Summer

Summer (after Hoyningen-Huene), Parkdale, 1994

TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF SUMMER. With that in mind, I'm posting this photo, which I scanned ages ago and have been waiting - and forgetting - to post when the time was right. With the end of this blog in sight, it feels like it's now or never.

I shot this for the cover of NOW magazine's annual Hot Summer Guide, the year after I'd taken over the whole of my Parkdale loft and had a dedicated, full-time studio space. This was precisely the sort of work I'd always dreamed of doing, and when Irene, NOW's photo editor, assigned me the job, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

I'd had this iconic George Hoyningen-Huene photo bookmarked for years, and I'd studied it constantly. What I did know was that it wasn't shot on the terrace of a hotel on the Riviera, but on a balustrade on the roof of Vogue magazine's Paris offices, with the photographer's protege (and lover) Horst P. Horst and a model wearing Izod bathing suits.

Divers, George Hoyningen-Huene, 1930

My challenge was shooting it in the studio, and not in the full sunlight that Hoyningen-Huene had used. I decided to take a few liberties and update the photo to somewhere in postwar North America - my favorite time and place - and shoot it with cross-processed colour slide film. I rented my favorite clouds and sky backdrop from Vistek and went shopping for old pop bottles and did a few tests until I was sure I'd nailed the light.

For models I chose the best-looking couple I knew at the time - Sloan drummer Andrew Scott and his girlfriend (later wife), actress Fiona Highet, two recent transplants to Toronto from Halifax. Fiona had a suitable vintage bathing suit, they understood exactly what I was trying to accomplish and took their places on my old weathered barn board table top perfectly. After a coupe of Polaroids and a roll of film I knew I'd nailed the shot to the best of my current ability. (In retrospect, I wish I'd taken a roll of black and white.)

Unfortunately, I decided to take a couple of extra setups just in case - prudence always being as much a vice as a virtue with me. They were much more "fun" and conventional, and I don't think anyone who's worked as a magazine photographer will be surprised that, in the end, the paper went with one of the "just in case" shots instead of my meticulously planned homage to Hoyningen-Huene.

THAT is a mistake I will never make again.

Tobey Maguire

Tobey Maguire, Toronto, Sept. 1999

IT WAS HARD TO TELL IF TOBEY MAGUIRE WAS BEING DIFFICULT. I was shooting the young actor for a NOW magazine cover during the film festival, and his manner as soon as he got in front of my camera could only be described as coming from the point where diffidence becomes confrontational, if you can imagine such a thing.

I'm not sure if Maguire was at the film festival promoting Ride With The Devil or The Cider House Rules - perhaps it was both. He was a star, but nowhere near one on the level he'd reach three years later with Sam Raimi's Spider Man films. I'd enjoyed him in The Ice Storm, two years earlier - the best '70s period film really about the '90s ever - and would be just as big a fan of Ride With The Devil, his second film with director Ang Lee.

I wanted the shoot to go well. I was sure it wasn't.

Tobey Maguire, Toronto, Sept. 1999

I don't give a lot of direction in a portrait shoot. Most of the time, I can rely on a subject to react to my seeming nonchalance by giving themselves internal prompts, trying to deliver what they think I want - or what they'd like to be seen doing in a portrait. As this happens, I might spot something that works and ask them to repeat it or even amplify it; Maguire was doing none of this.

It was as if we were having a staring contest with my Rolleiflex between us. Over the course of three rolls, the most I might have said was "Look away. Now look back at me." When it was apparent that I wasn't going to get much more out of him, I said we were done, to his obvious relief.

Tobey Maguire, Toronto, Sept. 1999

When I got the film back and made contact sheets, it became obvious that Maguire, young as he was, knew just how little he had to give to a camera in close up to register some sort of interior life. He had, more and earlier than many actors, learned the lesson that film acting is all in the eyes, and that most of the time we project most of the emotion we read into a performance.

It was a big lesson for me to learn at this point in my career, and I wish I'd been able to explore it a bit more at the time, but when I handed in the prints from this shoot a couple of months later, on the eve of the new millennium, it would be the last job I would do for NOW magazine.

NOW newspaper box, in-house ad shoot, Parkdale, August 1990

My first NOW cover was a photo of Chuck D from Public Enemy, which came out in May of 1989 - serendipitously the same week that I was fired from my job in the classical music department of a big downtown record store. I had been sending the magazine photos on spec since the previous year, and would do so for a couple more months, but by the end of that summer I was getting regular work, and by the following year NOW work would comprise the majority of my income.

