That Rick McGinnis and his photos

A photographer looks back at over three decades of work and wonders: "What was that all about?"

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MARIANNE WIGGINS Toronto 1990

American novelist Marianne Wiggins had only recently been thrust into a global spotlight when Iran pronounced its infamous fatwa on her then-husband, Salman Rushdie, the year before I made these portraits at the Toronto authors festival. It was hard to be unaware of all of this but, looking back, I don’t seem to remember any looming security presence during my session with her, in the waterfront hotel that hosted the festival. Looking back I’m sure it was unwelcome attention for someone whose own career had been progressing as steadily as Rushdie’s until he provoked the fundamentalist regime and put her just off centre of a target that, as we would learn many years later, Rushdie was never able to shrug off.

Marianne Wiggins was born in Pennsylvania in 1947 and published her first novel, Babe, in 1975. She was able to make a living from her writing with the publication of Separate Checks nine years later and married Salman Rushdie in 1988, a year before she brought out John Dollar, her breakthrough book, which won her the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize the same year she received the Whiting Award for emerging writers. That was the same year the fatwa was pronounced on Rushdie, and although she had told him she wanted to leave him a few days beforehand, Wiggins went into hiding with Rushdie. In 1995 she published Eveless Eden, a story about a photographer and a war correspondent, from an idea suggested to her by Rushdie.

Marianne Wiggins’ daughter is the photographer Lara Porzak, and she has made a photographer a character in her books twice – in Eveless Eden and The Shadow Catcher, which contains two timelines, one featuring the great portraitist Edward Curtis and the other a writer named Marianne Wiggins. I couldn’t know any of this when I photographed her in 1990, in the same spot in the lobby of the Harbour Castle hotel where, two years earlier, I’d taken portraits of Jerzy Kosinski, Jay McInerney, Andrei Bitov and Kathy Acker. She was very animated and willing to take whatever minimal direction I gave her, and I remember being pleased because my favorite shots were full-length portraits instead of the tight close-ups I defaulted to whenever I needed a safe option during a shoot.

Wiggins would divorce Salman Rushdie in 1993 and after living all over Europe would begin teaching at the University of Southern California in 2005. (For what it’s worth, I have always thought Wiggins was a more enjoyable writer than her ex-husband, not to diminish what Rushdie has gone through since he provoked the lasting ire of not just a tyrannical theocracy but fundamentalists all over the globe.) In 2016 Wiggins suffered a stroke and had to teach herself how to read and write, and was able to finish her latest novel Properties of Thirst with the help of her daughter.

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ELMORE LEONARD & GEORGE V. HIGGINS Toronto 1990

Back in the ‘80s I was a fan of modern crime writers like James Ellroy, Charles Willeford, James Lee Burke and Elmore Leonard, so when I heard Leonard was coming to the authors festival in 1990 I approached their publicity department for a portrait shoot. I was given a day and a time and arrived to be told that Leonard had been hanging out with fellow novelist George V. Higgins all day and that I could get a shoot with both of them. Higgins, who had been a newspaperman, lawyer and district attorney, wrote the sorts of books that gave him a reputation as a “writer’s writer”, starting with The Friends of Eddie Coyle in 1970. (Made into a movie starring Robert Mitchum in 1973.) He was particularly praised for his talent with realistic dialogue, and he would publish at least a book a year over the course of his career, including Victories, the book he was promoting when I photographed him at what I assume was the Harbour Castle Hilton.

Elmore Leonard and George V. Higgins had been fans of each other but had never met until the day I photographed both of them separately and together. Despite being bearded men of the same pre-war generation (Leonard in 1925, Higgins in 1939) they presented a visual contrast – one tall, with a wry, sardonic face, the other shorter and more bookish. They had been getting on like a house on fire since meeting that day, and I tried to capture a bit of this fresh camaraderie in my photos, using flat natural window light and the faintly textured wallpaper of the hotel room. I learned from the publicist later that the two men had adjourned to the hotel bar later that evening and stayed till last call.

Elmore Leonard was a very successful writer for years before I photographed him, starting with westerns in the ‘50s before moving on to crime novels in the late ‘60s, many of which were adapted into movies (The Tall T, 3:10 to Yuma, Hombre, Mr. Majestyk) but it was the publication of Get Shorty in 1990 – the year I photographed him – that kicked his career and its synergy with Hollywood into overdrive. He had a wary relationship with my camera – nowhere near as confrontational as George V. Higgins, his new friend who I photographed during the same session – so I doubled down on my old tactic of getting up close with a shorter lens to provoke some kind of reaction, even if only a subtle one. I was very pleased with these photos though I’m not sure they ever saw publication until I posted them on my old blog a few years ago. George V. Higgins died of a heart attack at home in Massachusetts in 1999; Elmore Leonard died at his home in Michigan in 2013.

