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Journeys with Geoffrey

A small gilded cage rises up through the central stairwell of the beaux-arts pile that fronts the seaside promenade. The young Italian woman operating the hotel elevator sniggers at the two middle-aged men who have just checked in at the grand lobby, which is now disappearing down the shaft. They’d arrived breathless, rushing in to book the hotel’s last room just as the midnight hour passed. She knows that the two men are foreigners, Anglos probably, and pansies for sure.

After the cage has creaked to a shuddering stop on the top floor, she leads her last guests of the day to their room. With a knowing smile she closes the door of their rococo-style room, which features mirrors and a crystal chandelier floating over a huge bed.

The older member of the duo sits down upon the big bed and glares at his companion, who shrugs it off, extracts a bottle of wine from the mini-bar and fills a glass. Ignoring his grumpy fellow traveller, he parts the drapes and opens the double glass doors that exit onto a Juliet balcony. Out he goes to enjoy the view and drink a glass of wine. Twenty minutes later he’s back in the room, but his companion’s mood is unaltered. Another glass of wine and more time with the view. He returns, sees that the silence has held and pours a third glass before retreating once again.

When he returns he confronts the sulker on the bed. “Geoffrey, I know exactly how you feel. Here you are in a lavish love nest overlooking the Bay of Naples, lit by a full moon. And you’re sharing the room with me instead of a beautiful woman. Geoffrey, you’re such a romantic. Well, I feel even worse than you, because you’ve staked out the big bed and I’m stuck with the little folding cot in the corner.”

Geoffrey certainly entered photography as a romantic. When he was a young journalist in Philadelphia, he was seduced by the work of the early Leica photographers. He’d visit André Kertész and learn to make pictures like the Hungarian-born poetic master, and like Cartier-Bresson. Years later, when he finally abandoned his steady arts-council job to become a full-time artist, he spent a number of years photographing the great gardens of Italy, England and France. They were romantic spaces, and James’s chosen instrument, an ancient Kodak panoramic camera, only added to the melancholia. He’d hand-load a large sheet of black-and-white film, cock the spring that powered the scanning lens and turn whatever formal spaces were before him into ones that were much less Euclidean. He made beautifully evocative images that were much more than the stretched-out Atgets that some observers professed to see.

Lurking behind the immediate attractiveness of James’s garden images were some interesting conceptual puzzles. European landscape pictures traditionally served as windows onto the world. During the 19th century, photographs of landscapes—those stepchildren of landscape paintings—were called views, and the instruments used to create them were called view cameras. But Geoffrey’s take on that tradition was more ambitious. His devotion to the panning lens and a panoramic aspect ratio, some three to one, seemed to go beyond the limits of a view and approach experience. The photographs made one think about the difference between the view and viewing.

They were also not the product of a single moment or viewpoint, as were conventional landscape images. During the course of each exposure the lens looked first to the left, then slowly swung around to the centre and finally to the right. The resulting photographs were, in effect, little narratives rather than instants. It was as if that little leather-bound box was saying to us, “I looked over to the left and spied an urn, then I looked in front of me and saw some stairs leading to a secret house and then I looked right and saw a path leading to a mist-shrouded valley.” The photographs weren’t just views, they were actually little stories, and they weren’t just ordinary tales, they were romances. Those pictures were quiet and small—like whispers.

Geoffrey and I rush down the Avenue of the Americas to meet Lee Friedlander in a coffee shop. It’s a spring day in the late 1980s and Lee has come into Manhattan to shop for a new tool. He’s become interested in the Sonora Desert, and in the idea of photographing it with a camera that will give him a wide-angle view and a larger negative than the 35-mm cameras that he’s most familiar with. He’s not sure whether he wants a panoramic camera with a rotating lens or a fixed wide-angle on a custom-made body. When we connect, he suggests going to Globus Brothers Studios on West 24th Street. He well knows the standard stock of camera stores, so he’s curious about what Globus might have to offer. Old man Globus had made money and his sons are busy spending it on the ground floor of a Manhattan office tower. They’re using this expensive studio to design and build custom panoramic cameras. Ronnie Globus meets us at the door, hands out his card and gives us a tour.

Half of Ronnie’s card is taken up by his portrait. It’s a kind of cameo, with Ron wearing a wide-brimmed white fedora and a Hawaiian shirt in a setting that suggests a tropical resort. Bright yellow cursive letters on a ground of what looks like wood grain completes the rest of the card. The young Globus is a bit of Hollywood himself.

