The new training centre was a handsome contemporary building with a big bleak atrium. The bank has been sold on the idea of hanging banners that will add colour, character and some history to that space. Since the bank has a small museum in its former headquarters building on Place d’Armes in Old Montreal, I’m dispatched to find suitable materials to photograph in large format for transfer to fabric. As it will be an intense week of work — lots of material to cover and film that will need constant reloading, sheet by individual sheet — I take my longtime helper Joanne with me. A side benefit for her is that her mother and sister live there. She can see them in the evenings.
The bank has a large collection of 19th century mechanical banks. However, these toys are quickly eliminated. Time and attitudes have changed. Cast iron “darkies” flipping coins into slotted watermelons are off message for a bank catering to a multicultural society. The toy banks are projected for removal from the bank’s museum — into some kind of dark storage.
However they do have a collection of bank-issued notes of different denominations. Few Canadians realize that this country’s various retail banks issued their own notes well into the 20th century. The familiar Bank of Canada bills debuted quite late in our history. I’ve seen several collections of these private banknotes. They’re beautiful. Instead of dead politicians or obsolete royalty they feature engravings showing how we once earned our livings — ships lock through canals, farmers harvest wheat, we mine and make things. As these notes are stored in a room off the dome that crowns the building, Jo and I set up a studio high in the building at the base of the dome. I’ve brought studio lighting, a copy stand and a 4x5 Linhof with a flat-field close-up lens. We set to work copying these wonderful bills. It’ll take most of the week.
Although we’re working in a somewhat neglected part of the old building we are not alone. Nor is it quiet. The historic building is undergoing repairs to its upper storeys. We can hear workmen shouting, pounding and sawing. Occasionally they clomp by on the other side of the dome. We work long hours in a pool of light under the 3200° Kelvin quartz lights laboriously copying bills. Otherwise we keep the room dark to ensure colour purity on film.
Several days into the project I have an animal sense that we’re being watched. I glance over to where a clutch of yellow hardhats peek in our door. Just as I do this I hear their foreman stage-whisper, “See I told you guys, this is the actual place where they print the money.”
After a few days on the bank money job Joanne suggests we have lunch with her mother and sister. Jo has worked with me for years and her family is curious about this guy with whom she spends so much working time. An Old Montreal fish restaurant is selected — it’s nearby. It’s a place where you eat seated at a long counter. The four of us gather in a line, the mum between her daughters, me at one end. The two sisters spend the entire lunch complaining about men. I wisely keep my mouth shut except to eat or drink. Now this is a prominent Eastern Townships family, the daughters look rebellious but the mum looks Westmount. The daughters drone on; their mother is silent — I can’t see her expression. Finally, at the lunch’s end Mum pats both her daughters on the head. “There, there, dearies, don’t get so fussed. Men are only good for two things: sex and moving furniture.”
***
My Hong Kong born friend E.L., physician, musician and photographer, has once again invited herself up to my island. Remote and isolated, my small rock seems to encourage women to shed their clothes. While I write in the screen porch, she follows the light around the island, making little nests with pillows and a quilt in which she curls up. She loves the sensual heat of the sun.
Far across the inlet I hear my American neighbour start the engine of his boat. He reverses off his dock, turns and accelerates toward mine. I shout to E.L. to get dressed. She retreats to her room wrapped in the quilt and emerges a minute or two later in a skimpy summer dress. Discretion ensured, we go down to my dock to greet the visitor. I introduce them, exchange news, then she asks him if she can see his island. They speed off together and I return to my work on the porch. Minutes later I hear a cry, look up and spot two tiny figures on his dock. I fetch my binoculars. She’s already naked. America is a can-do culture.
A business consultant hired by Frank Stronach’s Magna International has somehow convinced head office in Aurora that the global auto parts maker needs a documentary project — a book of photographs — celebrating Magna’s production culture and success. And someone else has convinced him that my longtime photography collaborator Dougie and I are the guys for the job. Now a man like Frank who can go from being yet another immigrant tool and die maker, grinding out custom parts in a little garage downtown, to near global dominance in the business has got to be interesting. I looked forward to being a fly on the wall.
We began with a meeting at corporate headquarters where we met the senior people and are poured the corporate Kool-Aid — Frank was a patron, everyone was looked after and paid well over minimum, all production was via cutting edge technologies, etc., etc. We were shown copies of the Magna Charter that laid out these values. Then we set off on a multi-day tour of local production facilities.
At the time Magna had some 60 plants scattered around greater Toronto — we visited perhaps a dozen. All were anonymous small plants with under a hundred employees — strategically too small to unionize. None carried Magna signage on their exteriors; the only hint that they were Magna plants was the framed charter somewhere in the front office. While all local management and senior technologists were white and European, the production areas were awash with brown faces. You soon discovered that wages were not as advertised and production was not so high tech. While there were some sophisticated machines controlled by the then new technology of touch screens, most were the old familiar grimy tools — stamping machines, welders, drill presses and grinders. If you expected efficient rolling production lines you would be disappointed. Parts were wheeled by hand from station to station in old wooden bins on iron wheels. The 19th century met the 20th only to slip back to the early industrial revolution. Once again rhetoric and reality had failed to hold hands.
