My History

My first picture, at age 8, was a landscape - our farm in New Glasgow, seen from a pasture, taken with my Kodak Baby Brownie Special. It is an impression, a dreamlike creation. I don't remember seeing a landscape photograph before that time.

I grew up in Saint John, N.B., I took art lessons at the New Brunswick Museum with Janet Melrose. I dabbled in photography for a few years.

The next stimulus to photograph came when my Aunt Eleanor's sister Ethel came to live with us. She was a wonderful lady, had been a missionary to China for all her adult life. Travelling to China in 1938, she had bought a Voightlander twin lens reflex camera in Germany for $150.00. That was a lot of money then. That was long before television, computers and digital photography. She allowed me to use her camera, and I started to take some serious pictures. The one I remember most was a panorama of Saint John from a height near our house, and showing the hospital and the streets all along City Row. There was a man on our street who had a darkroom, and made B&W prints. There was hardly any colour work being done. I saw his closet darkroom, but never saw the process.

From the time of my early photographs, I understood that the photograph could contain all the richness of form and structure of great painting, and moreover, could render a realistic subject at the same time.

I trained as a draftsman in high school, and was good at it. After graduating from HS, I returned to PEI for the summer, and in the fall moved, in 1956, at age 16, to Niagara Falls, Ontario, where I had a sister. I boarded with friends of my family.

I worked at Eaton's briefly, and then got a job at H.G. Acres, a huge engineering company. There I met a Swiss engineer, Armin Sauter, who was an amateur photographer. It was with him that I first learned to process film and make prints.
I bought my first 35mm camera, a Samoca.

It has always amazed me that a machine such as a camera can be used to create images with emotional content. Anyone can take a picture, but honing ones personal vision and technical skill to a fine edge to consistently produce images with emotional content, is very special. It is attained only after much work, study and practice.

I decided I wanted to become an architect. In 1958, I returned to P.E.I. to go to school. However, photography took over, and became my life. I joined the Charlottetown Camera Club to get access to their darkroom, which was in the Y.M.C.A. building. All the members were shooting slides, and I had it all to myself. My father was working at Bruce Stewart & Co. He was a machinist. We travelled together from New Glasgow to town every day. Claude MacKay was a machinist there in the daytime, and the Guardian photographer by night. I visited at Bruce Stewart's, and we talked a lot about photography. I read everything I could find in P.E.I. on the subject of photography. I first saw photographs by Atget and Berenice Abbott then, perhaps in a magazine or a library book.

I decided in 1959 that I had to go to Toronto to learn more. Rollie Taylor of Taylor's Jewelry referred me to Leigh Warren, an Islander who was the photographer at the Royal Ontario Museum. I visited him often, and he was a great help. I worked for photofinishers, and then for commercial photographers, all the while improving my skills and photographing on the street in my spare time. The most influential of the commercial photographers was Bert Bell.

In 1965, I went to work for the Attorney Generals Laboratory, the Ontario Crime lab. I was doing very technical work at first, photographing documents with UV and IR techniques to reveal alterations, etc. There I met my good friend Lorne Blunt. He was a forensic photographer at the top of his field, and also a very artistic photographer in his spare time. We have been friends to this day.

To exhibit images from more than 50 years of work, the selection process must be severe. I could fill several galleries with significant works from my collection. However, we can only view a small number of images at a time.

The subject, (the referent), of my photographs is the stimulus that causes me to look closely and see the potential for an expressive photograph. In this way, I am pure artist, and not a recorder or collector of things or of images.

Sometimes a subject has attracted my eye and I made a beautiful photograph. Then, later, I returned to the subject and it didnÕt inspire me at all. Making the photograph depends on an aesthetic moment.

The artist creates images of they visible world free from the imperfections by which it is flawed in reality.

My early years in photography were spent refining my vision and technique. Setting high standards for myself, I obsessively studied and experimented with the photographic process. This involved learning how the materials and equipment worked, learning how the camera and materials ŅseeÓ, and then making the camera and materials see the way I see.