I began my career at NOW as the junior photographer, and felt like I remained so for almost the whole of my decade there. I worked with a group of photographers - Paul, David, Anne, Laurence, Susie, Algis, Debra and Ben - with years more experience than I had, whose work I couldn't help but admire. And I had the great fortune to have a sympathetic photo editor, Irene Grainger, who fought to give us the space to experiment every week, steadily pushing against the arbitrary edicts (the "big face" covers; no high key lighting) that came down from on high.

NOW was a steady gig that gave me access to celebrity subjects and, for a few years, the chance to travel for shoots - as much travel as I'd done in my life up till that point. As long as I kept my overhead low and held on to my Parkdale studio with its absurdly below-market rent, I didn't need to do much work that I didn't enjoy. I didn't have money for savings or big luxuries like a car or vacations, but my Cold War upbringing had taught me to keep my expectations low - hey, you'll probably be dead before you're thirty - so I never felt like I was missing out on anything.

Politically agnostic, I didn't really care much about the paper's politics as long as I was getting work. The first jarring moment, though, was when the employees of this very stridently pro-labour paper led a drive to unionize. Confronted with the obvious discontent with NOW's non-union status quo, publishers Michael and Alice reacted with dismay, even anger; I remember Alice complaining, tearfully, that she thought we were a family.

Despite our position on the masthead as Contributing Editors, the photographers were still technically freelancers and exempt from union membership, but we'd have our moment with management a few years later. By the late '90s, the internet was a thing full of potential and menace, though still of only marginal utility. (At the end of 1997, less than 20% of American households had internet; Canada was actually a trailblazer, with nearly thirty per cent.)

NOW's news section had published several articles adamantly condemning attempts by big publishers to pay their contributors a pittance for use of their material on websites. The paper's position was that website publication was a separate usage, and should pay reprint fees in line with those paid in print. But when the time came for NOW to launch its own website, the photographers were approached with a proposal that we get paid a fraction of the standard reprint rate - a figure I remember as less than twenty dollars.

The issue reached a head at a meeting where Michael and Alice laid their case out for the photographers, and Michael actually framed our taking this nominal fee as "an investment in the future of the paper." I replied that if this was an investment, it wasn't out of line to ask that we be given shares. (Ultimately we'd be paid nothing for website reprints.)

My relationship with management cooled considerably after that. At one point Irene mentioned during a phone call that I was being referred to around the newsroom as "the Fascist." A shock to me, I should add, who just a few years earlier had voted for Bob Rae's NDP government.

It was Michael's firm conviction - voiced firmly to me once at a party - that NOW should own its market, so we were tacitly forbidden to work for any free weekly competition. (At some point Michael entertained widening that edict to include the big dailies like the Star and the Globe & Mail, but relented.) I had always chafed against this - freelance work was tenuous, after all, and none of us had any guarantee of income - and at some point in the mid-'90s I began writing a column under a pseudonym about old jazz & blues records for NOW's main competitor, eye weekly.

(My pseudonym, if you're curious, was the name of the psychopath protagonist of Jim Thompson's hardboiled novel The Killer Inside Me.)

Many of my friends worked for eye. (I was best man at the wedding of Greg Boyd, the paper's entertainment and later news editor, and he would later return the favour at mine.) I'd played chicken with Michael's non-competition rule with the eye column, to be sure, but I'd helped push to end the "big head" and "no white background" edicts in the past, and imagined - mistakenly - that he'd see reason about this one day.

It was especially galling by the end of the '90s, when jobs from NOW were getting scarcer, and Irene warned us that there were going to be even fewer to come as layouts were maximizing ad space at the expense of our once luxurious photo spreads. The paper's travel budget for covers had been cut a few years previous. Looking at my ledger of assignments, the drop off was considerable: 1999 records just a dozen jobs from NOW all year, culminating in the Tobey Maguire swansong; at the beginning of that decade I was getting up to eight assignments a month.

Which is why I scratch my head when journalists and photographers complain about the destructive effect the internet has had on their business. My experience was that the industry was already shrinking with increasing speed long before the really disruptive effects of the digital revolution - first cheap broadband and then smartphones - had ever happened. The audience - and the ad dollars - that fueled the last golden age of publishing were clearly disappearing before Apple sold the first iMac, and with it the marginal market for my specialty - editorial portraiture.

