe Kramer is of a piece with the kind of work the Voice printed. It's not too different from something James Hamilton might have shot at around the same time - a piece of mimicry, for a client I desperately wanted to impress.

Vikram Seth, Toronto, May 1993

The last assignment I ever did for the Voice were portraits of the writer Vikram Seth. By this point Edna Suarez had moved on to the New York Times and Tom McDonough was photo editor. I don't know why I never got another shoot from the Voice, but it's not surprising - I was no longer making trips to New York City with my portfolio to push my work and I never had the same personal connection with Tom that I had with Edna.

My Voice connection was probably the key to whatever success I had outside Canada; when Edna moved to the Times she assigned me whatever work she had that could be done here. It was through Edna that I met art directors Robert Newman and Jesse Reyes, who were responsible for assignments I got for outlets like Guitar World and Entertainment Weekly. The brutal truth is that, despite the size and competition, people in New York publishing were far more helpful and friendly than almost anyone in Toronto, which helped keep the illusion alive that I might one day have a career down there - at least for a while.

Vikram Seth might have been my last Voice assignment, but he was not the last portrait of mine published by the Voice. Late last year, after the last print edition of the paper had hit the newsstands, the Voice website ran a story about the new Fela Kuti box set featuring my 1989 portrait of Fela from the cover of the booklet. They obviously got the shot as a handout, so I didn't see money for it (though I was, thankfully, credited.)

Ironically, it was Chris Buck who told me about the photo being used, three decades after he got me my introduction to the paper. Ultimately, this is my only tearsheet from the Voice.

Kathryn Bigelow

Kathryn Bigelow, Toronto, September 9, 2008

I WAS STILL IN HIGH SCHOOL WHEN I WENT TO MY FIRST FILM FESTIVAL. I can't remember any other film I saw during that festival except one - a weird, almost campy biker film starring a then-unknown young actor named Willem Dafoe and the rockabilly singer Robert Gordon, who was probably the big draw of the film for me. (I was - and remain - a huge fan.) The Loveless was the sort of film where a character would say something like "We're goin' nowhere. Fast." with just enough irony to make it both hilarious and awesome. It remains one of my favorite films.

The film was co-directed by a recent Columbia University graduate named Kathryn Bigelow. I filed the name in my mind and was not surprised when, six years later, she made Near Dark, a really clever vampire film that didn't let its intelligence get in the way of being a vampire film. I felt very proud that I'd noticed her talent early on, and felt that strange pride and almost possessiveness that a fan feels when I watched her move from one project to another, working with bigger names on each film.

Kathryn Bigelow, Toronto, September 9, 2008

So I was thrilled when I was assigned to interview and photograph Bigelow by the free daily during the 2008 film festival. Bigelow had endured a bit of a career slump; it had been seven years since her last film, K-19: The Widowmaker, but there was a lot of buzz around her new film - an Iraq war film about a suicidal bomb disposal technician played by Jeremy Renner. I was on my own at this festival because Chris Atchison had left the paper - part of a slow exodus of staff inspired by our almost universally unloved new editor. I didn't mind having the job of interviewing someone like Bigelow, though I missed being able to concentrate wholly on the portrait shoot. Still, I think I got decent quotes, like this one:

"The war is, certainly as I understand it through his eyes, searching for IEDs. That's the signature of this conflict - it's like the jungle in Vietnam. And I think it's really unique - that's the war. There's no air power or other engagements - you're constantly seeking out this invisible threat, and it's insidious and it's futile, and I think the futility of it is what kept coming across to me. And my feeling is that if I could share that without polemics, or without being dogmatic, if we could just somehow humanize the experience for an audience then we've certainly done our job."

Still, I wish I'd had more time to think about the portrait. They're competent shots - I was certainly able to do something at least competent after four years of steady shooting at the free daily - but it wasn't inspired, and I wanted to do something inspired with Bigelow, a director whose work I knew well, and who had certainly inspired me with The Loveless all those years ago, back when I was looking for art that looked like something I imagined in my own head.

In any case, this would be one of my last portrait shoots at the free daily, and my last film festival for almost a decade. For a while, it looked like it was my last one ever, which made my shoot with Kathryn Bigelow seem appropriate - a kind of closure.

Jay Baruchel

Jay Baruchel, Toronto, July 10, 2008

JAY BARUCHEL WAS THE LOCAL BOY MADE GOOD WHEN I TOOK THESE PORTRAITS. If by "local" you mean born in Ottawa and raised in Montreal and living in Toronto. In any case, he'd gone from Canadian television to a small part in Almost Famous to membership in the Judd Apatow comic universe, and my best guess was that I was photographing him as he was publicizing Tropic Thunder, which came out around this time.

I didn't do a lot of portraits in my last year at the free daily - not as many as I'd done previously. So when I did get a decent portrait assignment, I wanted to make it count; I was no longer just pointing the camera and hoping for the best, as I'd done more often that I'd care to admit back at the beginning of my return to portrait work a few years' previous.

Jay Baruchel, Toronto, July 10, 2008

I shot Baruchel at my usual stomping grounds - the Intercontinental on Bloor. We didn't have a room for the interview, so I shot this on a couch in the ground floor bar, which just happened to have some nice light and a dark grey wall just behind my subject, the product of a recent renovation of the hotel. I actually used to spend a lot of time in the same bar over a decade previous, when it had a decent piano player who favoured standards, and my own stubbornly single social life revolved around restaurants and hotel bars.

