A sometime client had set me up with a new one who had a very special object to be photographed. I was sworn to secrecy until the job was over. Several days later a guy in a beautiful Italian suit rang my buzzer. He was hefting a very large aluminum portfolio case secured by numerous locks. Once inside, the door bolted by his request, he ceremoniously opened the huge flat case and revealed a large dark carefully packed grubby old cloth. I looked at this big mottled rag without comprehension. “What is it?” I asked.
“It’s the Shroud of Turin. I need a good photograph of it — for postcards.”
***
I kayak out through a back channel, round a small point and cut back in toward the mainland interior. It would appear to be an unpromising reedy back bay but I know its secret. It terminates in a wall of scrub where if you listen carefully you can hear water run. After grounding my boat I exit and hump it into the wall of scratchy bush and grass. In 30 feet I’ve climbed up 20 and can now see the curve of the hidden high beaver dam shouldering uncountable tons of water. There’s a huge hidden lake up here, a score of feet above the Bay and dozens of acres in extent. It’s not on any topo maps and doesn’t really read in aerial photographs. It’s another secret.
After re-launching the kayak from the dam’s lip I begin to thread my way through the many small black water channels that lead to the open lake. The mossy hummocks that border these passageways are covered with rose pogonias, beautiful miniature pink orchids on half-foot slender stalks. There are many thousands of them lining my tannin-dark channel. Even when I cease paddling and coast, the boat glides too fast for me to see all that surrounds me. Once on the main body I make for the large island that crowns its centre and begin a watchful circumnavigation. Once this island was a heron rookery but the big birds were chased out a decade ago by a pair of biker bald eagles that began nesting atop the tallest pine at the island’s far end. A hundred feet from that nest is a sentinel tree where the male runs guard duty. I want to see the male and stare contemptuously at its very ugly huge babies. I carefully round the far end, glide and surreptitiously glance up.
The trees are empty. The eagles have flown.
As analogue photography slips into the mists of history there are both gains and many losses. The beautifully machined bodies of Leicas, Hasselblads and Linhofs have been replaced by injection-molded plastics, leather by vinyl and exotic, even radioactive, glasses by coated crown glass or acrylic. A whole vocabulary, a nomenclature vanishes as well — contact sheet, pressure plate, darkroom, dark cloth, changing bag, safelight, push process, motor drive and so on. There are many more. We will never again develop, stop and fix our pictures. You can’t wash and dry a pixel. And gone forever are the after-class, beer-soaked sotto voce conversations with your girl about the Scheimpflug correction.
***
Idling slowly under the bridge at the top of the river I’m down-bound for the Bay. Rounding the first river bend I feel watched. Forty feet up in a big pine two big-eyed horned owls glare down at a puny man in a tin boat. They remain immobile. I’m too large for lunch.
The old photography of plates and film had made off with many of our daylight hours. We laboured in darkrooms whose only poetry was the tinkle of wash water and the emerging image’s sleight of hand. Meanwhile the world roared past outside the darkroom door. When the digital array finally freed us, photographers everywhere escaped blinking into the world’s brilliance. We believed we’d been liberated from darkness only to discover that we’d all become office workers. We are now captives of the desk chair, the keyboard and a glowing screen.
***
I have five guests at the island. They sit — one man, four women — distributed along the 40-foot length in the cabin’s main room in various chairs — press-backs, wickers and a Mennonite bent-wood rocker. All are hunched silently over their devices, intent on tiny displays and touch screen keyboards, hour upon hour. Beyond the many-mullioned windows lies the world — roaring, singing, whispering, flashing, vibrating, scintillating, rippling, glowing, shimmering, radiating, beckoning and calling as they tap their keyboards, gone and oblivious.