I pushed things with NOW by taking a job from eye and letting them run my photo byline. It was noticed. Irene called me and, with obvious regret, told me I had a choice. With surprising regret, I told her that I was choosing eye, and with that my long tenure at NOW ended after a supremely productive decade.

I knew, when I hung up the phone, that a major part of my life had ended. What I couldn't know was how much more of it would end, as my circumstances - as both a freelance writer and photographer - would utterly change, while the foundations of the business I'd worked in since I'd left college shifted and buckled in the first clear signs of an industry's historic, slow-motion collapse.

As I write this, eye weekly is long gone (Michael got his wish there) and while NOW - barely, according to some reports - holds on, it's been many years since any of the photographers I shared a masthead with for a decade have had a byline in its pages.

Greg Dulli

Greg Dulli, Parkdale, Oct. 1998

CONTROL IS A WORD PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHERS USE A LOT. We spend years trying to learn how to achieve control over all the variables that can enter into a portrait shoot - technical ones such as lighting, but also personal ones that start with the subject and radiate outward to their setting and, in the case of celebrity portraiture, the often arbitrary demands of handlers and publicists and even an entourage.

The key, of course, is to grab as much control as you can and then, almost by intuition, realize when you have to let it go.

I've shared some of the results of my 1998 shoot with Greg Dulli before, but it's only as I've worked my way through the decade plus of work that preceded it that I've seen how I tried to exercise control over portrait sittings. The shoot with Dulli was a NOW cover, and I must have had some time to really plan, because I was able to not only prepare a backdrop but run my idea for the shoot past Dulli and his management - a rare (for me) example of not only pre-visualization but (reluctant) collaboration.

Greg Dulli, Parkdale, Oct. 1998

I became a big fan of Dulli's group, The Afghan Whigs, years earlier, around the time of their Gentlemen record. I was still recovering from a bad breakup and cycling my way through a series of sporadic and brief, mostly pointless relationships that slowly transformed me from maudlin and heartbroken to something on the verge of callous. Dulli became famous - notorious, even - for writing about bad relationships and unhappy, self-loathing men, embodying his characters in songs like "This Is My Confession," "What Jail Is Like" and "Debonair."

I listened to their records over and over.

I knew he liked movies, almost obsessively, and was trying to kickstart a career in Hollywood on and off. I wanted to do something graphic and literary, so I told his record company that I was going to cover a black backdrop with a series of phrases, repeated over and over - things like "I have an honest face," "I will be a good boy" and "The only woman I have ever loved is my mother." They sent the list along to Dulli's people, who got back to me and said that Greg was fine with it - as long as it was in Italian.

Luckily most of my best friends from high school were Italian, so I asked one of them to translate for me, and got to work writing the results in my best cursive on a roll of black seamless. When Dulli arrived for the shoot, I proudly pointed out that I had fulfilled my end of the bargain and indicated the backdrop hanging at the end of the studio. He turned to his handler from Sony, then laughed a bit ruefully.

"Italian?" he said. "Shit, I don't remember asking that at all."

Greg Dulli, Parkdale, Oct. 1998

Dulli sat down and gave the sort of performance I always hope to get from someone with at least a bit of a public persona. He snarled and leered, sulked and brooded. I kept him in front of the backdrop - All that work! Why waste it? - but changed film and tweaked lighting setups, moving from straight to cross-processed slide film and finished with black and white. I had the luxury of a subject who had to at least feign cooperation with the promise of a cover story, and the rare circumstance of a sitting I could design and stage manage far more than my customary five minutes (or less) in a hotel room.

This was exactly the sort of studio portraiture I had spent over a decade trying to do, but it came my way rarely and, looking back at my account books from the time, was getting even rarer. I've written recently that my memories of the last half of the '90s are often full of creative frustration, but the results of jobs like this prove that I might have felt stymied but, when circumstances were in my favour, I could still rise to the occasion.

I hope I enjoyed it. There wouldn't be many opportunities like this again for many, many years.

Dulli and the Whigs were touring the 1965 record at the time, and would break up not long afterward. Dulli already had another band, The Twilight Singers, waiting in the wings, and later in the '00s would perform with Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan as The Gutter Twins. I've liked almost everything he's done, right up to the new records by a reformed Whigs. He's kept at it despite the frustrations - he never really got that Hollywood thing going - and I can't help but admire his long access to whatever inspires him creatively. It offers hope to those of us relying on a second (or third) wind.