To see the way I see is not easy to understand, given that I was working in black & white, (or monochrome), a way in which no one normally sees.

I methodically trained my eye to see and my mind to accurately remember grey tones and colours, to look at a scene and visualize it as a black & white print, and then adjust the process to get my vision on paper. In the beginning, IÕd make a sketch with the tones marked in, much like a classic painting technique. When I began using a new film or paper, IÕd spend months testing it and calibrating it to my way of seeing. With colour, IÕd shoot tests and alter the process until I got the colour rendition I wanted.

Working in colour, I learned to accurately remember colours, so I could reproduce those colours in the darkroom. It was never enough to send my work to a lab. It was always disappointing, and colour processes are much less flexible than black and white. Both processes are less flexible than digital printing.

When I had a print made at a lab, it just didnÕt seem right to my eye. It was only later, when I could control the whole process that I could be satisfied with the result. None of those prints are as satisfying as my colour inkjet prints. The colour neg or slide is an intermediate step & only good if they allow me to get the print I want.

Everyone sees the world uniquely. My left eye sees differently from my right. My method has a common factor- my eye. I see the scene with my eye, with itÕs particular rendition of the light, and when I make the print, itÕs the same eye that evaluates whether the image is as I saw it, regardless of the printing method.

Given the limitations of the medium, and the silver print, I succeeded in getting the materials to do my bidding. The silver print is the main print medium for B&W photography. It is a coating on paper of gelatine containing silver salts, usually silver bromide, that is converted to metallic silver by development.
Today I use digital technology to make my prints. They are more permanent than silver prints, and I have finer control of the results. Fine Control is what makes the print art.

When I used a large camera on a tripod, I could study every part of the image, eliminate nonessentials and make the image hold together as a complete visual experience. After doing this a few thousand times, and training my eye to feel images, I was able to perform the required actions, assess the image and make the adjustments and the exposure very quickly. Those view camera images were very purposeful and that quality has carried over into all my images. Then I was able to use hand held cameras quickly and efficiently. With hand held cameras, there is no time to think about the image. Things develop and change very quickly. Thought is too slow. The response must be intuitive. The value and aesthetics of the image must be recognized without analysis, and the exposure made almost instinctively. I donÕt think about photographs, at least not in a linear way. Each image is a whole thought or concept. It says something, but is nonverbal.

I was also training my powers of observation, counting things, the number of window panes in buildings, the number of birds in a flock.

A major milestone on the path to mastery of photography is to achieve a print that perfectly fulfills oneÕs vision at the time of photographing. Gatineau is the print that was that milestone for me. Working in Ottawa, I photographed on weekends with an 8x10 camera, often in the Gatineau hills. This print is exactly what I envisioned when I first came upon this stream.

Having achieved this, I knew that I could photograph anything, and achieve what I wanted with the medium. I had to decide what I wanted to photograph, and decided against presenting negative aspects of the world in favour of what is affirmative, positive, uplifting and beautiful.

I have had the good fortune to study with two masters of photography. I worked with Bert Bell in Toronto. You probably have never heard of him. He doesnÕt make it onto anybody's list of photographers because heÕs above the view of most. However, any advertising agency knows him. He was my principal teacher in commercial photography.

I canÕt believe my luck! To have worked with two masters of photography, Berenice and Bert Bell, and to be exposed to Atget, arguably the greatest photographer who ever lived, and by his greatest exponent

In all of photography, two figures stand out, Eug¸ne Atget and Berenice Abbott.

My teacher in art photography was Berenice Abbott. She was the dean of American photography and the finest silver print maker of the 20th century. She bought 1800 negatives and 2,000 prints of the work of Eugene Atget in Paris and brought it to America. He is the father of modern photography. She preserved it, promoted it, and now itÕs in theČ collection of MOMA in New York. It was a great service to photography, as she spent a large part of her career promoting Atget.