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EDMUND WHITE Toronto 1990

It took me a long time to get past my background as an English literature undergraduate, and at the turn of the ‘90s I was still apparently talking my way into portrait shoots with writers appearing at the city’s Author’s Festival. Which is how I ended up doing a shoot with Edmund White in some hotel room I’m assuming was the Park Plaza or the Harbour Castle though I have no way of knowing at this point. White was between publications, though it had been two years since he published The Beautiful Room is Empty, and just around when he moved back to the United States after living in France for most of the previous decade.

Born Edmund Valentine White III in Cincinnati in 1940 and raised in Chicago, he began his literary career after working at Newsweek and Time-Life in the ‘60s. White was far from the first but was definitely one of the highest profile openly gay writers of his generation; he was called “the patron saint of queer literature” and wrote biographies of writers like Genet, Proust and Rimbaud in addition to novels like A Boy’s Own Story and The Farewell Symphony, many of them at least partially autobiographical. I was interested in White because he was one of the more unapologetically literary figures working at the time, a writer who wrote essays, edited anthologies, published memoirs and even authored a play. It was a world and a profession that I had admired since I was a boy, and I might have had a glimmer of an idea that it was endangered, on its way to becoming extinct.

My portrait session with Edmund White was one of my standard hotel room quickies, done without lighting or props, or any attempt to disguise the location. I shot a roll each of 35mm and 120 film on my Nikon and Rolleiflex and did my best not to produce something that looked too much like a “writer headshot” (though I’m not sure I was successful outside of a few frames). I remember White being polite and accommodating – I was always surprised at how amenable writers were during portrait shoots; not sure what I was expecting – and doing his best to deliver whatever it was I was trying to get. I’m not sure if these portraits were ever published until I put a few of them on my old blog, but one of them did get bought by Vulture, New York magazine’s entertainment website, to accompany White’s obituary when he died last year at home in New York City.

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CASSANDRA WILSON Toronto 1990

The turn of the ‘90s was a great time to be into jazz, as there were still plenty of legendary musicians alive and performing as well as a whole new group of musicians emerging in the last years before the creeping spectre of “museum music” began to settle on jazz. One of these new talents was the singer Cassandra Wilson, who had emerged from a M-Base, a group of Brooklyn-based musicians, with a unique vision that applied improvisation to folk, country and pop songs, arriving independently at her version of fusion from similarly inspired musicians like Bill Frisell, Wayne Horwitz and Robin Holcomb. And if you were paying attention you could be fans of all these people and even see them play live. This was how I ended up shooting Cassandra Wilson’s portrait backstage at an upscale club on Toronto’s “Mink Mile” in late 1990.

Cassandra Wilson was born in Mississippi to a musician father and a teacher mother and performed with R&B, funk and pop cover groups while studying college. After living briefly in New Orleans she ended up in New York City and found a place in the M-Base collective with musicians like Steve Coleman, Greg Osby, Geri Allen and Jean-Paul Bourelly. Her had a sudden hit with her third solo album, Blue Skies – a collection of covers of standards and ‘30s pop songs that I remember playing almost non-stop when it came out. She was promoting her next album, Jumpworld, when she came to Toronto in the fall of 1990 and I made a point of getting an assignment to photograph her as part of my ongoing ambition to follow in the footsteps of photographers like William Claxton and Dennis Stock and document jazz musicians whenever I could.

I knew there was probably a clean white wall somewhere backstage at the club where I photographed jazz singer Cassandra Wilson so I showed up with a basic set-up: two Rolleiflexes, a single flash bounced into an umbrella and a bunch of colour and black and white film. I had been refining this set-up for several years and knew it could deliver simple but effective results if I placed my flash in precisely the right spot. I knew that my subject was photogenic enough – I just had to get her to look as interesting as her music was to me.

I was heavily into cross-processed colour film at this point, and particularly higher speed colour slide film that I’d process through C-41 chemistry to produce dramatically saturated negatives with an occasionally flattering colour shift. Wilson obliged with a range of expressions over four rolls and one shot in particular (at top), her hand elegantly touching her face while she looked off camera, that I made a portfolio piece for years. Cassandra Wilson has continued to record, and though her last record as a leader, Coming Forth by Day, came out ten years ago, the National Endowment for the Arts named her as an NEA Jazz Master in 2022.

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D.M. THOMAS Toronto 1990

British author and poet D.M. Thomas was a very big literary deal when I was an undergraduate studying literature in the early to mid-‘80s and became a literary phenomenon with the publication of his novel The White Hotel in 1981. I photographed him at a time when writers were still celebrities, and the English student in me was very impressed at the assignment, near the end of probably the most productive and memorable years of my career as a photographer. I was – at least in my own mind – arriving in the big leagues in terms of subjects, documenting the sorts of cultural figures I had only dreamed of putting in front of a camera a few years earlier.

