So we load the skiff with victuals. After I’ve made sure we have life jackets and a corkscrew we take off and head west. It gets rougher and rougher. As we reach the inlet’s opening to the big water the boat leaps and plunges on the freighted waves. K. indicates that he seeks a spot a bit north up the coast. Against my better judgment I begin evasive manoeuvres through the reefs and shoals. The 16-foot boat pitches and rolls violently.
We rock and roll our way 1,000 feet up the coast and then point toward an inlet in the shore. The big rollers grab the stern and pitch us forward. And down. The giant of a wave set almost pitch-poles us into a trough. As we bottom out the outboard’s lower unit cracks on a rock and whacks out of gear. I struggle hard to re-engage. As the seas begin to push us broadside, threatening a broach, I finally manage to force the shift-dog into reverse. We’ve missed the inlet so we’re now obliged to plow astern into heavy seas if we’re to avoid getting smashed on the shore rocks just ahead. As I reverse the waves repeatedly slop over the transom. Despite my repeated shouts to start bailing, my passengers remain frozen in their seats — they’re stunned. I watch as the Nikons and long lenses we’ve both brought disappear beneath the water in the bilge. In a few minutes the boat is swamped and the engine quits.
However, the skiff does have foam flotation under the seats. The boat settles into a kind of negative buoyancy just below the surface. I discover that I can row it despite the water being up to my chest and the entire craft beneath the waves. I stroke hard — it’s like paddling a sub — but we make slow progress. Looking over my shoulder I glimpse a large reef breaking the surface about a hundred feet farther out. With everything I’ve got I make for it and stroke the boat to its windward side. I’ll let the wind and waves do the hard work of pushing a waterlogged boat onto this very low small island. As we crunch onto the rocks K. rolls his bulk over the side and makes it to safety. A surprisingly fit and agile Mizuho quickly follows. She reaches out and pulls me after her saying, “My-ko, I never forget you.” We’re safe — sort of.
It’s September. The water’s cold. It’s rough. We’re standing on a reef hundreds of feet offshore in heavy seas with a swamped boat and motor. There’s no one around. We may still be screwed.
Then I notice that despite submersion of the battery and wiring, the bilge pump is still working. Our drenched trio stand slack-jawed as the boat gradually bails itself. When it begins to float I re-board, remove the cowl to dry the plugs and drain the carburetor. A few vigorous pulls and my battered 25-horse coughs to life. We’re off across the waves — backwards.
Despite my occasional lack of judgment, such as this junket, I’m pretty good at boat handling. We make it through several thousand feet of roiling water and aggressive rocks to the deeper water of the inlet. We slowly plow backwards in infamy to my island a mile or so away. K. and I are probably having the same fantasy — undressing with Mizuho in front of a roaring fire. Maybe there’ll be candles. Our cameras are gone but we still have the wine.
***
Round and round my island a merlin harries a bald eagle — a disreputable bird and fitting symbol for our southern neighbours.
1989
I’m wrestling my equipment cases into the U.S. Customs and Immigration area of the Vancouver airport. I have a flight to San Francisco and, later, beyond. The trip has two functions, one commercial and one artistic. I’m to photograph some properties belonging to Canadian Pacific.
But it’s also the sesquicentennial of Daguerre’s launch of the first practical photographic process. The occasion is being marked in Houston by a show featuring three photographers, a Brit, an American and a Canadian — me. My contribution is in one of the cases.
It’s a show that I had originally created to mark another sesqui celebration, the incorporation of the city of Toronto. A number of photographers had been commissioned to execute works honouring this occasion. As none of them had taken on the city’s blooming multicultural mosaic, I had been urged to do so. Like the others, I had no desire to record colourful “ethnics” shopping or “exotic” signage. I had to think of something more interesting. I chose the commercial portrait.
Decades later I still owe my two sons and their mother for that one. Every weekend for three months she’d borrow a dress from her mother and we’d deck out the boys in gray flannel pants and blue blazers. Off we’d go to several appointments at commercial portrait studios. These were always booked anonymously. We’d show up like any other family to have a group portrait taken. The studios were carefully chosen to reflect the city’s new character. We went to studios that served the Chinese, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Polish and West Indian communities. We also visited the studios of the more established. We patronized a couple of studios that served successful Jews as well as one that valorized the old WASPs. I never told them the nature of the project and always claimed that I couldn’t make up my mind when viewing the proofs. I urged the photographers to select for me. I was still the objective anthropologist.
Here was another lesson learned. Make your own pictures — it’s a lot less work. I had to go to each studio four times: once to book, again for the session, then to view the proofs and finally to pick up and pay. Every weekend we had to tug those clothes onto the boys and ship them off to the various studios. They got pretty sick of it. Jake was old enough to sort of understand it but Ben, the younger, became a problem. Most of the studios had a program to reward the children with a candy sucker for having endured a session. Ben soon began asking for his bribe in advance. He nearly blew our cover several times.
