Final Fire

by Michael Mitchell

  J.J. Barnicke died today. For most Torontonians he was just a name on a commercial real estate sign — one you saw everywhere for decades. However for me he came to represent something else. A couple of decades ago when he was at the peak of his powers I was assigned to do his portrait for a business publication. I lugged my gear up to his downtown office and began to set up my lights. He turned up about 10 minutes later and we set to work grinding out a standard corporate portrait. He was all business. When we had finished he told me to lock his office door. I did. Then he gruffly asked me to fetch a low stool from a corner. I did. Next an overcoat from a closet. What?

  Then this short round man ordered me to take his portrait again. He tossed the overcoat over his shoulder, put a foot on the stumpy stool and raised his double chins. Next he pulled off his tie and slipped his right hand between the buttons of his shirt. I finally got it. He was no longer a short, chubby, former E.P. Taylor beer salesman, he was the conqueror from Corsica — the Napoleon of office leasing. And I was his David.

  ***

  A great blue heron stands in six inches of water a yard off my shoreline. He’s as still as a lawn flamingo. When I step outside for a closer look he remains immobile. Same when I approach. As I sit on the shore beside him to no effect I realize that this spectacular bird is very ill. He waits quietly for nature to take its course.

  It’s one of those assignments that’s humiliating for all parties. I’m to do a “day in the life” of Ed Broadbent, leader of the federal NDP. It will take a week.

  Not all politicians enjoy these journalistic spreads. Some are very selective — St. Pierre, father of our current PM, was notorious for refusing to do sessions with Canadian photographers while being, at the same time, almost slavishly willing to perform for the British, French or American press. Being number three, Broadbent doesn’t have much choice. He’s got to embrace the exposure. And as a newly minted father I have little choice either: I gotta earn a living.

  So we both have to endure my recording his breakfast bowl of cereal for posterity, his meetings, his hair appointment, supper and bedtime stories for the kiddies, all the banalities of his regular Canadian guy routine.

  We spend a lot of time in cabs together; the days are long. Whenever I make a remark or ask a question Ed becomes the jukebox in your 1950s diner. The selector grinds across the file of 45s, selects the appropriate one and presses play. His every response is a packaged sound bite or speech. The guy is just not present. Fearing that this will show in the photographs I finally, after several of these prerecorded days, remind him that I’m only doing pictures, not sound or words. Since we’re stuck with each other for the week can we not converse like neighbours? He assents but it turns out that he can’t stop. After years in politics his default setting is auto response. So we stumble through the remainder of the week.

  When the piece is published word comes down from Ottawa. Ed didn’t like it. Having made his displeasure known the matter is dropped. However, some weeks later, after completing an assignment in Vancouver, I cab out to the airport for a red-eye home to Toronto. As soon as I enter the departure lounge my stomach knots. Ed Broadbent is on the same flight. When he looks up it’s not hard to know what he’s thinking as he glares at me — “I can’t place him but I know that S.O.B. and I don’t like him.” So I retreat to a far corner of the lounge.

  At boarding I’m relieved to discover that we’re on a huge 747 jumbo. There’ll be space. But there isn’t. My seat assignment is in the same section as Broadbent and his gang. I’m in the window row, he’s in the centre line of five seats. His staff sit in the row behind. Trouble begins immediately. Our democratic socialist leader is exhausted so he lies across the five seats, neglecting to fasten his seat belt. The flight attendants ask him to buckle up. No response. They plead. He refuses. The big plane squats like a huge toad at the end of the runway. We’re stuck. Finally the captain comes back, there are high level negotiations and Broadbent finally sits up and buckles up. The toad takes off.

  But the shit-disturber isn’t finished. A couple of rows ahead of him sit several prairie farmers. Their heads block the view of the bulkhead screen before them. These guys have scrawny chicken necks and nerdy haircuts half-obscured by those ventilated tractor caps given out by feed stores and manure spreader makers. Ed begins to make fun of them for the benefit of his companions in the row behind. Once again the attendants are summoned.

  ***

  When I was 15 I used to run these waters in an eight-foot planning hull that I’d built myself in our city backyard. The forward half of the hull was decked over with bright finished mahogany, creating a private space perfect for storing the booze I delivered in the evenings after work. I’d pick up the two-fours of Blue and Canadian along with mickeys of rye or gin at a tarpapered hovel hiding in the pines on the north side of the station channel at Pointe au Baril. That same family now runs a large and respectable marina that sells luxury runabouts to the establishment. Like the Bronfmans they’re not keen on talk about the origins of their grubstake.

  1994

  During the 1980s I had organized a public self-portrait project for the Art Gallery at Harbourfront. A fully equipped professional studio with flash power packs and umbrellas, seamless backdrop, a large format camera and print processor was established in the north end of the gallery building, a former trucking warehouse. The medium would be 8x10 Polaroid colour film. This allowed users to see their results immediately, a novelty then, a commonplace now.

  During the week established artists could book in for a day and, with the help of an assistant, execute a project of their choice at no cost. As such large format instant print materials were extremely expensive, the opportunity was quickly fully subscribed. The artists got to keep what they produced, their only obligation was to participate later in a group exhibition of the completed works.