Donald Michael Thomas was born working class in Cornwall in 1935 and came of age at one of the few times when real class mobility was possible in Britain. He learned Russian doing National Service and went to New College, Oxford, where he published his first short story. He made his reputation as a poet until the publication of The White Hotel, which was shortlisted for a Booker Prize and only failed to win because rules prevented it from tying for the prize with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. An erotic, dreamlike book about Sigmund Freud, set in Europe between the wars, it was the kind of serious, ambitious book that once made its way from book supplements to bestseller lists to college curricula.

D.M. Thomas was in Toronto publicizing Lying Together, his latest novel, in which he was a character, and when I wrote about this shoot in my old blog I said that I expected him to be “serious and intimidating” but found him in a good mood, “making jokes about doing an ‘author face’ while we shot and bantering with the publicists on the sidelines.” He looked very like what I’d expect a writer to look like, down to the tweed and the Byronic white hair (and the cigarette! inside! it was a different time), and I rose to the occasion with a series of very authorial portraits in the soft window light of the (unremembered) hotel room. There were several attempts to make a movie out of The White Hotel by everyone from Barbara Streisand to David Lynch, Terence Malick, David Cronenberg and Pedro Almodovar, but none of them ended up getting filmed. D.M. Thomas died at home in Cornwall in 2023.

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WHITNEY HOUSTON Toronto 1990

I neither wanted nor enjoyed this assignment to photography Whitney Houston when she was in Toronto for a press event. But it turned out to be educational, and helped me focus on just what kind of work I wanted to be doing, now that I had finally ascended to the ranks of working professional photographers. I would, ultimately, end up doing a lot of work like this, but years in the future, and when I no longer had any idea just what I thought I should be doing as a photographer. But what has to be understood about this shoot is that, at the time, Whitney Houston was one of the most famous people in the world, and undeniably the most famous person I had ever photographed up until that point.

Whitney Elizabeth Houston was born into one of the noble families of American music, the daughter of singer Cissy Houston – a soul and gospel legend and founding member of the backup singing group The Sweet Inspirations – and niece of Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick. Her godmother was Darlene Love and Aretha Franklin, a friend of her mother’s, was an “honourary aunt.” I first heard her singing “Memories” on One Down, an album by Bill Laswell’s experimental funk/soul/jazz group Material, but the next time I heard Houston she was literally everywhere after her debut album was released, spawning seven hit singles. Her second album, Whitney, had much the same effect, and I photographed her during the press build-up to the release of I’m Your Baby Tonight. This was just after she began a relationship with singer Bobby Brown, and two years before she starred alongside Kevin Costner in The Bodyguard, which launched “I Will Always Love You” onto the airwaves back when that was still a big deal.

Whitney Houston was a major celebrity when she walked into the conference room at the Harbour Castle on Toronto’s waterfront for a photo op that filled the room with photographers, including a small but very vocal contingent of paparazzi. I had heard about paps – reading about them in magazines and seeing them in movies – but I’d never been close to one. They made themselves conspicuous as soon as we all began taking our place behind a velvet rope that was set up six feet of so from a chair on a dais where Whitney would take her place. I was pleased with my spot; I’d shown up early and found a nice position at the front, where I was sure I could get some very nice close-ups with my Nikon. But the paps started muttering and tugging at the rope, and before anyone could say anything they were pulling the rope to the back of the room where they were apparently more comfortable using their big telephoto lenses – the sort of distance where they were used to shooting on red carpets and on stake-outs on the street.

It wasn’t at all where I wanted to be shooting, but the few of us who complained were drowned out by the paps and a few of the wire service photographers. When Whitney arrived they began bellowing for her attention, calling her name, while she seemed to regard the whole exchange as a kind of game, laughing and shouting back at them. It was a madhouse and I immediately knew I wasn’t going to be getting anything worthwhile, and I couldn’t imagine that anyone else could. But it took me a while to realize that getting a good shot wasn’t nearly as important to the paps as getting their famous subject to acknowledge them as they roared at her. It was all over in less time than I could shoot a roll, and Whitney seemed to gently mock them as she got up and waved on her way back out the door. I felt dazed as I packed my camera bag and looked around to see if anyone was as confused or angry as I was. Whitney Houston was found dead in her suite at the Beverly Hilton in 2012.

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ELIJAH HARPER Toronto 1990

I photographed Elijah Harper in October of 1990, just four months after the member of the Manitoba legislature played a major part in defeating the passage of the Meech Lake Accords. Thirty-five years later, I doubt that many people either know or remember why this was so consequential that it put Harper on the cover of the magazine that assigned me to photograph him. But when Elijah Harper, a member of the Oji-Cree tribe from northern Manitoba and MLA for the riding of Rupertsland, sat holding an eagle feather and blocked debate of a resolution to pass the Accord, he played a major part in the ongoing constitutional crisis that has conditioned Canadian politics and will – in my humble opinion – doubtless play a part in the collapse of this country. But I wasn’t thinking about any of this when I set up to shoot Harper on that day.