***
I’m on a 20-mile run up the northeast coast of the Bay when a heavy fog begins to build. Cold waters left from a harsh winter plus a warm front drifting in from the west make for a condensing environment. A Coast Guard buoy-tending ship steams a couple of miles ahead of me on a north reach. It’s in sharp relief and then it vanishes; it looms as a shadow — light flashes off a bright surface — then it’s gone again. I motor slowly north in a dazzling void.
A couple of hours later my main GPS becomes erratic and after some minutes finally shuts down. For once “belt and suspenders” Mitchell has no batteries for his backup portable positioning system. I know I’m getting close to where the mouth of my inlet releases river water from the interior into the Bay but from my perspective, several miles offshore in this white void, it’s difficult to pinpoint where it lies. Many hard-rock reefs and shoals lurk ahead.
I boot up my depth sounder and begin to watch the read-outs — depth, bottom contour and water temperature. The bottom profile in this part of coast is so irregular that it gives few location cues but the water temperature does — it’s beginning to rise. It peaks and then falls off. I tack back to the warmest water and swing east toward the coast, a plume of warm water from my river begins to guide me in. Every minute or so the temperature rises by a degree. I motor cautiously at a few hundred rpm, the diesel settling into an easy rhythm. The temp numbers continue to rise. Finally a white pine’s top emerges to starboard before vanishing into a void but I have recognized its wind-sculpted shape. I know that tree. I’m going to make it in.
One brilliant sunny day in the early 1980s I set up a heavy tripod on the sidewalk crossing the Bathurst Street bridge. Using my 4x5-inch view camera and a panoramic film back I made several exposures of the view looking east through the big-shouldered girders of the bridge
. The view encompassed the towers of the financial core, the yet-to-be transformed railway lands and the Gardiner and Lakeshore expressways. The large format film comprehended enormous detail. I liked this photograph so much that I made it a habit to return every couple of years for a remake. Each new take was positioned a little differently in order to accommodate the ever-changing skyline and produce a structurally balanced image. These photographs tell the city’s story.
If you look carefully at a small section of one of the early ones you can see graffitied across a pedestrian bridge in the far distance the message “Homes not Domes.” In a subsequent exposure in the series the lumpen form of what had just been named the SkyDome obscures that bridge. A year or two earlier when I’d been sent to make a portrait of Don Smith, president of EllisDon, the general contractor that was to build that stadium, I remember him bragging that it was going to be so huge that it would be visible across Lake Ontario from Brock’s Monument at Queenston Heights. I later checked that out. Not only was he right but you didn’t even need to ascend the monument to see that aesthetic monstrosity. From atop the Niagara escarpment it looked like a huge toad squatting on the far shore.
Occasionally I’d exhibit very large prints from the series in public galleries. Eventually they caught the eye of one of the Reichmanns who were busy not only building Canary Wharf but also further transforming Toronto’s downtown. They liked my most recent photograph from the bridge but since I’d made it they had completed another office tower or two. Would I make a more current version of the photograph so they could hang in their offices?
The commission fee that they offered, which included one-time reproduction rights only as well as a large colour print, wasn’t exactly generous. However, any amount that contributed to the furthering of the project was useful to me so I reluctantly agreed. I eventually executed the picture on a brilliant but ferociously bitter day in the middle of February. I got so cold waiting for the right light and a gap in the bridge traffic that I actually thought I was going to die.
I delivered a print that they did subsequently publish on the cover of one of their glossy print pieces. It was later framed and hung on an office wall. Everybody was happy. But about a year later one of the Reichmanns called me at the studio. He told me that they had finished looking at the photograph and wished to return it to me, minus the frame, so they could get their money back. This is how they’d become rich and I didn’t.
***
Erect a cabin in this landscape and you build not only for yourself but also shelter for your neighbours in the bush. Birds soon nest under the eaves, bats sleep under cedar shakes, red squirrels hide in the attic, mice and wasps retreat inside come fall and a hare trembles under the floor. Everywhere there are insects — spiders, carpenter ants, wood roaches and flies. The crickets move in as do late summer wasps. Soon there’s gnawing at night and sawdust in the morning. You have become a landlord.
Photographers don’t often get titles but on this job I have one — principal photographer, BCE Place. For the next couple of years I will provide a variety of photographic services to this project — hanging off the top of the TD Centre, flying to Milan for a one-day shoot, photographing the Chrysler building from the roof of the Empire State Building. All this as BCE Place stealthily climbed into the Toronto skyline. I started before there is even a hole in the ground.
Much of it is about marketing. There will be a great deal of space to lease and finding suitable corporate tenants is vital. Square footage charges will, of necessity, be high. Over the next few years I will see considerable waste and dubious ethics.