Berenice Abbott

In 1968 I was living in Toronto. I had an exhibit At Confederation Centre Art Gallery that year. My friend Lorne travelled here to see the show. On his way back to Toronto, he dropped in to visit Berenice Abbott in Maine.

He said that Berenice was looking for a printer to make prints for two major shows at the MOMA and the Smithsonian in Washington.

I remembered many of her images of New York and of science from a time when I had been voraciously reading everything available in the field of photography. She couldn't work in the darkroom for health reasons.

Recognizing a great opportunity, I set off for Maine, arriving at the beginning of November.

Berenice's house, a converted Wells Fargo stagecoach stop, was situated on the bank of the Piscataquis River, and the Appalachian Trail passed the edge of her property.Æ

Her house was filled with American antiques and was beautifully decorated, by herself, in an American country style. Her library was filled with first editions of major works of literature, and many books on art and photography. Many of them were signed and gifts of the authors. On her walls were many photographs, mostly her personal collection of Atgets. The Atget collection had been sold to the MOMA a few years previously. She also had numerous paintings, given to her by famous artists, who were former friends from life in Paris in the Ō20s.

There were stacks of her prints and negatives, and a file full of Atget prints and negatives. Seeing them was an education in itself.

For the first few weeks, while I was making the best prints I could, and I had been printing for some very good commercial photographers in Toronto for five years, nothing satisfied her. I was a good printer, and I couldn't understand what she was trying to do. It was very frustrating for both of us. I came to the point that I was either going to leave, or I was going to cave and accept everything she said as gospel. I decided to stay. However, when I made a print that she was happy with, we celebrated. Then the work went better. I learned an entirely new way of working with the materials. I opened up, forgot about rules and learned to respond to the image and the
luminous qualities that had to be coaxed out of the paper with very fine adjustments of exposure and processing. Her approach was completely flexible and artistic, while mine was more technical and methodical. I simply had to put aside my opinions, understand and accept that she knew much more than I did, and absorb her knowledge without analysis.

Every evening when we sat down to dinner our conversation would be about photography, or the state of the world, or the lessons of history. She had seen a lot with her photographic eyes which didn't miss details, no matter how uncomfortable they might be. Generally, it was a case of her correcting my misconceptions, errorĖs of perception, and prejudices. It was a complete education. She spoke often of Atget, and was always marvelling at his achievement in photography. I would have learned much more if I had known what questions to ask.

She was a patient and loving teacher. When I performed her work well, and was a good student, she was very sweet and kind. On the other hand, she took the task of my education very seriously. It was very zen-like; between master and pupil. The goal was the transmission of knowledge, which is not an easy task.

Berenice had many visitors, including John Szarkowski, the foremost writer on photography of the century, photography curator for the MOMA, as well as other museum people, and some of her many friends from Boston or New York. They were very knowledgeable about photography. Usually they were very good cooks, and we had many good meals. I was always welcomed at these gatherings. Conversations at the dinner table were, for me, highly educational.x

During my stay with Berenice I made many prints. They were mostly large prints, 20 x 24 inches, and I usually made three of each. I could print three negatives on a good day. Printing portraits of James Joyce, Cocteau and Djuna Barnes, I learned about the artists in Paris in the Ō20Õs. The prints were archivally processed and gold toned. Coating the silver in the print with gold is very expensive, but makes the image much more permanent. Making prints of a photographers negatives is the best way to know the work. By the end of February, the work was all but complete and we returned to Canada.

It took the next three years to assimilate what I had learned in Maine. I had adopted something of her strength of vision, and I feel that I was extremely fortunate to have been exposed to this master photographer; that I was the one to receive the line of teaching that was passed from Atget to Berenice. This is not technical information, but visual and sensitivity training. I have great love and respect for her.

My reason for relating all this is to try to show that there are levels of art and craftsmanship beyond what we know. It was also a very important time in my life.

I canÕt believe my luck! To have worked with two masters of photography, Berenice and Bert Bell, and to be exposed to Atget, arguably the greatest photographer who ever lived, by his greatest exponent.

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