Elijah Harper was born on the Red Sucker Lake reservation in northern Manitoba and worked as a community development worker and an analyst for the provincial Department of Northern Affairs before he ran for the NDP in the riding of Rupertsland in 1981 and won the seat. When Prime Minister Brian Mulroney put the Meech Lake Accord in front of the country’s provincial legislatures to debate, he was trying to get Quebec to endorse the 1982 amendments to the constitution, but Harper was opposed to it because First Nations communities were not consulted. His protest – sitting silently in the legislature holding an eagle feather and blocking unanimous voting – scuttled the adoption of Meech Lake and prompted Quebec to form the Bloc Quebecois, a federal party devoted to Quebec separation, which led to the 1992 referendum on sovereignty which was only narrowly defeated. You could argue that the growing instability of Canada today has its roots in this moment, though I’m not sure that was Elijah Harper’s goal at the time.

I have no idea where I did my shoot with Elijah Harper, but it was a room with just enough light to let me shoot with the lens on my Nikon F3 fully open. It was a cover shoot, which meant slide film, which meant Fuji RSP II – the fastest (ISO 1600) reliable slide film on the market at the time. Combined with whatever quality the available light offered (I’m sure I had to work fast) it produced a painterly quality that surprised me when I got the film back from the lab – a look I’d been striving for and found here quite by accident. Looking at this shoot today, the slim depth of field helped evoke the portraits of Edward S. Curtis, famous for his work with Native American tribes in the last part of the 19th century. I suppose this would be clever if this was intended, but I can assure you that this was wholly accidental. I have always considered this shoot a success, though for some reason I didn’t post it when I revisited my work on my old blog.

Elijah Harper resigned from the Manitoba legislature two years later and won the riding of Churchill in the federal election the next year. He lost in the following election and went on to become a commissioner in the U.S. Indian Claims Commission. Plagued by health problems for a decade, he died of heart failure in Ottawa in 2013.

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TOM STOPPARD Toronto 1990

Sir Tom Stoppard was at the film festival with a film version of his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which he had also directed. This was back when theatre was a part of mainstream culture, and Stoppard’s play was a standby of both classrooms and theatre companies that wanted scripts that could reliably draw crowds. Stoppard’s play – a comedy that imagines the lives of two minor characters in Hamlet when they aren’t onstage in Shakespeare’s tragedy – had a broad appeal and a built-in student audience. His movie starred Gary Oldman and Tim Roth in the title roles, with Richard Dreyfus as the leader of the traveling players. I had been a theatre student in college so I’d read Stoppard’s work and considered the playwright a real celebrity, so I was thrilled when I got the assignment to photograph him.

Tom Stoppard was born Tomáš Sträussler in Czechoslovakia but his family left the country escaping Nazi occupation and he spent three years at a private school in India before his mother settled the family in England with a new father, Major Ken Stoppard. He left school to become a journalist, writing plays for TV, radio and the stage while working as a theatre critic. His first hit as a playwright was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and his reputation saw him double as a screenwriter on films such as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Empire of the Sun, Enigma, The Russia House and Shakespeare in Love. His plays are famous for their wordplay and complex structures, with plays within plays that challenge the audience to decide how much of what they’re seeing is real.

I wanted to create something big and theatrical when I got the assignment to shoot Tom Stoppard but as usual I was given the usual less than five minutes and, even worse, a room without much natural light in a downtown hotel. Thankfully I didn’t have to shoot colour film for the cover, so I was able to lock my Rolleiflex off on a tripod with fast film (Ilford HP5). I shot one roll with a close-up filter on the camera to fill the frame with Stoppard’s face; not the big theatrical setup I had imagined so I had to hope that a sense of intimacy with the subject would provide interest. (This is a choice I’d end up having to make more often than not for many years of shooting in hotel rooms.)

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ROBERT ALTMAN Toronto 1990

The Toronto International Film Festival is on right now, so it’s a perfect time to post one of my favourite film fest portrait shoots, from back in the days when it provided me with years of major subjects from the movie world. Robert Altman was born in Kansas City, MI in 1925 to a wealthy family and served in the US Army Air Force in World War 2, flying over fifty bombing missions in Asia. He was working in California when he sold his first script to RKO and moved to New York City to become a writer, but he had little success and moved back to Kansas City where he directed industrial films and documentaries.

He moved back to Hollywood where he directed television shows until he got a job directing his breakthrough movie M*A*S*H in 1969. That film’s massive success led to a series of films that established Altman as one of the most distinct voices in American movies – pictures like McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, Nashville and 3 Women.

Portrait shoots with people like Robert Altman in 1990 were my first sign that I had upgraded my pool of subjects and had access to the kind of people I’d only read about for years – albeit in brief, 5-minute windows in various hotel rooms. Altman had gone through a decade in the wilderness when I photographed him: his films had always met with mixed success with critics and audiences, but the failure of Popeye in 1980 effectively drove him out of Hollywood – to theatre, back to television and to a teaching gig at the University of Michigan.