 

Fruit & Veg

Artichoke, Parkdale, Jan. 1997

BY THE MID-NINETIES, I WASN'T LEAVING THE HOUSE MUCH IF I DIDN'T HAVE TO. I had an ambition - probably easier to achieve today than twenty years ago - to stay inside from the moment the first snow fell till the beginning of spring. If I could get all of my subjects to come to me, as well as arranging for all of my necessary supplies - film and chemicals, laundry, food - to be delivered, all I'd need to do was have colour film couriered to and from the lab, and prints delivered to my clients.

It would have cost a fortune, which is probably the main reason I never carried it through. It certainly wasn't for lack of desire on my part; today, of course, with digital photography, Amazon, eBay and competing grocery delivery services keeping delivery charges low, I think I might have tried to give it a shot. It's just a shame nobody makes money taking photos any more.

Persimmon, Parkdale, Oct. 1995

Pomegranate, Parkdale, Oct. 1995

This is a long way of explaining why, starting in the middle of the decade, I began shooting still lifes in my Parkdale studio. It began as a technical exercise - an attempt to figure out high-key tabletop shooting, the sort of thing any competent catalog photographer could do with just a few minutes' set-up. But there was also a nagging worry that the market was shrinking, and that I was relying too heavily on my NOW assignments. I needed to branch out and find new markets.

There were a lot of cooking and lifestyle magazines on the newsstands. I noticed this because, besides spending most of my days reading, I was teaching myself how to cook. I had become what we now call a "foodie" years earlier with my first girlfriend, and instead of spending money in restaurants, I wanted to learn how to make really good food at home, if only so I could avoid leaving the house to socialize and convince my friends to come to me.

Ginger root, Parkdale, Jan. 1997

Garlic bulb, Parkdale, Jan. 1997

And so I bought a piece of milk-white opaque plexiglass and set up a simple backlit tabletop to shoot the ingredients I had in the kitchen. I began with more obviously sculptural items - a Savoy cabbage and some leeks, a pomegranate and a persimmon (though I still haven't really figured out what to do with a persimmon, even today.) A while later I turned my attention to ingredients I was using all the time, like garlic and ginger and summer melons.

I was pleased enough with all of this work to make fruit and veg still lifes the subject of my first (and only) solo photo show, at an uptown restaurant that's still in business today. It was not a success; despite several phone calls from diners who either wanted me to mark down my (very reasonable) prices ("What if you made a smaller one? Would that cost less?"), I only sold one framed print - to the chef/owner. I'd end up selling another to a friend years later, but the rest have ended up on the walls of our home.

Canteloupe, Parkdale, Jan. 1997

Despite this setback, I was proud of my still life work, and can only blame my own woeful inability to market and publicize myself for not using it to get more work, back in the last moments of the last boom time of magazine publishing. I'd keep doing still life work in my studio - more about that later - and occasionally take over the kitchen table when everyone's at work or school to see what I can do today.

Finally, I should mention that all of these shots were shot with cross-processed slide film. After years of experimenting, I had finally found a way to control the results and produce negatives with the contrast and colour I'd been trying to get for a decade. This little-seen work is probably the technical zenith of my work as a studio photographer. They are also available for very reasonable prices for framing and hanging.

Wilco

Jay Bennett and Jeff Tweedy, Wilco, Toronto, Oct. 1996

SHOOTING BANDS IS HARD. Taking a photo of a group of people is hard enough, but bands, with all their personal conflicts and loyalties - large and small - always inhabit a space together uneasily. Getting a decent shot of everyone at one time that isn't a collection of poses is a crap shoot, and always means taking a lot of film. (This problem might be less of an issue in the age of digital photography, but it still means more work, and there's no guarantee you'll get a single, usable frame.)

I was grateful that I didn't have to photograph the whole of Wilco when I set up in what my memory - probably wrongly - remembers as the Park Hyatt hotel downtown. I know I did this as a NOW cover, and that I was probably with writer Tim Perlich for this job, and all I had to worry about was bandleader Jeff Tweedy and Jay Bennett, who was probably as close to a co-leader as Tweedy ever had in Wilco.

Jay Bennett and Jeff Tweedy, Wilco, Toronto, Oct. 1996

The band were promoting Being There, their newest record, though I can't be sure if the duo were on a promotional tour without the rest of the band or whether this was a tour stop. I didn't know much about them at the time except that they'd emerged from the breakup of Uncle Tupelo and that they were considered a big deal in the alt country world. I'd get into the band much later, around Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but in 1996 I was neck deep in old jazz and blues reissues and not much else.

