close your eyes and hope for the best

Moonlit gondolier, Venice Italy. (click image to enlarge)

it was my second last film shoot before I migrated to digital photography.

It’s been drolly remarked that Venice is the only city where you can get seasick by crossing the street. Water and canals are everywhere and so are opportunities for photographers but, as with water, you can drown in the possibilities. What do you shoot that hasn’t been done before? Venice is one of the most photographed and painted cities in the world. To anyone with a heartbeat and a visual instinct, it’s irresistible which means the possibility of doing something new and fresh is slim indeed.

This was one of the challenges I faced when, after an editorial assignment in Tuscany in the late 1990s, I tagged on an extra four days in Venice for stock and personal photography. My mission was to get just a few images that might distinguish themselves among the many I would inevitably take. One concept that teased me immediately was the idea of a moonlit photo with a gondola and gondolier. Walking around Venice on my first evening, I witnessed the scene several times. Technically, however, the challenges in getting such a shot were daunting. The exposure would be too long to freeze any motion and balancing the exposure so that the canal and sky and moon were adequately exposed was impossible in a single image.

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George Hunter with Korelle Reflex II at Grande Beach Manitoba, 1939.
(click image to enlarge)

Press photography was in the transition era between flash powder and flash bulbs. …I rigged up my Korelle with a rudimentary flashgun. With tinfoil wound around the finger release button to make contact and a table lamp reflector mounted onto a flashlight to utilize No. 5 flash bulbs.

In keeping with Irving Penn’s edict in that folks are more interested in where you came from than where you are at, I will endeavor to recall some early happenings and photographic endeavors.

The year after my trip to England for the Coronation (1938) the travel bug caught up to me. I talked my Norwood (i.e. Winnipeg suburb) friend, Steven Putnam, into pedaling to Kenora, a hundred and fifty miles east of Winnipeg, in the Lake of the Woods region of Ontario. Our bikes were the standard for their day, being the single gear variety, great for downhill, but not for the uphill grind. Speaking of hills, we were severely reprimanded by the RCMP for doing 40 m.p.h. (64km.) downhill near West Hawk Lake. The officer claimed, that had we hit a rock or a pothole, we would have gone flying. We just about wrecked our bikes anyway as half of the Trans-Canada Highway was still gravel and quite rough.

The Kenora trip didn’t cure anything. A few weeks after that trip we took off again on our bikes - this time for Minneapolis/St. Paul, a distance of over five hundred miles (800 km.). It took five days each way. We carried sleeping bags but not a tent. One morning, having slept overnight in a farmer’s barnyard, we awoke to find representatives of all the farmer’s birds and animals forming a prefect circle around us. So perfect was the formation that we wondered if there was a circle etched on the ground where each placed its toes and dared not cross. They were curious to see who was invading their territory.

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Granny Smith Pumpkins
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…I had stumbled upon something potentially a hundred times more territorially sensitive than a Hell’s Angel’s marijuana farm.

“Sorry Mate, but this is fer y’own good.”

One of the rough-looking characters who had confronted me pried open the canister of Velvia with his 12-inch croc knife, exposing my film to the bright austral sun. He looked like a heftier version of Clint Eastwood (if it’s possible to imagine a somewhat overweight Eastwood). The other, who could have been a blond Keith Richards explained, “If the boss ever thought someone had a picture from here…” He didn’t finish his words, but made a cutting gesture across his slightly too-thin neck.

Their pickup had come out of nowhere and cut me off in a cloud of outback road dust as it deliberately spun sideways to block the route and force me to stop. How had they spotted me? I had only been outside my rented jeep for a couple of minutes, just long enough for three or four quick, furtive compositions.

It wasn’t as if I hadn’t been warned. The dirt road had been clearly posted “No Public Access / Unauthorized Passage Strictly Forbidden”. I had proceeded onto it anyway. I imagined Aussies as among the least uptight people anywhere, seriously disinclined to go nutters over a tourist who had taken a wrong turn.

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George Hunter 1937
(click image to enlarge)

One week when I wanted to see a street-corner circus with an elephant and trained fleas, I had to borrow 10c from my sisters. Mother said, “Don’t waste your money. You will see lots of flea circuses”. I have seen lots of elephants, but you know, I have never seen another flea circus.

It was Irving Penn, was it not, who proclaimed, “People don’t care where you’re at. They are more interested to know where you’re from”. Well, I’m from Saskatchewan, or as it is sometimes referred to, ‘Saskabush’. More precisely, I’m from good old Regina, Queen City of the Plains. I think of Regina as being in the centre of the Great Regina Plain, the country’s largest grain-growing area where farmers, unknowingly, create fascinating patterns that are best viewed from a low flying aircraft during harvesting operations. I never got tired of crisscrossing the prairies in search of these graphic scenes. Thinking back, I wish I had made lots more of them, especially with grain elevators included as these sentinels of the prairies have nearly all disappeared.

I’m from quite modest beginnings. My parents were from Ontario, my father being brought up on a farm near Peterborough and my mother being from Port Hope and a descendant of Roger Byam of Mutiny on the Bounty. Father, William Harold Hunter, was with Imperial Oil before I entered the scene but I knew him as a sales representative who travelled the length and breadth of Saskatchewan to visit dairies and bakeries for a waxed-paper company. With our comfortable cars and hard-surfaced highways, it is still a chore driving the province’s vast distances. In a Model T on gravel and dirt roads that turn to gumbo in rainy weather, it must have been arduous and treacherous. I only accompanied him on one or two short trips but it was enough to pique my interest in travelling. The Regina to Moose Jaw highway was my training ground when he taught me to drive. I was thirteen or fourteen years old.

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