The big bright studio is littered with wacky panoramic cameras. As Ronnie Globus hypes his different models, Friedlander keeps attempting to get a word in edgewise. He repeatedly tries to explain his project and the possibility of having the Globus shop craft him a medium-format, wide-angle panoramic camera. Ronnie Globus, however, just wants to sell one of his existing models. Friedlander persists. When Globus finally understands that Lee has no interest in lugging an enormous sheet-metal camera out into the desert in a pickup truck, he shows us his 35-mm model. It has a beautifully machined handle that’s filled with oil. On top of this vertical hand grip is a rotating head supporting a lens and a geared spool mechanism that winds film past the moving lens and makes the head rotate continuously. The oil in the handle smooths out the motion. It’s an odd camera and Lee is absolutely not interested. Once more he explains to Globus what he wants, and this time Ronnie loses it. He shouts at Friedlander and kicks him out of the studio.

Geoffrey and I watch as the man that we would both probably regard as the greatest photographer of the late 20th century disappears into the midtown traffic. When Friedlander is out of sight, Ronnie Globus pulls me aside. “You seem like a nice guy,” he says. “But your friend who just left is an idiot.” Globus looks up to make sure that Geoffrey has wandered out of earshot. Ronnie then leans into my ear and tells me that our recently departed friend Lee knows nothing about photography. However, since I’m a good guy he’s going to tell me the special secret of photography. Of course I can’t wait. “You take my 35-mm GlobuScope,” says Ronnie, “and you go to someplace really famous and beautiful like the Colosseum in Rome. You put yourself in the middle of it. Then you hold the GlobuScope over your head, pull the trigger and the head of the camera will go round and round and photograph everything. When you get home you develop the film and cut out the good parts. That’s how you make great pictures.”

Eventually Friedlander settled on a medium-format Hasselblad with a fixed wide-angle lens. When he finished his Sonora project Geoffrey enlisted him in a new one. The writings of Robert Smithson had made Geoffrey excited about the work of Frederick Law Olmsted, the great late-19th-century American landscape architect. He made a proposal to Phyllis Lambert, the founder of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal: documenting Olmsted’s legacy. A trio of photographers—Geoffrey, Robert Burley and Friedlander—would fan out across the United States and investigate the contemporary state of great Olmsted projects like Central Park, Prospect Park, the Biltmore Estate and so on, ultimately producing an exhibition and book. Lambert went for it. The project was to occupy most of a decade.

The Olmsted project was a fitting follow-up to James’s European gardens. Like the European work, the new endeavour involved photographing an idea that was no longer there. The original concepts behind these places had long been subject to modification, neglect and decay. At best, the photographers were walking about in a kind of palimpsest, trying to honour the original while also observing time’s tendency to pull things down. At the same time, it was their job to show changes in cultural conceptions of landscape and public uses of land. Olmsted had worked in a time when public attitudes toward the land were highly conflicted. On the one hand, nature was something to be conquered, tamed and exploited. At the same time, the 19th-century Romantics celebrated and had a deep reverence for the natural world. In many ways, their conception was also one of nature tamed—Arcadia. Somewhere in this latter camp stood Olmsted.

It was a big challenge for the photographers, and one that definitely made Geoffrey’s photography more rigorous, analytical and descriptive, and less romantic. His beloved old panoramic cameras had been fitted with the crudest of viewfinders, and these brought to the results a certain element of chance. Accident can be a great teacher if you’re intelligent and curious, and Geoffrey was both. He took what he had learned from the panoramics and gradually applied it to what he chose to frame up in a view camera, a much more precise instrument. The panoramic camera was put aside and the contemporary world became more and more evident in his pictures. Yet his new tool, the eight-by-ten view camera, was a completely classical one.

Born in Wales, Geoffrey has always led a peripatetic life. After his father was killed in the Second World War, his mother took her two sons along to her various teaching posts in Italy, Egypt, Hampshire and Hanover. Geoffrey attended Oxford, got his first job in Philadelphia and worked in Montreal, Ottawa and then back in Montreal. When he finally landed in Toronto, in 1995, he quickly became an enthusiastic player of the national sport of Toronto-bashing. Many visitors and the newly arrived have found it to be a somewhat impenetrable place. Despite the number of immigrants it has welcomed from all over the planet, it retains some English reserve. People work long hours and live behind closed doors and pulled drapes. It’s also a somewhat improbable place. A glance at a map will tell you why Montreal exists, or Halifax or Vancouver. Improbably located cities typically exist by fiat—think of capitals such as Washington, D.C., or Brasilia. But to plop a huge city lopsidedly on the muddy shore of the least great of the Great Lakes? The Humber and the Don are pretty poor excuses for a Fraser, Ottawa or St. Lawrence river. Whatever were they thinking? And yet despite its somewhat inauspicious beginnings, and its relative modesty during the 19th century, Toronto has become a hugely successful metropolis. Photographers have a tendency to restlessly travel the globe, recording life anywhere but at home. An encounter with exotica automatically opens one’s eyes, but it also, usually, results in a mere record of surfaces. Making great photographs at home requires going deeper. Geoffrey had taken photographs in Italy, France, Wales, the eastern U.S., Quebec, Alberta, Montana, Mexico and the Queen Charlotte Islands. It was time to pause and make peace with Toronto. After he finished his Running Fence series on the U.S./Mexico border, Geoffrey took the city on as a photographic project.