I worked hard on this shoot, doing a new setup with every roll of film, switching from colour negative to cross-processed slide film. I must have been feeling restless, because instead of trying to force Tweedy and Bennett together into a tight frame in a flattering bit of light, I went uncharacteristically wide, making their hotel room an obvious part of each shot, opting for a slightly staged candid, "documentary" feel.

Jay Bennett and Jeff Tweedy, Wilco, Toronto, Oct. 1996

What I mostly had to work with was the relationship between the two men, both of them around my age (Bennett was a year older than me, Tweedy three years younger,) about which I knew almost nothing, though it seemed very amicable on that day in the Park Hyatt - two musicians who'd only recently begun working together, whose mutual inspiration was obviously deep enough to have produced a double album of songs.

I was never sure if I got much, but time has filled out the context of these shots, at least for fans of Wilco, Bennett and Tweedy. The tensions that would later develop between them were documented in Sam Jones' film about the making of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Bennett's firing from the band and later death have given these shots the added aspect of being history, and not merely some old shots of some rock musicians goofing around in a hotel room. But even if that weren't all in play, I have to say that I like these shots now more than I did when I took them - a record of a creative challenge I made for myself, back at the end of my first decade as a photographer.

Jay Bennett died in 2009 of an accidental overdose of fentanyl.

Sally

Sally Lee, film test, Parkdale, April 1991. Kodak VPS rated at ISO 20, pushed 1 stop, 30R filter

MY RECENT POST OF OLD FASHION PHOTOS featured some shots of Sally Lee, my onetime roommate in the Parkdale loft and sometime model for my studio experiments. When I was scanning those shots, I remembered that one of the thankless favours I asked of Sally was being the model for my attempts to calibrate the results of cross processing colour negative film through E-6 chemistry.

While it's true that Sally was a convenient model, living as she did in the next room, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I knew that scrutinizing rolls of slide film for contrast and tonal shifts would be generally more pleasant with an attractive model. She was agreeable enough to stand in front of one of my strobe lights for two sessions in the spring of 1991, holding up my homemade colour chart while I changed filters and made notes on f-stops as I worked.

Sally Lee, film test, Parkdale, April 1991. Kodak VHC rated at ISO 20, pushed 1 stop, 40M filter

Sally Lee, film test, Parkdale, April 1991. Fujicolor 400 rated at ISO 50, pushed 1 stop, 40M filter open 1 stop

I'd first seen cross-processed photos in American music magazines, in work by people like Michael Lavine. Not long after my predecessor at NOW magazine, photographer Chris Nicholls, had done some early work with cross-processed slide film, and he was kind enough to sit down with Chris Buck and I in an east end diner and give us some basic tips on how it was done.

He said that you could cross-process both ways, but that you needed to do a lot of testing to see how pushing and filters and exposure would effect the results, especially when working with colour negative film. After some early success with slide film-turned-negative, I picked up a variety of negative films and tried to find something workable. I carefully recorded my results and offered them to anyone who wanted to try it out, figuring that it was better to share information than hoard it.

In the end, negative-through-slide cross-processing turned out to be too unpredictable to work with, though I'd keep going back to slide-through-negative cross-processing on and off for the next decade, looking for a way to get punchier colours and interesting historical effects. Nowadays almost all of this can be approximated roughly in Photoshop, though to my eye there's always something specific and unique to film chemistry - some peculiarity in the tonal shifts - that no one has ever been able to recreate digitally.

Sally Lee, film test, Parkdale, April 1991. Fuji Reala rated at ISO 12, 85 filter

Sally Lee, film test, Parkdale, April 1991. Kodak Ektar 25 rated at ISO 3, pushed 1 stop, no filter, closed 1 stop

Sally Lee, film test, Parkdale, April 1991. Agfa Portrait 160 rated at ISO 20, 85 filter closed 1 stop

How I ended up living with Sally is another story. She was, by the time I took these shots, my ex-girlfriend's sister, or very nearly. The three of us had moved into the Parkdale loft together, subletting the space against the wishes of a rogue landlord who tried to force all the tenants out with intimidation and threats. Sally's sister broke up with me after moving to New York City to study, leaving us in a somewhat awkward living situation.