He managed to get funding for a variety of projects and arrived at the film festival in 1990 with the Van Gogh biopic Vincent & Theo, which was made for British television as a miniseries but was edited into a feature for a theatrical run in North America. It was a turning point for Altman, and two years later he made The Player, a caustic portrait of Hollywood that ironically revived his career there.

I went into my assignment to photograph Robert Altman knowing that he had a reputation for being prickly, even hostile, and I tried to break the ice by telling him that he’d made one of my favourite movies, but that I didn’t think he’d be able to guess which one.

He rose to the bait: “Was it Quintet? HealtH? Tanner ‘88?”

I said it was Secret Honor, the film he made in 1984 with his students at the University of Michigan, a one-man movie starring Philip Baker Hall as Richard Nixon.

“That is a strange choice,” he said.

I asked him if he knew what Hall was doing, and he sourly said “Ahh, I hear he’s doing television.”

Having engaged him I set about doing a set of spare portraits in the soft, conventional light coming from a hotel room window, using my Rolleiflex. I shot three rolls – two black and white and one with a high-speed colour transparency film from Agfa that had an unusual cool colour cast. (Which was probably why I rarely used it again.) I fitted a close-up filter to the Rollei so I could get up close with Altman, his face filling the frame while he continued to regard me with mild suspicion and what I can only interpret as bemusement.

Altman had a pretty great run after The Player, making films like Short Cuts, Pret-a-Porter, Kansas City and Gosford Park – the biggest hit of his late period; a costume drama set in a British country estate, and hardly the kind of thing that would have been expected from the man who made Nashville. He made his last film, Prairie Home Companion, in 2006 and died that year from leukemia in Los Angeles.

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EDWARD PRESSMAN Toronto 1990

Edward Rambach Pressman was born in New York City in 1943, the son of a toy manufacturer who went to Stanford and the London School of Economics where he met filmmaker Paul Williams. Pressman produced Williams’ first two films for United Artists before making Badlands with Terence Malick and two films with the young Brian De Palma – Sisters and Phantom of the Paradise, a personal favorite of mine. He had a big hit with Oliver Stone’s Wall Street and a critical one with Stone’s follow-up, Talk Radio. He was a big player when I was assigned to photograph him at the 1990 film festival, after the release of Kathryn Bigelow’s Blue Steel earlier that year, where was presenting Barbet Schroeder’s Reversal of Fortune.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that producer Edward Pressman had set himself up on the mezzanine lobby at the old Sutton Place Hotel on Bay Street underneath the big tapestry wall hanging that I’d come to rely on when I had a shoot at the hotel. I’m guessing that I brought my own light since the shoot was done on Kodak Plus-X – a relatively slow speed “portrait” film that I rarely used. A prudent photographer would have tried not to overuse this backdrop but I was never prudent and in any case I loved working with tapestries, in the hope that they’d help create an image that evoked 18th century paintings. Pressman had an interesting look, with his baseball cap, seersucker suit and deck shoes, and I thought that created an interesting contrast, especially in the full-length shot of him sitting on an antique sofa with his scripts and notebooks sitting on the velvet upholstery.

Edward Pressman had a rare reputation as a producer, working with great talents (Oliver Stone, Paul Schrader, Abel Ferrara, John Frankenheimer, Kathryn Bigelow, Werner Herzog) and putting together pictures that ranged from classics (Badlands) to cult pictures (The Bad Lieutenant) to zeitgeist movies (Wall Street) to notorious bombs that turned out to be wildly influential (American Psycho). What he did was rare in the old studio system, where the closest you got to a creative producer was David Selznick, but independent producers who had a palpable sense of taste and vision – almost auteurs in their own right – started making their mark on Hollywood in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Pressman rarely repeated himself except with the Crow movie series that began with the cursed 1994 film starring Brandon Lee and continued right up a reboot in 2024, released a year after Pressman died in Los Angeles at 79.

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DARIO ARGENTO Toronto 1990

The Toronto International Film Festival was still called the Festival of Festivals in 1990, when it became my happy hunting time – a week and a half where I had a chance to add more celebrity portraiture to my portfolio than at any other time in the year. I’d been covering the festival for several years already, but the ‘90s were when it really kicked into high gear for me: the first of two brief periods of abundant Festival shooting. Italian director Dario Argento was there to promote Two Blue Eyes (Due occhi diabolici), a collaboration with fellow horror legend George Romero and I had seen enough of his work to have some ideas about how I wanted to photograph him before I entered the hotel room.

Director Dario Argento began his career as a writer and co-wrote, among other things, the screenplay for Sergio Leone’s epic western Once Upon a Time in the West, one of my favourite films of all time. He began directing in 1970 with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, the first of his genre-defining giallo horror films, to be followed by pictures like Deep Red, Suspiria, Tenebre and Opera. Gory and violent but also surreal and visually audacious, they made Argento’s reputation as a director whose imagination took audiences to places that were both ravishing and horrible. It was a reputation that presented a challenge if I wanted to create a suitable portrait in the brief time I’d be given.

