Final Fire

by Michael Mitchell

  They were all very nice people but many seemed hopelessly parochial to me. It was as if they graduated from high school, walked across the street to attend R.I.T. and then crossed the street again to work at Kodak for the rest of their lives. The ones I knew had never been to New York City and those who came up to assess my project in Toronto seemed surprised that there was such a large city in the Canadian wilderness. They were too provincial to be full visionaries.

  My days working with that revolutionary and disruptive prototype ended with a knock on my studio door. Several RCMP officers and a manager from Kodak Canada showed me their cards and a letter giving them permission to borrow the camera for a week or so. The Mounties had a project they wanted to test it on. I surrendered the gear. A couple of weeks later it was returned to me. What had they done with it?

  It was a long shot but I booted up the drives. Yes, there were files. Men with handkerchiefs covering their faces crouched in the bushes. There were rifles and baseball bats. There were barricades and fires. My photographers’ pictorial fantasies evaporated. Of course, the technology was perfect for surveillance. I’d shown the borrowers how to take pictures but had neglected to teach them how to delete. I erased every image of Oka’s Mohawk defenders.

  Nine

  Facing the Light

  “The evidence is in, and you are the verdict.”

  Anne Lamott

  “Art is a sort of experimental station in which one tries out living.”

  John Cage

  1978

  It’s night and raining, I’m waiting for Go Boy Roger Caron outside his publisher’s office beside the big expressway. His train from Toronto’s Union Station back home to the pen in Collins Bay leaves in less than an hour and I must both do his portrait and get him on it. Finally the doors at McGraw-Hill Ryerson open and Caron hunches out chained to his guard, Ricky. The backlit pair shamble toward me with a foot of steel links between them. I slide open the side door of my little VW van and we’re off onto the 401 headed for the Don Valley Parkway in a downpour. Ricky is huge.

  Caron has just turned 40. His achievements so far include 75 bank robberies, some hostage-takings and assorted assaults. His hobbies include concealing knives, clubs and loaded guns. So far all these enterprises have earned him 24 years in jail but he’s busted out over a dozen times. Go Boy.

  The Don Valley Parkway has long been an expressway in name only. We splash slowly southward toward the towers of downtown with the clock hands spinning toward train time. I’ve got to get the picture. Finally we climb the ramp to Richmond Street and clatter onto Front. With ten minutes to go I pull into the cab stand at Union Station. I grab my Nikons and flash and run through the rain with Ricky and Roger. I shove Ricky behind a column and stick Caron in front. When I step back and turn he hunches his shoulders and pulls up his collar against the hard rain. I make two exposures before the flash shorts out. Both photographs are haunting, strange, threatening, perfect.

  Roger Caron at Union Station in the rain as originally published in Weekend Magazine, January 25, 1978

  2012

  It’s late April and raining. I turn a page in the Globe and Mail and discover that Caron is lying in a Cornwall funeral home — dead at 73. His life since we briefly collaborated in a downpour has included writing four books, a rampage in the Brockville Psychiatric Hospital and robbing a discount store. In 2004 he was caught in an Ottawa shopping centre carrying a wig, a change of clothes, surgical gloves, duct tape, a knife and a loaded .32-calibre in a gym bag.

  A handful of years after I met him he discovered he had Parkinson’s disease. He’d become a prisoner of his own body.

  1977

  After driving up Bayview Avenue I wheel into the Sunnybrook Hospital parking lot and locate the new addition designed and executed by my architectural client. They want portfolio photographs of the building. When I step inside this veterans’ wing I suddenly confront scores of people, both men and women, who have fought for this country, suffered an injury and spent the balance of their lives in hospital. There are veterans of our peace-keeping efforts of the ’60s and ’70s but also of the Korean War, Second World War, the First World War, even the Boer War. This is their life — white rooms, beige corridors, shiny floors, hospital routine and pain — for weeks, months, years and decade after decade. I’m stunned.