And once I almost blew it. We had booked into Al Gilbert’s studio on a classy row of Victorian storefronts where Bay Street turns into Dupont. Gilbert mostly served the successful Jews of Forest Hill Village and beyond. As soon as we walked in Al’s assistant recognized me. I had to tread on his toes and beg him to keep his mouth shut; I’d explain later. When Al came out his face gave away his thoughts. “I know this guy with his family but I can’t quite place him.” This mystery preoccupied him throughout the session. He got so agitated that he dropped a Hasselblad film magazine on his marble floor. Broken but not busted. We got through it with our anonymity barely intact.
We then moved a few doors down the street and became an Anglo family at Ashley and Crippen.
What did this project reveal about the culture of immigration? Most obvious was the conservatism of many of these cultures. The setups were frequently straight out of the 19th century — same props, same poses, same lighting. One of the Greek Canadian studios posed the boys on a swing hung by ivy and flower entwined ropes. Mom and Dad were placed on either side looking down adoringly. The children were the true subject. Both studios catering to the Jewish community posed the mum, who in this case actually was Jewish, in the centre of the picture with a highlight glow framing her. I was just an accessory. The portraits from Mediterranean cultures established the father as the central and most important figure. Sometimes the portraits were about arrival and success. A prominent studio in the Portuguese neighbourhood posed us on a bridge, in front of a picture window that looked out on the Rockies. Presumably the message was we’ve arrived in the New World (the Rockies), and we’ve made it (our house has a big picture window with a nice view). Sometimes the message was less clear, even weird. At one Italian studio we sat on tree stumps blocking the road in a painted set of the Appian Way. Decode that one.
At the time, 1984, I wrote this text to accompany the portraits as they travelled to various museums and galleries.
Toronto, as we all know, was once a stuffy Victorian lady. However, something happened. She has hiked up her skirts and begun to cohabit with people from all over the world. Something has happened to me too. Here I am, fifth generation Anglo-Ontarian and lapsed Anglican choirboy, married to a Parisian Jew and father of two sons who have brown eyes and speak French. I, like Toronto, am no doubt the better for it and yet, like Toronto, am no longer so sure of what I am.
I do know that I’m a photographer but how could I ever show in photographs what has happened to both of us?
“Such confusion, I finally realized, required professional help. My family agreed and came along for the sessions. We went to Ashley and Crippen to see if we were WASPs and to Horvath and Gilbert to see if we were Jewish or, at the very least, successfully established.
“We consulted additional specialists — Katerina would know about the Greeks and Hilario and Ferreira were experts on the Portuguese. We were examined by Wong’s and Roma Studios on the off-chance that we might have become Chinese or Italian. Russell-Carib assured us that we weren’t West Indian but the diagnosis from Junak studio is ambiguous. We could possibly be Polish.
“What do we have, besides a sailor suit that was washed a dozen times, to show for all of this? Well I, standing for once on the wrong side of the camera, have a renewed respect for those who earn their living by making four human beings look presentable simultaneously. All the photographers worked hard without knowing the nature of our problem. I was glad also to see that our Victorian lady was in a sense still around. The posing tables and stools, tree stumps and armchairs, ornamental plants and ivy-twined swing are straight out of her period in portrait photography. So too are the painted backdrops that whisper of Rembrandt and Rubens in the establishment studios, while fairly shouting of a new life and a new land in the studios of those who came later. Retouching also survives. As an obliterator of the stigmata of chocolates in children and of mortgages and middle-age in adults, retouching has contributed to the true outcome of our consultations.
“It is not a diagnosis but a dream. A moment when the light is kind, children have resolved all differences and love their mother. The father is present and protective while the entire family, innocent of disease, debt and the politics of the sexes, floats in a limbo outside history and beyond all time.”
I later heard that when the prints were on exhibit at Harbourfront Al Gilbert and his assistant went down to see it. I had ordered one print from each studio and had paid anywhere from $15 to many hundreds for prints of the same size on the same Kodak paper although the more expensive ones did have some retouching. I had some concerns about how the high-end photographers would feel about being exhibited alongside the humbler immigrant ones. It turned out that Al Gilbert was quite amused when he saw the finished project. I also heard that people started using the series to select their wedding photographer.
However, when I showed up at American customs in Vancouver with those portraits they were not amused — figuring I was taking away Americans’ jobs. It took them only a couple of minutes to deny me entry. This banning engendered a great deal of work. A number of letters from the Canada Council, Ontario’s and various important museum curators and directors eventually persuaded American officialdom that the entry of myself and the portraits was not going to drive the U.S. economy into a job-destroying recession.
During the ’90s these entries into the U.S. became increasingly unpleasant. These uniformed primitives were rude and frequently shouted abusively at travellers. They seemed uninformed, uneducated and poorly trained. This tendency culminated in an episode at Toronto’s Pearson. I had been pulled out of line for a random agricultural inspection. Both my and my partner Sheila’s suitcases were taken into a side room and rifled through. I was not concerned as we had nothing of interest and were merely entering the U.S. briefly to change planes at Charlotte. I was cleared and shown out a door leading back to the entry line where Sheila waited. When I got there I gave back her suitcase. Immediately there was screaming and shouting while a big attack dog was set upon me. All this by Americans in my country, not theirs.