We lasted a year after the breakup as roommates before it got all too much for Sally and she moved out. I was so desperate to have a shooting space that I was apparently willing to endure thug superintendents shoving toothpicks in my door lock, writing threats on our door and blaring country radio in the empty unit next door, along with the emotional awkwardness of living with the sister of my ex, as nice as she could be. I'd end up living in that loft for the rest of the decade, though the landlord and his thugs were gone not long after I took these photos.

Sally's essential likability has always made her popular in Toronto's overlapping worlds of art, music and film, where she's worked since we were roommates. I've always felt that I must have tested her amiability with my own basically grouchy temperament, not to mention my increasingly fragile emotional state during and after the break-up with her sister, but we've somehow managed to stay friendly in spite of it all. She took up the bass while we were living together, and she's till at it today, playing with our old upstairs neighbour Don Pyle in a new band. I'd like to post these old photos as a belated thank you, both for helping me out and for enduring.

Jason Patric

Jason Patric, Toronto, Sept. 1998

1998 WAS A VERY BIG YEAR FOR ME. I didn't have any major career breakthrough - quite the opposite - but it was the year when I met the woman who would become my wife. I had begun the year in London, England, and by the time the summer rolled around I had flown across the ocean again to visit my new girlfriend in Barcelona, where she had a teaching gig.

A year that began with what felt like a tipping point had definitely delivered on transformation. In hindsight, I'm tempted to scrutinize the work I did that year for signs of change. It's a lot of weight to put on shoots like this one of actor Jason Patric, shot at the film festival as a cover for NOW magazine.

Jason Patric, Toronto, Sept. 1998

Patric was becoming a leading man when I took these photos - an attractive actor in his early '30s who had gone from the vampire bro flick The Lost Boys to playing Lord Byron and a junkie narcotics detective. He'd been gossip fodder when Julia Roberts, at the peak of her "America's Sweetheart" fame, rebounded on to him after jilting his Lost Boys co-star Kiefer Sutherland at the altar.

As with my Ally Sheedy shoot, I'd returned to cross-processed slide film to try and extract as much saturation as possible from colour film. I could control the process just enough by now, and was looking to get the look of Kodachrome film, with its bright primaries and nearly plastic skin tones, as it often appeared in old magazines and the chromolithography that rendered colour photos almost like hand-coloured stills. An esoteric goal, to be sure.

Jason Patric, Toronto, Sept. 1998

I barely said a word to my subjects; having found the sweet spot of light - or, as in the case of this shoot, having created it with a high strobe light bounced into an umbrella - I gave only the barest of instructions (lean into the wall, look right, don't smile) and peered into the viewfinder until something registered in their eyes. I'd spent a decade desperately searching for a style; by this point, I decided to stop trying and pare away almost everything from around my subject. No complicated lighting, no backdrops, no pre-visualization.

Maybe I was inspired. Maybe I was just tired. Perhaps being in a relationship again after many years as a lonely single man had restored some confidence, or perhaps it had given me a healthy distraction from constant, anxious fretting over my creative direction. Nearly twenty years on, I look at these photos and can only imagine myself saying "Here are some photos of what Jason Patric, actor, looked like in this hotel room at this moment in time. Take from this what you will." I was either very secure about my work or simply beyond caring about making something photo editors might have wanted to see.

I'm not sure what happened to Patric's career after this. In the film he was promoting - Neil LaBute's Your Friends and Neighbours - he'd played a very convincing heavy, a sociopath who plays a major part in destroying the marriages of two couples. Perhaps he'd done his job too well, or perhaps he was simply too handsome, but he never became the leading man it was assumed he was going to be. Perhaps that was never his goal, as he's built a career since then playing anti-heroes, sadists, cops and untrustworthy authority figures. I won't lie and say that I don't wish he'd become a matinee idol, but I still like these very minimal portraits of a cypher-like subject.

Ally Sheedy

Ally Sheedy, Toronto, May 1998

MOVIE STARS WERE MY MAJOR SUBJECT AT THE ZENITH OF MY CAREER. The thing is, I would never voluntarily call them that. I spent much of the '90s shooting celebrities, as far as I could tell, since "movie stars" were, in my mind, something that existed mostly before I was born, some of them surviving well into my life, but usually far out of my reach as a photographer.

When I had my very strange but memorable portrait session with Mickey Rooney, I actually felt like I was in the presence of a movie star. The rest of the time - as with this shoot with Ally Sheedy, late in my time at NOW magazine - I was shooting celebrities, or famous actors. Movie stars were never close to my age (Sheedy is only two years older than me) and if their fame began at any point in my adult life they were merely "famous."