I’m pretty sure my portrait session with director Dario Argento was in the old Four Seasons in Yorkville, with its big windows, concrete balconies and clean white walls. For this shoot, however, I asked my subject if he’d be willing to step into the shower of the room, where I could use the marble panels on the wall as a background. He was enthusiastic and noted that I had set up my single light – a Metz flash mounted with a small softbox – below his face: classic horror movie lighting.

I wanted shots that evoked the unease and dread of Argento’s best films so I coached him to address the camera appropriately and he understood exactly what I wanted. I took a roll of cross-processed colour and two rolls of black and white film, one of which was underdeveloped thanks to some exhausted darkroom chemistry (I’d switch to one-shot developer after that), and which I’ve only been able to rescue now thanks to Photoshop. I’ve always liked these portraits – a rare time when the results matched what I’d imagined going in – and it made the runners-up in the American Photography annual when I published it in my 2019 photozine Faces.

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BRUCE DERN Toronto 1990

My portrait shoot with Bruce Dern at the 1990 film festival is the one that proves – for me at least – that a portrait session will work as long as both parties acknowledge that they are making a record of an encounter, and that there’s no need to talk about the shoot as a “power struggle” or a kind of therapy. The year had been a very good one – probably the busiest of my whole career – and I was primed to get the most out of a brief, constrained session after months of steady work with my cameras. Dern was in town promoting After Dark, My Sweet, a neo-noir of the sort they were making a lot of in those days, now barely remembered. He was in a bit of a career lull – his last really notable film was That Championship Season in 1982, and it would be a few more years until a generation of directors realized that an appearance by Dern, even just a cameo, could add considerable intensity to a film. By the 2010s he was doing roles in up to six films a year; his almost wordless turn as Joe Kennedy in Chappaquiddick is pure malevolence.

Bruce Dern was born in Chicago to what you’d have to call an establishment family: his family included a governor and Secretary of War, the founders of a department store dynasty and the poet Archibald MacLeish. He studied at the Actor’ Studio and made his earliest film appearances playing sailors, murdered men, poor farmers and villains; he made a particularly good villain in The Cowboys, as one of the few men who killed John Wayne onscreen. He got his first Oscar nomination as a Vietnam veteran in Coming Home – an example of the kind of intensity that Dern brings to his work. He used to joke that he worked so much because he hated seeing James Caan get roles he wanted, but with Caan gone and Jack Nicholson retired, Dern is probably the last actor of that generation still regularly appearing in films.

There’s very little that needs to be said about my portrait session with Bruce Dern. It was taken during press days at the film festival, probably at the old Four Seasons on Avenue Road. I was taken into the hotel room by the publicist and introduced to Dern; I took a minute to find the cleanest wall and the best light and had him sit down. I gave very little direction – I told him I’d be shooting a roll each of colour and black and white film, and that I needed him to give me as wide a range of expressions as possible. After that we didn’t exchange a word as I shot 70 frames, getting very close up with my 50mm lens as I was fond of doing – getting into someone’s personal space to elicit a reaction.

Dern for his part simply turned on his “Bruce Dern-ness” – intensely addressing my camera for every frame, changing his expression to give me menace, hostility, defiance, mistrust, wariness; he understood what a closeup meant and even better that my single frames had to carry as much weight as a whole performance in a movie. After I finished my last frame he shook my hand and said “That was very good. You’ll go far.” I took that for encouragement and lived off it for years.

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WHIT STILLMAN NYC 1990

Whit Stillman was born square in the middle of the social class he would end up essaying in his films, the son of a Democratic politician who attended private schools and Harvard before a brief stint at the American Spectator, followed a few years working in film production and sales in Spain. His first film, Metropolitan, was loosely based on his own experience after his parents’ divorce – a comedy set during debutante season in Manhattan during Christmas. This was the film Stillman was promoting when I was sent to New York City to photograph him for the cover of NOW magazine.

I don’t know if I saw Metropolitan before I did my shoot with Whit Stillman, but when I did I became a big fan of his work – I’ve written essays on Metropolitan and its “sequel”, Barcelona. He would finish the trilogy with The Last Days of Disco, when I would photograph Stillman again, and then after a long interruption he’d make Damsels in Distress (2011) and Love & Friendship (2016). The last film was a circling back of sorts – characters in Metropolitan are constantly discussing the merits of Jane Austen, and Love & Friendship was an adaptation of Lady Susan, an obscure early novella by Austen. Given the current popularity of Austen, it’s hard not to consider Stillman prescient.

For some reason I decided to only use my Rolleiflex while shooting director Whit Stillman, probably as I was at the beginning of a decade-long love affair with the camera. My memory – and it may be a false one – is that we did the shoot in the lobby and stairwell of the Puck Building on Houston Street. It may, however, have been a building nearby, and I’ve remembered it as the Puck Building because I was a little obsessed with that building. Perhaps someone (maybe Stillman himself) could corroborate or correct me. (EDIT: Whit Stillman tells me it was the Cable Building at Broadway and Houston.) If anything works in these photos it’s the composition – of the stairwell cutting across some shots, the heavy freight elevator door in another, and the receding perspective of the windows in the colour pics. Very formal, more than a little mannered – at the time I probably thought that this reflected what I knew about Stillman’s movie.

