Faith Nolan In The Beginning

500 Weeks # 19

Share Newspaper, February 22, 1990.
My first photo assignment resulted in a pair of cover photos. Left and top right.

Spend any time as an event photographer, and invariably someone will ask how you became a photographer. The standard assumption is that you were an avid amateur who always wanted to be a pro. They seem oddly disappointed when I tell them it was never something that even crossed my mind because it was never my goal to be a stills photographer. 

Growing up, my ambitions were, first, to be a comic book illustrator and second, to work in the film industry as a director of photography. I studied both graphic design and film production in school and after working on film crews for a couple of years, I found myself without an assignment. The city seemed to go dead one winter, with almost no films in production. This is actually a standard part of life in film, but I was a newbie and needed a job.

So I answered an ad in a newspaper and ended up doing graphic design for “Share” a weekly Caribbean community newspaper. Not my community, but that didn’t matter, as they were very welcoming. As part of the team that put the pages together, I had to design ads and lay out pages, using the text and the photos provided by the contributing writers, who took their own pictures. They frequently only took one frame, so if the subjects’ eyes were closed, or if the focus was off, or if the exposure was wrong, too bad, that was the only option we had.

As an art school graduate with an interest in the technical aspect of photography – even if it was for motion pictures - the technically mediocre photos, really started to bother me.  So, after almost a year of working at the paper, I walked into the managing editor’s office and declared, “Your reporters photos suck, I could do better”. The managing editor – Jules Elder, who also had a background in film production – said, “You have to write”. I answered that I didn’t want to write, he told me I had to write. This repeated itself a few times, until I agreed and said, “Okay, okay, I’ll write”.

The next weekend I was given a roll of B&W film and a photo assignment: Go to Harbourfront and photograph Faith Nolan and the BA Rappers.

Big Mistake Number One: The show was scheduled for 1:00 in the afternoon. I took my time and arrived around 1:15. Turns out Faith Nolan and the BA Rappers were two different musical acts, not one. So by the time I arrived, the BA Rappers were off the stage. Going on an assignment to photograph two performers and failing to even see one of the acts was probably not the best way to try and win another assignment from the managing editor.

Big Mistake Number Two: The stage lighting was not very bright, so to compensate I chose to use a slower shutter speed. After the film was developed and the photos were printed, the images appeared – to me – to be out of focus. When the editor - Mr. Elder – examined them, he assured me they were actually in focus, but blurred. He then gave me some hints about shutter speeds usage.

Best decision: I decided to look around the venue and make sure I took photos of other people and wrote down their names. Call it a photo essay or "B" roll, having extra images was a great idea.

Somehow, my technically mediocre photos got printed on the cover of the newspaper resulting in me walking around for a couple of days feeling pretty good about myself. Then, as I was entering a subway car, there was my work, discarded on the floor. For emphasis, there was a muddy footprint on it, which, combined with a little twist, had torn my photos. I looked at it and thought: “Get over yourself. In two days it’s fish wrap.”

Share newspaper was a weekly publication, and after that verbal boast, and the resulting photo assignment, at least one of my photos ended up being used in a print publication – somewhere in the world - every week for the next 10 years. That works out to approximately 500 weeks, and hence the name of this blog. 

Share newspaper supplied the film and kept the camera negatives, so I can’t scan the originals of my first assignment. All I have remaining is a copy of the printed newspaper. After a few assignments, I started to buy my own film, so I could keep the negatives. I have contacted Share and requested the negs, but they did not file them very well, so I assume they are lost forever.

Technical stuff: Pentax K1000 camera with 50mm f/2.0 lens using Nikon TMAX 400 ISO B&W  negative film.