  I execute my architectural assignment, process and print the film and deliver the pictures, but for days after I can’t get the residents of the building out of my mind. I want to talk to them and make their portraits. I want Canadians to see what I have and comprehend these lives. I negotiate with Sunnybrook and present the idea to the editors of Weekend magazine. Both buy in. I spend days on these encounters, making notes and photographing these men and women with my Hasselblads, framed by white walls and institutional furniture. The black-and-white pictures are stark because the lives are stark.

  When Weekend decides to run them for early November my pictures are sent to the Montreal printing plant. When the pressmen on the night shift see them they decide to shut down the colour gravure presses and clean all the rollers in order to reproduce the originals on newsprint as faithfully as possible. The result appears in 40 newspapers, Globe and Mail included, across Canada. Many letters thump in. As this was before we’d seen Richard Avedon’s portraits against white seamless, many readers found the pictures harsh and upsetting. This was, of course, part of my point, but the many abusive letters to Weekend remain disturbing.

  1978

  I slammed down the phone and stared out my studio window at the gathering winter gloom. I’d been packing my gear for a morning flight to the Bahamas to photograph the bestseller novelist Arthur Hailey. The magazine’s art director had just called me with good news — I wouldn’t have to go to Lyford Cay: Hailey was coming to Toronto later in the week for a publisher’s meeting. I glumly unpacked my sunscreen, snorkelling gear and bathing suit.

  I was now scheduled to meet Hailey at his hotel up on Bloor next to the Hudson Bay Centre. I reread the magazine profile of him that I was to illustrate. It was a bit frightening to a free-wheeling photographer. Hailey gets up every morning precisely at six. By 6:05 he’s in his bathroom shaving. He’s dressed and having coffee by 6:25. He’s at his desk by seven, pounding out the next bestseller — one year of research, six months reviewing his notes following by 18 months of writing. Airport, Hotel, The Money-changers, In High Places, The Final Diagnosis, and so on, for a total of 47 books and 170 million sales in 40 languages. This kind of industrial production requires serious time management and discipline. Here’s a guy who schedules every minute of his day. I better not be late.

  Sunnybrook Veterans Hospital (Weekend Magazine, November 12th, 1977): Aubrey Winch, 61, 419 Squadron of the RCAF in WWI. Ditched in the North Sea.

  Sunnybrook Veterans Hospital (Weekend Magazine, November 12th, 1977): (Left) Leslie Miller, 88, 4th Canadian Mountain Regiment in Flanders, WWI. (Right) William Caswell, 90, army machine gunner in France, WWI.

  A few mornings later I lug my gear into the lobby of his hotel and ask the desk clerk to call up to Hailey’s room. The call is brief. I’m told I’ll have to wait. Mr. Hailey will call down when he’s ready. An hour later I’m still sitting in the lobby — the clerk has heard nothing. I request a second call — Mr. Hailey says he needs a little more time. I wish I knew how you cool your heels.

  Three-quarters of an hour later I request another call. I can go up to his suite in 15 minutes. I give him 20 then get on the elevator and knock on his door. It’s answered by an unshaven, middle-aged, little man still in his underpants.

  1979

  I have been tricked. Somehow I have promised to do a glamour portrait of a woman I do not know. A stretch limo stops in front of my studio and a black dress and large black hat emerge as do a couple of sinister-looking men. We mount the stairs to my studio. When my sitter removes her hat and steps onto the brightly
lit set I know I’m in trouble. She’s no longer young and has spent too much time beside the pool in summer and on small southern islands in winter. When the men introduce themselves I recognize familiar Mafia names. They’ve caught my reaction to my subject’s face and stare at me hard. “You better make her look good! Capisce? We’ll be back in an hour.” The big car slithers off into the afternoon traffic.