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HAL HARTLEY Toronto 1990

If there was a Gen X hipster trivia game I’m pretty sure Hal Hartley’s films would feature in a few questions. I certainly remember his films being a part of my cultural diet in the ‘90s, but when I was assigned to photograph Hartley by Irene at NOW magazine in the summer of 1990, I found myself approaching him for this shoot as part of an extended circle of friends, mostly because of our mutual friendship with Chris Buck, who had been a set photographer on Trust, the movie Hal was promoting in Toronto. I’m not sure just how much this changed the dynamics of the shoot, but I think I was able to ask for a little bit more while we were shooting.

Hal Hartley’s early films – The Unbelievable Truth, Trust, Surviving Desire, Simple Men, Amateur and Flirt – were a hit among my small circle of male friends, all of us either single or intermittently coupled. Perhaps it was the sexual dynamic they shared: confused young men shadowed by the possibility of violence and attractive young women armed with some enigmatic knowledge the men can’t share, or struggle over the course of the film to access. The protagonists (played by actors like Martin Donovan, Robert John Burke and Bill Sage) seemed to be alter egos of the director, while the women (Adrienne Shelly, Karen Sillas, Elina Lowensohn, Parker Posey) were more varied, though uniformly as confounding as women often are to men that age. Or at least that’s my take on it. Though Trust was essentially a reimagining of the plot of The Unbelievable Truth, subsequent Hartley pictures would explore this attraction and struggle between men and women until his films began moving in a different direction with Henry Fool in 1997. What I’m trying to say is that I didn’t arrive cold for my portrait shoot with Hartley.

After a search on Google Earth I was able to determine that my shoot with Hal Hartley was at the old Sutton Place hotel at Bay and Wellesley, in one of the rooms with a balcony on the eastern side of the building. I did most of the shoot on the balcony – three rolls of 120 film shot on my Rolleiflex, one of which saw us move to one of the tapestries on the wall in the lobby and mezzanine spaces of the hotel – backdrops I’d use quite a few times over the years. I did a few variations of Hal posing with his arms behind his head, and I remember being pleasantly surprised that he trusted me enough to follow my direction; I was still very tentative with my subjects during shoots. He liked them enough to buy reprints of several shots to use for promo purposes a few months later, which made me remember this shoot as a successful one.

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SPIKE LEE, NYC July 1990

I was flown to NYC to photograph Spike Lee for the cover of NOW, at a press junket for his fourth film, Mo’ Better Blues. It was the summer of 1990 and I was still buzzing about having a job that flew me to other cities for work. (To be honest I never got over that thrill.) There was a lot of anticipation about Lee’s new film; Do The Right Thing had been a sensation the year before, and the new film cast Denzel Washington as a trumpet player, and set in the world of jazz musicians – something the director knew about as the son of a well-known New York jazz bassist. It was all very exciting, and I was desperate to do a good job.

Spike Lee was born in 1957 to Bill Lee, a jazz bassist, and Jacqueline, a teacher, the oldest of six children. He made his first film, She’s Gotta Have It, in 1985, for just $175,000, but it was the release of Do the Right Thing in 1989 that made Lee’s reputation as both a creative and political filmmaker. With its soundtrack by Public Enemy and a cast that included Giancarlo Esposito, John Turturro, Rosie Perez, Martin Lawrence, Samuel L. Jackson, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, it made Lee a serious player outside the independent film movement. Since then his career has had highlights (Malcolm X, BlacKkKlansman) and lows (Jungle Fever, She Hate Me) and plenty of controversy but Lee remains a significant director, with a new film (Highest 2 Lowest, a remake of Kurosawa’s High and Low) due out later this year.

I don’t remember much about the hotel where I did my shoot with Spike Lee; it was likely in midtown NY but don’t make me swear on that. I do remember that it was an older building with the usual small windows, so I used high speed film in my Nikon F3. I opted to get close in for the shots, and the colour rolls I shot for the cover were constrained by the cover format of the magazine at the time, which required space at the top and sides for type and graphics, though I think I was learning to work with this pretty well by now.

I found Lee to be a wary but generally cooperative subject, though I knew as soon as I started that I wasn’t going to get him to loosen up and give me anything that played against his public image. I also managed to get a quick shoot with his sister Joie, one of the co-stars of the film; she was striking and something of an “It Girl” at the time and I was always happy with the handful of shots I took of her in an adjacent bedroom of the hotel suite with the Rolleiflex I brought along just in case.