  On weekends the public participated in a similar deal. Anyone interested could book the studio for 15 minutes or so and, in complete privacy, execute a self-portrait. Again the portraits were theirs to keep but each came with an obligation to allow it to be exhibited in the public gallery for a week prior to them taking it home. As the project ran for several weeks the self-portrait exhibition was constantly evolving. Every Monday morning I’d go through the weekend’s production and select pieces to hang that week. While many people used it as an opportunity to create a conventional family portrait, an astonishing number did quite unexpected things, some of them quite naughty. Another surprise was discovering just who had taken advantage of that opportunity over each weekend. More than a few famous faces showed up — entertainers, sports heroes, politicians. The project was a hit.

  At the end of its three-week run I packed up the studio along with the remaining materials and shipped everything to my Queen Street studio. As the equipment was on loan for a full month and there were still several boxes of unconsumed Polaroid I decided to reward myself for having pulled the whole thing off. I would take the remaining week and do my own project. I reestablished the studio.

  Although I had several competing ideas of how to use this opportunity, fate threw something else my way. That first evening back at the studio my old friend Macbeth dropped by on his way home to the Beaches. I asked him to sit for a portrait. He sat on a stool before the seamless backdrop while I set up the 8x10 view camera. It’s always a magical moment when you throw the dark cloth over your head and open up the lens. The world is suddenly made strange. It floats upside down and backwards on the ground glass of the big bellows camera. A combination of optical fall off and viewing angle seems to pool the light in the centre of the frame, the edges and corners descend into mysterious shadows.

  I’ve always found that moment hypnotic and entrancing but on this evening the image on the glass seemed lifeless. It was just a skinny guy sitting on a stool. Anxious to make an image that spoke to me I began to move the camera toward him. As I wheeled the heavy stand and camera forward
the image on the ground glass became more and more interesting. I didn’t stop closing in until the lens was only a handful of inches from his face which had now become a landscape on the big ground-glass. An eye, a nose, a bit of lip and a partial ear had been transformed into giant landforms. I exposed several of the precious sheets, we drank a beer and then Macbeth went home. I was left alone staring at a handful of photographs.

  They gave me lots to think about. Imagine a photograph by a classicist like Yousuf Karsh. His Hemingway or Churchill portraits don’t really tell you anything you didn’t already know about their famous subjects. Rather, Karsh’s talent lay in summarizing the public image of his sitters in a single photograph. This is accomplished by carefully selecting a setting, the clothing, the pose and the attitude of the subject. All these elements, augmented by strategic lighting and composition, become signifiers. They tell you who the sitter is. This often becomes a game of pretend. Churchill is a bulldog warrior; Hemingway, a rugged but sensitive artist. It’s a simple message and the message is rigged.

  Macbeth

  But if you come in so close that most of the signifiers are eliminated the viewer is left with a challenge. Do you know who you’re looking at? The face remains recognizable but the person becomes more an object of interpretation. Photography is put to the test. What can it actually show when the props are kicked out? Here was something to work on.

  As I quickly exhausted the supply of Polaroid and had to return the big camera, I switched to my own 4x5 camera and colour negative sheet film. In exchange for nightly beers Macbeth became my lab rat as I worked out how to execute these portraits. The closer one goes to the subject, the more one must extend the bellows in order to achieve focus. The more the bellows is extended, the more the light reaching the ground glass is reduced. It diminishes with the square of the distance. Whereas a few hundred watt seconds of strobe light were enough to expose a conventional portrait, in excess of 5,000 were needed for these close-ups. The use of flash was essential, not only to fix the sitter’s movement that got exaggerated at such distances, but also to avoid cooking the sitter’s skin with hot quartz light. Moreover, squeezing all of this gear on stands into a few square feet required ingenuity. I employed a number of booms.

  Another hazard of close-up photography is reduced depth of field — shallow focus to the layperson. I used a powerful magnifying loupe to focus. With the lens wide open the depth of field was less than a quarter of an inch. Everything else was an out-of-focus blur. If the subject moved even slightly all focus was lost. View cameras have movements. If one tilts the lens board slightly forward when making a landscape then everything from immediately in front of the camera to infinity will be sharp. Swinging the lens on its vertical axis can do the same on the other plane. The lens can be raised and lowered within the circle of light it throws to change what one sees. Analogous movements can be executed by moving the ground glass and the film plane at the rear of the camera. These must be done carefully and accurately to achieve the desired results. And some movements distort shapes. While one has leisure when making a landscape or still life, one must move exceedingly quickly when making a close-up portrait. Macbeth allowed me to practise. Each session was, of necessity, several hours long.

  With practice I made portraits of my sons, Ben and Jake, and a few friends and colleagues. When the editor of Canadian Art magazine, Sarah Milroy, saw the results she commissioned a portrait series for the publication’s 10th anniversary in 1994. The list of subjects included artists, critics, curators and collectors with a couple of museum directors thrown in for variety. I set to work.