  1999

  Another little assignment has come in from Canada Post. They’re launching a new stamp series celebrating hockey. I take a cab down to the SkyDome to meet my client in the lobby. It’s the standard media event setup, a podium, a mic-encrusted lectern behind a low barrier and a rabble of reporters, videographers and photojournalists. As I jockey for position I realize how much I resent the hierarchical foundation of these events. I’m not a news guy. I began to set up beside someone I’d taught camerawork to many years earlier. Acknowledging our situation, he ruefully refers to himself as a “picture peon.” He too feels diminished. At that moment my contact from the post office taps my shoulder. “Ottawa doesn’t want you in this scrum. Take that elevator to the top and photograph the people in the room up there.”

  Relieved, I grab my camera bag and retreat to the elevator. It stops at a large gray room with only three occupants. Each wears a tie, a blue blazer and gray flannels. They are sitting together under flickering fluorescents on a row of plastic chairs with their trousers rolled above their knees. All three guys are comparing scars on their shins. Bobby Hull looks up at me and elbows the other Bobby sitting beside him. “See this son-of-a-bitch Orr? I gave him my autograph at a show in Parry Sound. He was just a kid. Next time I saw him he slammed me into the boards in Boston. Big thanks.” All three laugh hard, the two Bobbys and the little guy beside them, Rocket Richard. Maurice is dead a few months later.

  1980

  The first time I met billionaire Ken Thomson was at his office across from Toronto’s new City Hall on Queen Street. I’d been trying to clean up my east end studio after a particularly messy shoot when I got a breathless call from the art director of Toronto Life, an ambitious Brit who later went on to art direct big American magazines like Rolling Stone and Esquire. They’d commissioned a cover story on Thomson but had no photograph to illustrate it. And the subject was flatly refusing to be photographed. As the press deadline approached they had, after many telephone entreaties, finally gotten Mr. Thomson to agree to a brief audience with a photographer who they felt he would like. If he didn’t there would be no session and the matter would be dropped. I was the photographer they had in mind. The time set for this critical meeting was in half an hour.

  “Keep it simple,” I told myself. I rushed out of my studio carrying only a Nikon F, a single prime lens and a roll of Kodachrome. I jumped on a westbound Queen streetcar and began scanning the story which had just been faxed to me. Twenty minutes later I was in the building’s lobby telling security I had an appointment with Ken. After a few phone calls I was told to take the elevator to the top where I would find his office.

  When the doors opened I discovered that his office was the top floor. A beige carpet prairie stretched out before my feet. Some acres off to the west a small dark rectangle broke the horizon. A tiny man stood behind it.

  We all know how to greet someone for the first time. The door opens, you smile and extend your hand — simple, basic, even natural. But it doesn’t work so well when the distance from the door to the desk is several hundred featureless feet. As I hiked across the broadloom the desk grew to the size of a small building. After several minutes Ken was towering over me. I’m barely five ten.

  In no time we were talking about art. I come from a family of painters. An ancestor taught a member of the Group of Seven how to paint and that member in turn later taught my mother and aunt at the Ontario College of Art during the 1930s. My grandfather had briefly employed a couple of Group members. I grew up surrounded by people who made art. Ken didn’t but he collected it. We hit it off. He had little time so I quickly made several photographs — they were not brilliant but they were decent and did the job. While packing up my gear I asked him why he’d been so reluctant to sit for a portrait. He had two reasons. One was that he felt he had a funny chin — it looked very standard to me. The other I’ll tell you about a little later on.

  The next time I ran into him he was having an argument with his wife, Marilyn, in the cosmetics department of The Bay’s flagship store at Yonge and Bloor. He wanted to go home and she wanted to do more shopping. Not one of the dim dollies in the makeup department seemed to have the faintest idea that the couple of seniors bickering before their counters owned the place. Ken and I had a brief exchange as he stomped out of the store.