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ROY NATHANSON & CURTIS FOWLKES, THE JAZZ PASSENGERS Toronto 1990

Back when my ambition was to become William Claxton or Dennis Stock and photograph jazz musicians I was also painfully aware that I was at least three decades late for the music and musicians at their peak – for the most part. But there were a lot of younger musicians who were doing great work and I did my best to catch them when they were passing through town. Back in punk rock days I was a fan of John Lurie’s band The Lounge Lizards, who described their music as “fake jazz”, but a few years later they were something more like real jazz, with new members in the group like trombonist Curtis Fowlkes and sax player Roy Nathanson. Fowlkes and Nathanson left to form their own band, the Jazz Passengers, and in the summer of 1990 they came to town, playing a short-lived jazz club on the city’s “mink mile” called the Bermuda Onion.

Curtis Fowlkes was born in Brooklyn and met fellow Brooklyn native Roy Nathanson when they were playing in the pit orchestra of the Big Apple Circus in the early ‘80s. They joined the second proper lineup of the Lounge Lizards alongside Dougie Bowne, Erik Sanko and Marc Ribot and left to form the Jazz Passengers in 1987. They would be part of what’s loosely called the East Village jazz scene – a diverse group of musicians that included John Zorn, Wayne Horvitz, Bobby Previte and many others, centred around the Knitting Factory venue. Their music incorporated soundtrack and ethnic music, R&B, rock and other influences, and when they passed through Toronto in 1990 they were promoting their third record, Implement Yourself. A few years later they’d make the record many consider their classic, In Love, which featured vocalists like Jimmy Scott, Jeff Buckley, Mavis Staples and Debbie Harry, and Harry would become a de facto member of the band.

I talked my way into a shoot with Roy Nathanson and Curtis Fowlkes the way I got a lot of my jazz portraits around the same time – by being friendly with the promoters, showing up before soundcheck and presenting myself as a fan who also happened to be a professional photographer. The club where the Jazz Passengers was playing was in The Colonnade, a modernist landmark and high end shopping mall on the city’s luxury retail strip, and I found a spot for the shoot on the marble-lined landing of a set of stairs leading up to the club, where I set up my single light bounced into an umbrella and shot with my Rolleiflex.

Fowlkes and Nathanson were a visually dramatic pair – one tall, the other short, both of them looking like they might have stepped out of a ‘40s comedy. My only job was to underline this contrast and get them to relax just enough to give me a range of expressions over two rolls of film. I’ve always been pleased with these shots, but I don’t know that they ever got published anywhere until I posted them on my old blog. Roy Nathanson still leads a version of the Jazz Passengers but Curtis Fowlkes sadly died of heart failure in 2023.

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DEWEY REDMAN, Toronto 1990

I met jazz saxophonist Dewey Redman through my friends Jane Bunnett and Larry Cramer, who had worked with Dewey on In Dew Time, Jane’s first record. He had become a semi-regular member of Jane’s band by the turn of the ‘90s and was spending a bit of time in Toronto, which I took as an opportunity to get a portrait session with Dewey in my studio – which had the advantage of being just around the corner from Jane and Larry’s house in Parkdale. I was grateful for any opportunity to do a real, sit-down portrait with jazz musicians at the time as I was (as I’ve said many times before) desperate to do the kind of work I’d admired by photographer like William Claxton and Dennis Stock, documenting the jazz scene of their time.

Dewey Redman was born in Fort Worth, Texas and played in his high school band with Ornette Coleman, Charles Moffett and Prince Lasha. After going to college and doing his service in the U.S. Army, he moved to San Francisco and finally ended up joining Coleman’s band in 1968, alongside Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell, with whom he would later form the band Old and New Dreams. Redman played in Keith Jarrett’s American Quartet and was a member of Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, as well as playing and recording with Paul Motian, Michael Benita, Pat Metheny, Randy Weston and many others, recording his own solo records for labels like Impulse!, Black Saint, ECM, Enja and others. While associated with the avant-garde in jazz, Dewey was also fond of evoking the growling sound of the blues and R&B tenor players he listened to and played with when he was a young man.

The studio space where I photographed Dewey Redman was my bedroom in a shared loft apartment in Parkdale, with the furniture pushed to the walls to make space for my backdrop and lights. I didn’t do anything adventurous with the shoot – just a dark gray backdrop and a single soft light to one side – a “classic” setup copied from the photographers of the ‘50s and ‘60s I admired. Dewey was one of the funniest people I’d ever met, and I’d see him crack up everyone on the bandstand during rehearsals many times. I hope I’ve managed to convey something of that side of his nature in these photos.

I mostly shot black and white with a single roll of colour slide, and not-so-secretly hoped that one of these shots might end up on an album cover, but they remained unpublished until I revisited them on my old blog nearly ten years ago. I also shot a few rolls of Dewey playing in concert with Jane, using my Rolleiflex locked off on a tripod. I took a few of these prints with me when I visited Dewey in his apartment in Flatbush several months later, where he pointed to the Polaroid I’d taken of him and his Australian girlfriend tucked into the corner of the massive TV set in his bedroom. Dewey Redman died of liver failure in NYC in Sept. 2006.