***
Pewter sky with a pale blush descending to the treeline. I’m sitting on my big screen porch a dozen feet from the water’s edge concentrating on the veils of sound hanging like successive flats on a barren stage. Near sound: water streaming off the roof and rattling on the hard gneiss of the Shield. Next the soft kiss of small waves driven by a freshet from the west. The following curtain is the sibilant wind through the pines with a faint dry crackle from the lone birch on my point some 40 feet away. And finally the ground bass of the big breakers on the foreshore a mile out to the west. All these curtains of sound interweave slowly with the wind, penetrating each other, changing places and perspective in an endless series of velvet variations. A round, guttural thunder enters as a refrain, calling up a new set of variations every few minutes or so.
They’re a smart group of students — physicists from Chalk River, teachers from Sudbury, a clutch of alert and curious northerners and a few stragglers from the south. I’m to lead a two-week photography workshop, centered on a common assignment. The school, Canadore College in North Bay, has recently been given the decommissioned Bomarc missile base north of town. It still has its launch sheds, maintenance buildings and a structure designed to hold the guidance computer, a monster with vacuum tubes the size of garbage cans that had less computing power than a smart phone. The college had yet to figure out what to do with the whole installation.
But I have. It seems to me that this abandoned Cold War relic is the perfect subject for a class assignment. It’s nearby, self-contained, and has an interesting history and freighted structures. When I announce the project to the students all hell breaks loose. “We didn’t come here to get involved in politics!” screams one of the southern students. “I hate war!” shouts another. I guess students taking a summer course for their annual vacation don’t want to think about realpolitik. They’re here for Group of Seven picture fantasies. I back down but a few of the students, the smarter ones, pursue my suggested project anyway.
1972
The police in this Toronto neighbourhood pick up the local teenage boys, drive them down to Cherry Beach, beat them up and dump them. I’ve been told this repeatedly by local parents and now it’s my turn. The cruiser has pulled up, blocking my view of the street and that of the houses across from it. I’m sitting on the curb this early Sunday morning, with both my Rolleiflexes on my lap as I spool fresh rolls of paper-backed film into them. I’ve been photographing for several weeks to illustrate a forthcoming book by journalist Graham Fraser on the Trefann Court urban renewal struggle. This low-income downtown neighbourhood lying largely between Queen Street East and Shuter Street east of Parliament, is threatened by urban renewal. The working-class residents of the many owner-occupied houses here don’t want their houses razed and the neighbourhood flattened. They don’t have much money but they do have a functioning community. They like it and are prepared to fight for it.
And they have allies. The local meetings I attend with my cameras are chaired by the likes of John Sewell and David Crombie. Both of these men will do stints as Toronto’s mayor. But at the moment these cops are the issue in my life. They exit their car and tower over me asking aggressive questions and making crude insinuations. Knowing that what I’m doing is not only legal but supported by people more powerful than this pair of bullies I continue with my film change while quietly dealing with their abuse. There’s always been a sizeable element of my city’s police force that is out of control. There still is. As soon as you give guns and a certain authority to a group that is, by and large, lightly educated and trained, there are going to be control issues. I’ve always been struck by the quite extreme personality differences between the people who become firemen and those who go into police work. The firemen tend to be salt of-the-earth helping types; the police force seems to shelter many bitter, angry and
aggressive personalities.
After a half hour of this interference I get to my feet and begin to walk away. When they demand to know what I think I’m doing I tell them I’m going to the phone booth down on Queen to call my friend David Crombie. They look at me, then at each other and silently decide I’m more trouble than I’m worth. They glare and drive away. This was not to be the last time.
***
When I awoke in the cabin this morning the world is gone. A paint-thick fog had rolled in the dark and “disappeared” the far shore, the islands between, even my point. Out on the front porch the night rain had left a million pearls and tiny lenses on the screens. The whole soundscape has changed as the mist greases the waves of sound. Far-off breaking waves are at my feet; birds sing in my head. The universe is once again made strange.