Like all big architectural projects it begins with an expensive model. In the past when doing architectural shoots I’d begun to wonder if some of the big developers could even read drawings. A couple of times I’d been present when the model for some future project was delivered and you’d seeing a light bulb suddenly illuminate in the client’s eyes. Some may call these big developers “visionaries” but often they weren’t very visual. When my ex was working on lobby designs for the Bank of Montreal tower at Bay and King she’d show up for a meeting with the Reichmanns with a series of presentation boards presenting colour schedules and material samples. They’d be glanced at quickly and then she’d be told to take a good sized area of the lobby under construction, have the finishes installed — marble walls, brass, flooring, etc. — and call the client in when it was complete. A Reichmann would show up, dismiss the program and ask for a new design. A whole new set of boards would be made up and met with the same instructions. The marble would be torn out and new stuff installed, presented and rejected. These sample spaces were larger than the average Woodbridge monster house. And they were rebuilt several times. Undoubtedly the computer programs that now allow architects to take clients on virtual reality tours of proposed projects have saved a lot of money, time and grief. However, BCE Place, now Brookfield Place, was before all that.
A huge mockup of the block-square project was constructed inside a suite of offices located high up in the adjacent TD Bank towers. I did a number of all-night shoots there, a spooky experience as the HVAC systems would shut down after midnight. In the absence of the white noise they generated all one could hear at two in the morning was the grinding and groaning of the tall structure as it swayed in the wind. It could be quite alarming. One night I did my own groaning when the nine-foot-wide blue paper sky I’d hung above a large model of the whole complex collapsed on it, destroying part of the intricate model of Santiago Calatrava’s steel and glass atrium.
At one point it got decided that a large hardcover picture book would be a lease deal clincher for the project. It would feature historical photographs of the site, my model photographs and some new ones that I was to take of the historic facades along Yonge Street and Wellington that were to be preserved. The ground floors of most of these 19th century buildings had been extensively modified and butchered over the decades but the upper floors were relatively intact. I was to record those, square-on, for the book. How?
I soon discovered that getting access to them from facing buildings across the street was impossible. Windows were sealed, landlords hostile and many wires were in the way. I tried to get city permission to run a cherry-picker bucket lift up and down those streets but it proved to be a massive challenge. Some of them were Toronto streets, others under Metro and one was a provincial highway — too many jurisdictions, too many bureaucrats and rules. It’s always easier to say no and go to lunch.
Finally I booked a truck driver and his 53-foot tractor-trailer. We’d pretend to be making a site delivery. I climbed up with an assistant onto the trailer roof and set up a tripod and large format camera. We drove majestically up Yonge Street while cops innocently directed traffic down below. None of them ever looked up and uncovered our scam. As I frantically shot I congratulated myself on having dreamed up such a brilliant solution — until we turned onto Wellington Street. I’d forgotten about the high voltage trolley lines that hung just above trailer height. Down went my tripod while I dove for the deck.
We crawled over to Bay Street, then down to Front and back up Yonge to face the same cops who once again failed to look up. This time I lay on the trailer roof like a sniper and got the pictures. They’re handsome but don’t look at all death-defying.
That wasn’t the first time I’d cheated the Guy with the Scythe on that job. One afternoon when I was working with a client in my Queen Street East studio the phone rang. The BCE gang wanted me to immediately rush down to the TD Centre with a camera, go to the roof, lean over and make photograph of their site, just a block-sized hole across the street at that point. The picture was for a leasing meeting the next morning. I said I couldn’t: I was working with a client. They reminded me that my title, Principal Photographer, came with an obligation. My studio client was now looking anxious so I demurred once again.
The voice on the phone said, “It will only take you 45 minutes.”
> “I can’t.”
“We’ll give you $500.”
“No!”
“$1,000.”
“I’m really sorry.”
“$1,500.”
“I can’t leave in the middle of a shoot.”
“$2,000.”
“Regrets.”
“$3,000.”
“Apologies.”
Twenty-five years ago I discovered that I had my price. For four grand in 45 minutes, I could be bought. I gave my client a cold beer, grabbed a camera and a cab, met security at reception, walked out on the roof, crawled out over the edge with two big guys sitting on my legs. I hung over the granite plaza spinning 700 feet below and squeezed the shutter. On the way back to the studio I had the cab stop at the lab. They’d courier the results to BCE at eight the next morning. I was back in the studio in 50 minutes. I knew that as a photographer with two boys to support I’d peaked financially. But the experience was awful. Selling out wasn’t worth it.
1978
I’m working on a magazine story about secret rooms. In each one I’m to do a portrait of someone whose life depends on that room. So I photographed actor Barbara Hamilton in the green room at the Royal Alex down on King Street and the province’s chief justice in the judges’ anteroom at Osgoode Hall up on Queen. I travelled to Smiths Falls to photograph Hershey’s head chocolate maker in the conching room where huge granite rollers slopped back and forth in giant tanks of chocolate. The smell there was so strong I couldn’t eat Hershey’s Kisses for years. That space is now a legal marijuana grow-op.
Final Fire Page 14