Although I had travelled or worked in almost every U.S. state and had numerous American friends and colleagues by this time I’d had enough. There are many other more interesting places to go than the United States. Americans should be ashamed that these uncivil and uncultured officers are their face to the world. They even banned the very talented and quiet Rohinton Mistry because he was brown. I haven’t gone back.
2003
These children of cheap oil and world-power-by-default can be both crazy and classy, generous and absolutely lethal. America’s weird tapestry of extreme individualism and excess rolls out endlessly.
It’s a month after I’ve republished my 1979 book Monsters about the late 19th century studio photographer Charles Eisenmann. His specialty had been making portraits of dime museum freaks. Every giant, multi-limbed, obese, tattooed or dwarfed performer on the circuit in the 1870s and ’80s had visited Eisenmann’s studio on the Bowery in New York. Descendants of the photographer have just discovered my book while trolling Amazon and have invited me down to the beach town in New Jersey where they all now live. It’s barely a month since my quadruple bypass heart surgery but I elect to go. Indirectly this family has been part of my life for over two decades so I can’t wait to meet the ones still living. My GP Rae and my old friend Macbeth come over to the house and work hard with little pliers for over an hour removing all the staples in my chest and down my left leg so that I can fly to Newark, rent a car and barrel down the Jersey Turnpike. It’s midwinter and the season throws every move and mood it has at me. It snows, it sleets, it hails, it rains, it freezes and snows again. Just for fun some fog gets tossed at me as well.
I finally slide off the freeway in the dark and skid my way through endless sprawl toward the coast. I meet my host at his office and he immediately takes me to a local restaurant where he has generously arranged a large dinner as part of my reception. He announces to the assembled diners that I’ve recently had open heart surgery in Canada. In Canada? It’s a miracle that I’m still alive. The table is suddenly awash with stories about the evils of socialized medicine. Up there you wait decades for surgery that’s probably going to be executed with a hatchet and a can opener. Bodies pile up in emergency departments; you have to shoot and trap your own hospital food. For a while I can’t get a word in edge-wise, long-wise, any-wise.
Soon the conversation shifts to the superior American system. I hear about neighbours who had to sell their house to pay for dad’s bypasses. People lost their second cars, even their boats to pay for follow up. When all these keeners finally pause to catch their breath before launching more tales of terror and triumph I jump in and tell them that my surgery was booked while I was still on the table having an angiogram — I didn’t wait even a day. I had four of these $70,000 bypasses they’re talking about and after leaving the hospital a week later I was handed a bill for $35 because I’d had a private room. That was it. But the power of myth is greater than the power of truth. My country sinks further into the third world. Things are so bad up there that I may be the only one still alive. Maybe I should appoint myself President of Canada. That would be okay as long as I understood who the real president was.
I try a few more times to get my story across but the propaganda from their health lobby has been just too effective. My dinner mates simply cannot absorb what I have to say so I give up. I turn to the couple next to me and inquire about their lives. Turns out he drives a truck and she’s a grocery store cashier. They have ordinary jobs but an interesting hobby — they collect dead bodies, well, mummies actually. Their bungalow is full of them. I have trouble following the story but it seems that their latest acquisition is the preserved body of a musician with some connection to Elvis Presley. They bought him somewhere out west, Vegas rings a bell. The tricky part was getting him home. The guy was rigid, most stiffs are I guess, so they had to wedge him between the bucket seats of their Camaro. His head was back against the hatch, his feet on the dash. But that wasn’t the tricky part. Their way home was obstructed by a few states that had intrusive laws banning the ownership and transport of corpses. You had to sneak across state lines at night and drive on crummy back roads. It was all a big pain in the ass and an infringement of their liberties.
I was already feeling nostalgic for Canada
. Even Don Cherry was looking pretty ordinary. I had actually once done a project with him. Cherry had contracted to do a series of ads for pink insulation. They were television ads so a big studio was booked for the film shoot. It had an adjacent smaller one on the other side of the wall where I was to shoot stills for a poster campaign. We spent hours setting up before Cherry arrived. He came in accompanied by his wife and, of course, that little boss dog. Don was already costumed in one of his neck-brace shirts and a jacket that screamed at the top of its lungs. He was taken in to meet the film crew, the client’s people and the agency writers, designers, account managers, etc. There must have been close to 60 people. When that was done he was brought over and introduced to my little crew of a half-dozen assistants, hair and makeup people and loaders. It’s been said that half of success is just showing up. Well, most of the other half is remembering people’s names. With just one introduction Cherry got them all — all 70. It’s a skill practiced by successful politicians and people in sales. Remember their names and people love you for it. Myself, I don’t really have it.
Cherry would work with the film crew and then come over to my side during their teardowns and setups. He’d address each of my little gang by name and they’d do anything for him. We’d get him into position and I’d cry, “Go.” He’d immediately launch into his Don Cherry schtick. I’d shoot until I was sure I had the right moment and then I tell him to stop and he’d become just an ordinary guy. All day it was like that: Okay Don, go! Okay Don, stop! His internal hard drive would spin; his internal hard drive would stop. The act was obnoxious, the opinions outrageous but he was a treat to work with — a true pro.
Final Fire Page 12