Ally Sheedy, Toronto, May 1998

Ally Sheedy's fame was white hot over ten years before I met her, with films like The Breakfast Club. She was at the start of a second act in her career when she came to Toronto to do press for High Art, a small film where she played a reclusive lesbian artist. It was the sort of role you took when you wanted to persuade the public that they should stop imagining you as a sullen teenager who shook dandruff onto her notebook during detention.

Ally Sheedy, Toronto, May 1998

That would be a harder job than she might have imagined; when I was printing photos from this shoot for NOW's cover story at the rental darkroom, other photographers - men, mostly my age - would stop and look at the test prints I'd stuck to the white board.

"I loved her in The Breakfast Club," they all told me. "Way more than Molly Ringwald."

Ally Sheedy, Toronto, May 1998

My old standby setup with the back of a hotel curtain draped over a floor lamp to make a gauzy backdrop was getting tired by now. It was was clever and suitable for my Bjork portrait, but by now it felt stale, and this was probably the last time I used it.

I was briefly enamoured with cross-processed slide film again, having finally mastered how to use it without getting blown-out highlights (Fuji 400 ISO film shot as rated) and decided to return to it in search of more vivid colours than I was getting from slide film or (especially) colour negative.

The best shots were taken on one of the big balconies outside the corner suites at the old Four Seasons in Yorkville, in front of a big wall of pebble-finished brutalist concrete. She was very thin, and when she cocked her hip with her hands on her butt I told her to hold that pose; she looked angular and lean and a long way from the sweetly awkward teenager she'd played in her early twenties.

Fashion

Unknown model, Parkdale, 1994

MY CAREER AS A FASHION PHOTOGRAPHER WAS BRIEF AND SPORADIC. Which is to say that I didn't really have a career as a fashion photographer at all, though I have always loved really great fashion work, and had no shortage of ambition to make some of my own.

The reason was simple enough; my favorite photographers shot fashion in addition to portraits and whatever else was their specialty, and some of their most iconic images came from their fashion work. Avedon with Dovima and the elephants. Penn's photos of his wife Lisa in pretty much anything. I wanted to take a lot of great photos, so I wanted to work in as many places that would let me take them.

My first problem, however, was that I was not working in New York City in the mid-50s. It would take me a while to actually grasp that inescapable fact.

My first proper fashion shoot was for NOW magazine, early in my time there. We were doing a special section and the idea was to have the city's fashion luminaries wear the clothes instead of some model. Dierdre Hanna, the paper's fashion editor, made the arrangements and on a day I distinctly remember as cold, wet and miserable Dierdre, the clothes and a hair and makeup artist arrived at my Parkdale loft.

Catherine Franklin, Parkdale, Feb. 1990

Jeanne Beker, Parkdale, Feb. 1990

Ray Civello, Parkdale, Feb. 1990

Jeanne Beker had moved from hosting The New Music - a program I'd watched avidly as a teenager sniffing out the last smokey vapours of punk rock - and had helped start Fashion Television, which became a big deal in the industry. Ray Civello was the owner of some high end salons and had launched his own line of product, and Catherine Franklin was the fashion director for Toronto Life Fashion, one of the two big fashion magazines in the country.

We shot on a day when the thugs hired by our landlord to harass the tenants out of the building went on the offensive, knocking on my door while I was shooting to issue vague threats that I should "get out." Explaining the situation to Dierdre and everyone else in the studio meant that I was more than usually tense while I worked.

I wanted desperately to make a good impression on these people, as they seemed to hold the keys to work I longed to do. I felt like a nervous kid, working at the edge of my technical competence and besieged in his apartment by guys with names like Dwayne and Harry. In hindsight, it's a colourful anecdote. At the time it felt humiliating. Does all of this show in the photos? You be the judge.

Sally, Parkdale, 1991

The results of my first real fashion shoot - which never translated into work with any of these people, by the way - convinced me that as a fashion photographer, I took okay portraits. I needed practice, and the nearest person I could practice on happened to be my very pretty roommate Sally. I'd never lived with a woman who wasn't my mother up till then, so Sally's makeup ritual was something I couldn't help but notice. I was looking at a lot of old fashion magazines, and one day I had an idea.

Left: Erwin Blumenfeld, 1950. Right: Irving Penn, 1959.