This is going to be a big photograph — a real mother of a picture. Toronto’s Eaton Centre is nearing completion and retail tenants are preparing to move in. The provincial liquor board, the L.C.B.O., has leased a large space at the Dundas Street end of the block-long complex. It’s one level below grade with an entrance presenting a long blank wall to the public area of the mall. I’ve been asked to come up with something to cover the wall. The architects are basically talking about custom wallpaper.
After making several presentations they chose my least interesting idea — a photograph of row upon row of stacked bonding barrels. I get on the phone to find a distillery that will admit me and a big view camera. Finally an old established one on the QEW freeway west of Toronto agrees to participate.
Before admitting me to the bonding warehouse they take me on a familiarization tour of the distillery. This may be a house of booze but the tour is sobering. We all believe that rye whiskey is made from rye, gin from juniper and vodka from potatoes. What really happens is that a long line of dump trucks from southern Ontario farms back up to the rear doors and unload tons of corn. A mixture of kernels, water and yeast fills up mash tanks and begins to bubble and ferment. This stinky mess is then boiled and a distillate collected. The resultant clear liquid, a mixture of alcohol and water is then pumped out through an overhead pipe. Before exiting the distilling area the pipe forks into five smaller ones. One goes into the vodka room, another the rye, the gin room and so on. In these rooms flavouring extracts are added and the finished product put in nice bottles with classy labels. It may all look different, taste different and have different names and reputation but it’s all just hooch — corn liquor. This business is all mythology and marketing.
I make my exposures and then some large prints, which are mounted together in a long row on a heavy board. I hire an old photo retoucher from Toronto Island to disguise the seams and alter some barrel numbers so the repeats aren’t evident. The whole mockup is then re-photographed with an ancient wooden 8x10 view camera to produce the enormous negative that will be projected onto a giant darkroom wall hung with rolls of black-and-white photo paper. The enlarger that does this work is yet another antique wooden 8x10 camera on rails.
The finished print is to cover a wall 10 feet high and a little over 40 feet long. Fortunately for me when I scout the site a construction foreman tells me that I should consider making the print somewhat oversize. How much? He says at least 10 percent. So I do. Installation is to take place overnight the day before the store is to open. When I arrive with a team of paper hangers and begin the midnight work I discover the wisdom of the foreman’s advice. The Eaton Centre may look like a giant machine but it’s not a precision one. The concrete floor at the foot of my wall is as irregular as the surface of a fast flowing stream. At some points in my 40 feet we have to trim off a foot of picture at the bottom; at others only the installation of baseboards hides the failure of my mural to reach the floor. The construction errors are staggering.
1973
One summer day I crossed Front Street on a whim and walked into the north building of the St. Lawrence Market. As it was Sunday, not a market day, the vegetables had been replaced by a miscellany masquerading as antiques. In the course of half-heartedly ambling around I suddenly spied stacks of photographs in a vintage bowed-glass display case. These cabinet cards, roughly 5 by 7 inches, were amazing. On one level they were typical New York studio portraits of the 1870s and ’80s — the subject sat or stood before a painted backdrop accompanied by one or two overly elaborate pieces of Victorian furniture and an exotic plant in a pot. Every uptown photographer in Manhattan made similar portraits of local society types. But these were different. In place of a successful businessman or idle lunching lady was a giant, a dwarf, a fat lady, a naked obese man or an ethnic exotic. And there were rubber skin men, Siamese twins, a lobster boy, a lady with four legs. In short, all were freaks. The imprint on the base of these cards verified that they had all been made on the Bowery by the same photographer — Charles Eisenmann.
Who was this guy? I knew my 19th century American photography pretty well but I’d never heard of him. And who were these strange people? Were they real? Why had these portraits been made? Dry as dust histories of photography like Beaumont Newhall’s failed to deal with vernacular images. They were predicated on a canon of waspy masterpieces. I couldn’t get these images out of my mind. I wanted them. Their owner refused to sell. He enjoyed having people covet his stuff.