Following its debut in the late 18th century, Toronto sputtered along in the 19th. Consequently, much residential building in Toronto was junk. Montreal had many streets full of solid and stolid cut-stone buildings for people to live in—so many of them, in fact, that Montrealers spent a good part of the 20th century casually tearing them down. Residents of downtown Toronto had streets of badly built Victoriana thrown up by speculators in the late 19th century. Many homes are crude balloon-frame structures faced in soft Southern Ontario bricks that were sometimes split in half by their builders to make a load go twice as far. When, after a few years working downtown with his camera, Geoffrey went to the new suburbs of the surrounding 905 area-code region, he was interested in the transformation of agrarian land into a new kind of settlement. He found that, flimsy as they might be when measured against an ideal, the new townhouses on the crescents and cul-de-sacs that now stood on Canada’s best farmland were actually a bit more substantial than their old counterparts in the city centre.

Furthermore, Toronto’s downtown Victorians had been subjected to huge indignities. Over the years, successive generations of inhabitants had chopped off their gables, glued porches across arches, covered stained glass and pasted fake stone over old brickwork. And the city’s planners and inspectors colluded, endorsing anything they saw as a contemporizing upgrade. When Geoffrey began walking the old side streets and back alleys, he encountered a mess. However, it was a mess that he began to approach with an increasing degree of enthusiasm as he came to understand the many stories it had to tell. A house that had originally reflected the aspirations of tradesmen from Britain would later become a safe haven for a Jewish family, a starter home for energetic Calabrians and a rooming house for Chinese labourers before finally becoming the fashionable home of urban professionals. He was beginning to understand the complexities of his new home, and had the advantage of being both insider and outsider. And, like many of us who have studied Lee Friedlander’s intricate layering and stacking of planes, Geoffrey began to organize his pictures using those compositional devices, which were so evocative of dynamic urban experience. When he’s finished with Toronto and the 905, this may well prove his best work.

There are tabula-rasa artists—those who attempt to go back to first principles, who attempt to see the world fresh and raw, free of cultural and historical preconceptions. This is a laudable ambition, but also, obviously, laughable—no one can be that free of baggage. Other artists study the past, have heroes and are fans. Geoffrey is one of the latter. His work as an arts journalist and critic gave him a good general grounding in the visual arts. When photography seduced him he became an admirer of Eugène Atget, Josef Sudek and Walker Evans, among others. They all influenced him. He has taken from them what is useful to him and built his own house on their foundation. He once described himself to me as a “total reactionary in everything.” This is not totally true—it’s probably not even half true. While his work may honour certain traditions, he is often engaged by what is fresh, brittle and edgy in the work of others. It’s just not the kind of work he wants to pursue.

There are certain shared extreme experiences that cement friendships—surviving a late-night carjacking on a Guerrero highway, a long night in an open boat during the fall furies on Georgian Bay, a midnight drive to rescue a suddenly deceased friend’s family. For Geoffrey and me, that moment occurred many years ago as we were swimming in the Ottawa River, off Calumet Island. We got swept up by the current and were sent tumbling along the boulder-filled bottom toward the fast-moving water of a narrow gorge. At the time, I didn’t know that my heart needed a serious tune-up and I had a very difficult time reaching a back eddy and, finally, the shore. So did he. No words were needed.

Geoffrey began his career as a writer and has gradually made himself into a full-time photographic artist. I began as a photographer and have increasingly turned to the keyboard rather than the camera when I want to say something. Photography can teach one great patience and keen observational skills, but it can also make one a prisoner of observable reality and potentially hobble the imagination. “Keep the faith!” Geoffrey used to exhort. “But these little pieces of paper with some silver salt stuck to them are so mute,” I often wanted to say. He came to love the materiality of it all—the papers, chemicals, formulas and cameras. For me, the cases of lighting gear, the stands and tripods and the stacks of frames and mounting board just got heavier and heavier. Too much stuff. At some point you want to travel lighter.

One thing we did agree on was that the most comfortable home for a photograph was upon the pages of a book. And Geoffrey has made a lot of them. But professionalizing one’s passion also requires some commercializing of your production. These days, the market demands that photographs be scaled up to sofa size. Geoffrey has obliged. Stuff, stuff, stuff.

There was a period of several years—during which he was on his way into photography and I was on my way out—that our leaky ships passed, and we spent a lot of time looking at pictures together and talking about them. We’ve both moved on, but we both often take time to look back over our shoulders.

The writer/photographer Michael Mitchell’s work is in the collections of the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Portrait Gallery of Canada and Sweden’s Moderna Museet, as well as many private and corporate collections. His memoir The Molly Fire was a fi nalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize, and was named as one of the Globe and Mail’s 100 best books of 2005.

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