Like my portraits of Ben Stein a month earlier, these pictures are the result of four years of shooting, starting from a point where I didn't consider myself a photographer any more. I often refer to the work I did for the free daily as being a style with no style, mostly because I'd completely abandoned the look I'd developed and the working method I'd relied on in the '90s. After four years, a new style - simpler and cleaner than the one I'd had before - was emerging. I felt cautiously optimistic. Big mistake.

Ben Stein

Ben Stein, Toronto, June 19, 2008

I HAVE VERY NICE MEMORIES OF THIS SHOOT. Which is worth noting, because I don't have a lot of good memories of my last year at the free daily. It was an anxious time; my editor (and friend) Jodi Isenberg had been pushed out by management and the direction of the paper was doubtful, so a few people who I'd worked with closely for years had left or were preparing to leave. I ended up having to cover a lot of bases, including more combined shooting/writing gigs - like this one, interviewing and photographing Ben Stein, who was in town promoting Expelled, a documentary he'd co-written and hosted.

I didn't see Ferris Bueller's Day Off until a few years ago, so most of what I knew about Stein came either from his years in the Nixon and Ford administrations as a speechwriter (I have been fascinated by Nixon since the Watergate hearings preempted my favorite afternoon TV shows as a boy) or from Win Ben Stein's Money, which ran in syndication when I was watching a lot of TV while writing a daily column for the free daily. I mostly remember his thinly-concealed distaste for Arianna Huffington, one frequent guest, and a just as thinly concealed crush on Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan.

Ben Stein, Toronto, June 19, 2008

It would be an understatement to say that Expelled was controversial. A documentary defending Intelligent Design and asserting that Darwinism was ideologically complicit in the rise of eugenics and the Holocaust was going to piss off a lot of people. I personally think Creationism is ridiculous but I was impressed by Stein's willingness to get behind the film and its thesis, even if I didn't agree with most of the message.

(For the record, I consider the theory of evolution is broadly correct, but that it's going to see a lot of revisions in the decades to come, as more evidence is uncovered and research is done. A hundred years from now our current understanding of evolution will probably seem as basic and misconceived as public health was before germ theory and antibiotics. Which is why we shouldn't treat it as dogma.)

I was open about my opinion, but told Stein that I supported what he was doing as a free speech issue, and we ended up agreeing that academia in particular (and the media in general) had become remarkably hostile to anyone challenging conventional wisdom and the status quo. We got along so well that Stein asked his publicist if he could just blow off the next few interviews and keep talking with me. Naturally, this made him a more pliable subject when it came time to take my photos.

By 2008 it had been four years since Jodi had pushed me back into portrait photography. By then I had cautiously begun to imagine myself as a professional photographer again, and years of regular work had forced me to search for a new style. The portrait of Stein at the top was a stab at that, formed in the circumstances in which I'd been working for the last few years - hotel rooms like this one at the Royal York, where I had to look hard to find my light and my background and discover something usable, fast.

The result was something a lot more artless than the work I'd been doing a decade earlier at NOW magazine - direct and symmetrical and somewhat clinical takes on the subject in front of my camera. I was shooting with something in mind beyond what would run in the paper a day or a week later, and the shots I'm posting now are probably a lot closer to what I had in mind on that day. Not necessarily flattering portraiture, but I'd finally let myself downplay that obligation, which felt a lot stronger when I started shooting again for the free daily.

Luton Hoo

Luton Hoo, Bedfordshire, UK, March 2008

I CAN THANK WALT DISNEY FOR THIS ONE. My second trip to England after over ten years was a press junket organized by Disney to push the DVD release of Enchanted and National Treasure: Book of Secrets. This was, as far as I can tell, the last great golden moment for movie  press junkets, which I'd been doing regularly for at least a couple of years at the free daily, though mostly to either New York or Los Angeles.

I don't know how or why they chose this lovely 18th century manor house, designed by Robert Adam (with later additions) and landscaping by Capability Brown. It was being turned into a golf and spa resort and I think our group was part of the soft opening before they officially began taking guests. I suppose it fit the theme of Enchanted - sort of - though the connection to the latest Nicholas Cage film was tenuous. I wasn't complaining, in any case.

Luton Hoo, Bedfordshire, UK, March 2008

We were a large group of English-speaking international press, and within a day or so we'd sorted ourselves into little cliques. I ended up in a group of colonials - Canadians and Australians, who seemed to appreciate each other's sense of humour more than anything else. The unofficial ringleader was Sam de Brito, an Australian who ended up writing a column about our little group. I was shocked to learn, from another Australian while on a travel junket two years ago, that Sam had died.

Our lodgings were, in a word, palatial. Sir Julius Wernher, who bought the house in 1903, had it redesigned by the architects of the Ritz, his favorite London hotel. My own room was in a new addition built for the new hotel, and was larger than my first two apartments put together. I had my first Full English breakfast at the hotel, which was a revelation, though I'm grateful it isn't a regular menu item here.

Luton Hoo Resort, Bedfordshire, UK, March 2008

I don't remember much about the junket - there was an etiquette lesson, and a ride in a car driven down an obstacle course by a stunt driver. The real star of the trip was the house and the grounds, which gave me my first glimpse of the English Country House up close. I could have - and should have - spent hours wandering around; I'm amazed that I didn't follow that long lawn down to the view that Capability Brown obviously wanted me to take in, but I was still unsure about shooting landscapes back then.

So I stuck close to the house and shot the ancient trees, the gazebo and its ceiling, and the ornaments and statuary placed around the gardens. It was my first glimpse of a really first class lodging, and I can say with authority after a few years of doing travel journalism that there are few things that give more pleasure than a really nice hotel - at least for me.

Luton Hoo, Bedfordshire, UK, March 2008