Over the next couple of years whenever I ran into that guy I bugged him to sell the collection. I couldn’t tell you how many times I was rebuffed. Over time I gradually gave up but one day he called me. He’d recently bought a house in the Annex and in the course of preparing to move in had discovered that much of the plumbing was shot. He had to fix it or be homeless. He was out of money. If I paid the plumbing bill I could have the photographs, all 450 of them. I bought him his drains.
Over the next several years I spent my spare time obsessively researching that material. Slowly, in fits and starts, I figured out who Eisenmann had been and the identity of his sitters. It was a massive amount of work. This was before computers and the internet. Without any information online I had to drive to any place that could yield cues — New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Wisconsin and many points in between. I did. In time a publisher got interested and I had a contract and a year or so to assemble a manuscript. I set to work on it in my spare time.
Until one day the phone rang. It was my editor to be: she was totally wound up and screaming. It took me a few minutes to understand why she was so agitated. Virtually her entire list for the season had fallen apart and she had nothing to show her boss. Her solution was to bully me into finishing my manuscript in 90 days instead of a year. I can’t deal with screamers so I caved.
A modest advance allowed me to decline photo assignments and concentrate on the project. I developed a routine. At the time I was living in a tiny winterized cottage on the Scarborough bluffs. I’d drive from there mid-morning to my downtown studio, make coffee and spend the next four or five hours reading through my notes for the next section of the book. I had shoeboxes of research notes on 3 by 5 index cards. By about six in the evening I’d have memorized the content of relevant cards and I’d go out to a local Chinese restaurant to have supper. More about that restaurant and its beautiful waitress later.
After dinner I’d return to my studio and write furiously for six or seven hours. By midnight or so I’d be exhausted and get in my car for the 45-minute drive back to the bluffs. Once there I’d be so wired I couldn’t sleep. I’d pour a beer or a glass of wine, build a fire, put some music on the stereo and stand by the cottage’s big picture window that gave on the lake. As the building perched precariously a mere 50 feet from the soft clay 200-foot drop to the water, the view was spectacular.
During that three-month period the music that helped me unwind and get to sleep became very important. I soon became addicted to a specific piece, Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. It was then a relatively recent piece of minimalist music with a repetitive and overlapping structure that slowly built in complexit
y and then gradually unraveled itself. It was music to program your brain. I must have listened to that 50-odd-minute-long piece several hundred times while working on the book and waiting for the next call from the screaming editor. I finished the book.
So my supper “dates” with the beautiful Chinese waitress were also finished. I missed her grinning delivery at every meal’s end of a porcelain bowl cupping a single fortune cookie. She’d stand by my side as I opened it and read the fortune. From the very first day they got better and better — fame, fortune, romance and adventure. It became a running joke with the restaurant staff. They began gathering to hear my escalating good news as other patrons tossed their bleak fortunes to the floor. When I finished the book I opened my last fortune: “Don’t believe everything you read.” I was struck dumb and helpless but the beautiful waitress leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Don’t believe that either.”
Decades later I was travelling around Europe with the Toronto Symphony. After several concerts in Germany and Hungary we landed in Vienna. The Musikverein is one of the great public music halls of Europe and one of the very first. Home of the Vienna Philharmonic, its past resident conductors are a who’s who of the European classical tradition — Brahms, Rubinstein, Richter, Furtwängler, von Karajan. It’s the ground zero of 19th century classical music, especially the Germanic tradition.
And now the TSO was going to play several concerts there with Jukka-Pekka Saraste on the podium. It was not uneventful. The band had played a set program across Europe. As there were a few changes for Vienna some extra rehearsals were required. One afternoon Jukka was taking them through one when the TSO musician who represented the union mounted the podium and took Jukka’s baton from his hand. The union-approved rehearsal time was up. By this point I’d done enough drinking with Jukka to know him reasonably well and when I saw his expression at this intervention I knew he was going to quit. And he did. Classical musicians in big orchestras are among the most spoiled people in the arts. They can act more like unionized civil servants than artists.
Final Fire Page 7