  The art world is small so we all knew, or knew of, each other. This didn’t necessarily make things easier. A couple of the critics had savaged my work in the press. Now we were obliged to engage in this extremely intimate exercise. They each handled it differently. The Globe’s critic insisted that I carefully light his face in order to highlight the large scar/depression disfiguring one side of his forehead. I did, with pleasure. The Star’s critic was somewhat ingratiating, telling me that every time he passed my big house with its separate studio building on the backlot he thought of me as someone with a perfect life.

  Explain each of these for me.

  The project was even more uncomfortable for the women. In a world where you’re supposed to have perfect skin and never age how are you going to feel about being under a microscope and having the image enlarged to two and a half feet especially when one of the sitters was close to 80? It took guts and maybe a perverse kind of vanity to participate. But they did — on their own terms. Ydessa Hendeles, once an art dealer and by then a major global collector of contemporary art with her own museum/foundation, insisted on negotiating for a couple of hours the night she arrived at the studio. This was difficult and frustrating. It got later and later. I thought the whole session was going to go pear-shaped but we finally reached an agreement on usage of the photograph and set to work. The image turned out to be one of the highlights of the whole series. It was stunning.

  The late John Bentley Mays, the Globe’s former art critic, and his scar

  However, she later decided I had broken our agreement (I hadn’t) and cold-shouldered me for several years despite importuning by mutual friends. Eventually she came around and released the picture for public viewing and sale. Subsequently a large print went into the collection of Canada’s National Portrait Gallery, a vital institution later destroyed by Stephen Harper. My print is now in some basement in Quebec with many other fine portraits and its building across from Parliament Hill has been allowed to rot. Both are crimes. At one point Ydessa had an assistant order a print of the image from me. I thought that this might mean that she was not displeased with it. However, when she received the print her response was relief because the jewelry she had worn for the session had been stolen. My highly detailed portrait that I’d so sweated to get was merely ID of stolen goods.

  Another subject was a woman who’d been a rival dealer in Toronto. Not only were they art competitors but also said to be competitive over which one of them had inherited the most money. Word on the street was $80 million for one, $250 million for the other. I know that more is never enough but when you get to those sorts of numbers, personally I lose focus after the first 10 million. I have other problems, like the grocery bill. This session with S. was also strange and strained. She was in the middle of a divorce and her ex-to-be kept calling her cell. After a number of these interruptions she seemed to have dealt with him. But no. He began pounding on the studio door. He’d been phoning all this time from his big dark car in my driveway. She looks gently vulnerable in the final photograph. Both women looked quite beautiful.

  My next sitter was Matthew Teitelbaum, the director of the Art Gallery of Ontario. As he sat down in the cluster of light and camera stands he reached into the cast aluminum shelf attached to the camera stand and picked up a short black pencil. As he rotated it between his fingers the word noir rolled up in gold. “Ah,” he said, “I see Ydessa has been here.”

  Quite a few of my favourite artists sat for these portraits — Michael Snow, Robert Fones, Geoffrey James — but oddly there has never been an exhibition of the series. A few were shown in Av Issacs’s gallery during a fundraiser. One was enormously enlarged for an outdoor installation alongside the Rideau by the once and future National Portrait Gallery, and a handful have appeared at the Art Gallery of Ontario in various exhibitions but never the larger group. As my friends in Jamaica say, “Maybe soon come.”

  Robert Fones

  2009

  Environmental photographer Edward Burtynsky has been working on a book about oil. I’m to write one of the book’s essays. As part of the research we take off in Ed’s Volvo for Detroit. It’s winter and the season’s gods throw everything they have at us as we sluice down Highway 401 toward Windsor. It snows, it sleets, it rains, it freezes. Eighteen-wheelers hurl slush balls as the car’s w
ipers try to defend us. For once the Americans at the border find us of no interest and we are soon dodging craters on downtown Detroit streets. Bombed-out blocks crumble in the shadow of boarded-up towers. It’s hard to believe that the once shining industrial capital of the planet has been so diminished. A day into the trip Ed has to replace the tires on his car — they’ve been shredded by all the broken glass and metal shards littering the roads. It’s like one of the sad cities of Syria.

  A couple of days later, accompanied by an armed guard, we pull up to the former Packard car plant on Detroit’s East Side. Enormous — seven storeys high and covering 40 acres — it’s darkly empty and spooky. However the dead hulk is not silent. Retching screeches and crashes leak through broken windows and smashed doors. These are the sounds of scavengers picking the bones of the century-old complex. After a few hours of exploration I get into conversation with a middle-aged Black couple as they emerge from the dark interior. Early every day they come to pull, pry and cut wires, rails and plumbing from the building’s gut. By five their tired pickup is full and off to a scrap dealer. The haul will pay for the family’s supper and breakfast. Then it’s repeat. They’ve been reduced to dalits on a Mumbai dump.

  Here is a rich country that doesn’t care to share. The big auto companies have simply walked away from huge complexes when the facilities no longer meet their needs. Ford had abandoned the 1908 birthplace of the Model T on Piquette Avenue and later the Highland Park plant, home of the T’s first true mass-market, moving assembly line. These hulks, and others, were left to crumble in the wan light of the industrial north. So too were the people who once worked in them. The factories, the neighbourhoods and the workers were all disposable.

  West Germany