I'd finally bought a proper medium format studio camera - a Bronica SQ-A - and after picking up a close-up filter to give the standard 80mm lens some vaguely macro function, I asked her to sit under my little set of strobe lights and set about with her lipstick and mascara. I had come to the conclusion that sharp focus was an arbitrary thing, and likely overrated, so I dialed back the lights and shot with cross-processed slide film rated two stops below the ISO on the box.

I ended up getting something more than vaguely like what I had in mind, which felt like success. (Though it was only while scanning these shots over 25 years later that I decided the bottom shot actually looks better in black and white.) I put one of these shots in my portfolio, hoping someone would respond to what I was trying to do. No one did.

My next kick at fashion shooting came when my old Nerve boss, Dave Macintosh, phoned and said that his new girlfriend was a model whose agent told her she needed more work in her portfolio. He asked if I was interested. Sally had moved out by that point, and I was desperate for a new model, so I eagerly said yes.

Teri Walker, Parkdale, 1992

I rented my favorite sky and clouds backdrop for good luck and explained to Teri my idea for something slightly evocative of surrealism and Magritte. We shot for a while with one simple black dress and then Teri went out to the living room to get the hair and makeup person to give her a new look. I came out and saw the candy-coloured curlers, thought "Eureka!" and said she had to get back into the studio for another setup. I shot negative film cross-processed into slide; it was a trick that didn't often work, but this time it turned out exactly as I'd hoped.

Teri Walker, Parkdale, 1992

We shot for the rest of the afternoon, finally heading outside to get something a bit more "street," which led us to the less salubrious of Parkdale's two diners. I ordered a Labatt's 50, set dressed the table with my own Zippo and Lucky Strikes (Teri didn't actually smoke) and took a couple of rolls. At the end of the day I had a lot of film. I'm not sure if the results were what Teri had in mind, but I'd had a glimpse of what it was like to work with a real model.

It would be two more years before I'd have that experience again. I'd met a young fashion designer at a party somewhere who knew my work from NOW; he asked if I'd be willing to shoot some promo work featuring his clothes. He'd take care of the expenses of models and makeup and I could do what I wanted. It seemed like a good deal, and I knew that I'd never get a chance shooting fashion if I couldn't show off something that featured models and actual clothes.

Unknown model, Parkdale, 1994

We shot with two models and three or four outfits. A set of shots with a model in a bathing suit never did much for me, but the photos I did with the other girl turned out much better. She was young but Eastern European so she looked much older than her age; I recall that she was married, and that she couldn't stop playing with Nato, my very friendly kitten. I honestly wish I remembered her name, because the setup we did at the end of the shoot was probably the closest I ever got to work that looked like the fashion photos I wanted to make.

These shots have Penn all over them, there's no hiding that. But I was able to use props that I liked - a scarred and stained tabletop, an old fan from the attic of my mom's house, and a pair of lemons from my kitchen to set off the model's blue jacket. I shot on slide film, which is unforgiving with exposure, but I was at the top of my game in the studio by then, and everything came out just as I'd imagined. I was eager to work with the designer again, but somewhere along the line he'd gotten some good press and, imagining he could get a better deal, blew me off rather callously. It's why I always remember my favorite fashion shot with some bitterness.

A footnote: The shot just above is not the best one from the shoot. My neighbour across the hall in the Parkdale loft was a set designer/opera singer, and he loved that shot when I showed it to him. He asked if he could borrow it to have it turned into a painting for a show he was doing. It was sent off to an artist to be copied, who then sent it back to his studio, the original slide taped in an envelope to the paper wrapping. An assistant signed for the delivery, quickly unwrapped the painting - and then threw away the paper, with my original slide still attached.

This is why I love digital so much, and why I'll never shoot another roll of slide film again.

Lost slides, ungrateful designers, a generally sour feeling. My attempts to shoot fashion pretty much ended here. I could never find the energy or the resources to throw myself into the cycle of testing and promos and mailers that were required to get a shot at doing paid fashion work. And it would be years before I learned the dirty secret of fashion shooting - that no one really makes money at magazine work, which is just a ritual for gaining favour with the editors who assign the really lucrative jobs in advertising campaigns. Models and stylists and makeup people and photographers work together in a web of mutually exploitative relationships pro bono, hoping that one person's break will buoy a few of them upward. Perhaps I never would have been a decent fashion photographer, but I would have loved to have had a shot.