  Fast-forward almost two decades. The Art Gallery of Ontario, newly renovated and expanded by Frank Gehry, was having a pre-public opening party for patrons and various dignitaries. As a sitting member of one of the board’s acquisition and curatorial committees I had been invited. As I picked my way through the amazing Thomson collection of ivories on the ground floor I ran into Marilyn who was there on her own — Ken had recently died. As we examined his tiny treasures together I began to tell her how I’d first met him years before. When I told her that he hadn’t wanted to be photographed she asked me if he’d explained why. I said he’d told me that he liked to cross Bay Street to the big Simpsons department store during his lunch hour and not be recognized when he bought socks on sale. “But you own that store!” I’d spluttered out.

  When she stopped belly laughing I began to rave about the collection of antique ship builders’ models that he’d presented to the AGO. Artists can be surprisingly conservative and territorial about their beloved museums they love to hate. In 1995 when the Musée des beaux-arts in Montreal mounted a stunning exhibition of classic cars it seemed that every regional painter and sculptor in the country screamed solecism! As far as I was concerned anyone who could design something as beautiful as a 1929 Auburn 8-120 Boattail, a 1932 Mercedes-Benz SSK Trossi, a ’34 Chrysler Airflow CU or a ’35 Voisin C25 Aérodyne was a serious sculptor. Nevertheless, many little artists in Toronto decried the ships.

  I told her how glad I was that Ken and the gallery had ignored them and facilitated the gift. When I told her how delighted I was that they were here she said that she was happy too. For years she’d nagged her husband to get his toy boats out of their basement.

  My assignment this week is doing editorial portraits of IBM executives. All have large offices and imposing desks. It’s the very early days of desktop computer production and each of these men has the latest model squatting like a bust on the credenza behind his desk. To a man they want me to include their enormous monitors as a prop and signifier in their portrait but not a single one of them knows how to boot their big clunkers up. After bumbling around for a few minutes each calls a secretary in to animate their show-machines and call up an impressive spreadsheet or graph. The women comply with efficient resignation.

  Today my former student at OCA is my boss. We’ve been thrown together to work gratis on the annual report of a large Canadian health charity. In his role as art director he has conceived an elaborate, theatrical approach to the portraits that I’m to execute for the annual book. Imagery relating to the condition the charity supports will be projected onto the bodies and backgrounds of the individuals featured in the report. As it’s still an analogue age the images will be thrown onto the set and sitter by a powerful projector. I will then photograph the subject and superimposition. It will take a lot of gear and patience to pull this one off but since I don’t want to rain on a former student’s concept I’m determined to pull it off. After some experimentation I assemble a system that will realize his vision.

  We set up on the auditorium stage at the charity’s national headquarters up on Toronto’s Bayview Avenue. A half-dozen head-office women are charged with guiding the subjects to our photo shoot. Most sitters are patient beneficiaries but a handful are executives invo
lved in managing the charity. All eventually deal with the darkened set and the discomfort generated by the glaring projections and make the photographs. It proves to be a long, difficult day.

  By late afternoon the stage has gotten crowded. The staff wish to make sure that the final sitting, featuring the organization’s new chief executive, goes well. Soon the boss, a recently retired president of a large Canadian oil and gas resources company, marches into the auditorium. I ask him to take up position on a stool, the lights are dimmed and the projector lit. Just as I prepare to make the first exposure my very important sitter announces that he thinks the whole setup is stupid and he doesn’t want to sit for the portrait. As his session is the only thing standing between me and the completion of the assignment I try to gently persuade him to change his mind. When he retorts that the photo session is a waste of his time I remind him that we’re all donating our time and resources to this project. If he gives me 10 more minutes then our part of the project will be finished and we can all go home.

  “I’ve given away far more of my valuable time than you ever have!” he thunders back. At that moment I realized that I was dealing with a two-year-old. “Go! Go! Get out!” I shouted back, kicking the senior toddler off the set. He stomped out of the auditorium, the slamming door echoing in the big room. As soon as they were sure he was gone his support staff burst into applause.

  2015