Alternate cover now available.

November 24, 2020

Now available at Toronto Reference Library!

October 18, 2020

The Story Behind the Photo (A)

August 3, 2020

This photograph was selected as the opening image for the new Portrait Gallery of Canada’s first exhibition, Personae: Indigenous and Canadian Portraits 1861–2019. It was taken through a mirror high atop the National Olympic Stadium in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in 2014.

It is a self portrait, shot late in the afternoon when the light was pleasing. The soft and warm hues of the photograph along with the scratches and marks from the old mirror give it a semblance to analog film, which also is subject to dust and scratch marks. It is a raw, simply shot yet complex portrait because of the history behind the stadium it was shot in.

During the war, it was used as a killing field where thousands of local residents who did not adhere to the Marxist ideology of the Khmer Rouge, were rounded up and executed. It never served as an Olympic stadium throughout its history. Now the upper level functions as an aerobic fitness platform, where free fitness classes are given to middle- aged women who were undoubtedly all young girls at the time of the war and undoubtedly witnessed horror before their eyes.

I arrived later in the afternoon by tuk tuk, and took the long ascent up. The temperature drops to a more comfortable 28c by then. I was loaded up with 4 cameras, both analog and digital. By then, I was doing a lot of self-shooting through mirrors and found one on the upper level. At the moment this was taken, I imagined what it may have looked like behind me, when local city folks were rounded up and brought to the field to face their doom. Not a trace of the past remains in the stadium, unfortunately. Though one can visit other War sites, such as the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.

Actually, this photo wasn’t even a contender for the Portrait Gallery website. The decision to submit it to the Portrait Gallery team happened in a tent I was sleeping in, in the Sahara Desert in Morocco in early March of this year. I was contacted by Robert Tombs, one of the gallery’s board members, about one of my submissions, an interesting portrait of the late Florence Richler, the widow of the late Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler. It was selected as one of my images for the gallery website.

After several attempts to secure permission from the Richler family for permission to use the photo fell through, I offered up this self portrait to Tombs as a last-minute alternative. All this happened by communicating with both the Richler family and Tombs, through my smartphone device from my tent in the middle of the Sahara, and by sending out the replacement photo file via a weak satellite connection. Technology surprisingly worked flawlessly in the middle of nowhere, under the clear Moroccan desert skies on a gorgeous evening.

I hope my photograph serves as an invitation to all viewers of the website to explore the wide range of beautiful portrait works presented by Canadian artists.

www.portraitcanada.ca

*Self portrait, National Olympic Stadium, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 2014*

Portrait Gallery of Canada

July 30, 2020

Happy to be included on the newly launched website. www.portraitcanada.ca

Never Judge a Book by its Cover

July 23, 2020

I am happy to announce that my book is now being picked up by major public libraries such as the Toronto Reference Library and the Vancouver Public Library.

It is still available for purchase with choice of two covers. Free delivery within Canada.

www,stevestober.com/photo-store

Hasidic Rabbi, 1992, silver gelatin print

Living in the Past

June 13, 2020

As a young photographer, I spent most weekends photographing on the streets of Montreal. The street was my studio then. And photography was my passion. It allowed me the opportunity to experiment with techniques photographing people in a time when most people were unaware of the camera being pointed at them. This would be very difficult to achieve today. It was open season for photographers.

Women at Vending Machine, Expo 67, Montreal, 1972,

Man Reading Saturday Newspaper, Montreal, 1973.

Passing the Turnstiles, Expo 67, Montreal, 1972

Lunch Counter, Wilensky’s Diner, Montreal, 1972

Lunch Counter, Schwartz’ Deli, Montreal, 1972.

Thoughts on Porch Portraits during the Pandemic

May 4, 2020

On March 15, 2020 I returned to Toronto from three weeks in Paris and Morocco. At 12pm sharp the night before I flew out of Paris, the city went into total lockdown. The numbers of COVID-19 cases were staggering and on the upswing, people were dying everywhere, and even though I was locked up in my small hotel room in the 14th arrondissement, I did venture out occasionally for a walk and a nice meal. Back in Canada, the Government was still taking a cautious, wait-and-see approach by allowing international flights to return. Immediately upon touching down on Canadian soil, I was ordered to go into quarantine and isolation at home for two weeks, which seemed fair and reasonable given the uncertainty and sharp rise in cases throughout the world.

On April 1st, 2020 after my quarantine ended, I defied the yet-to-be-announced “stay at home” policy and launched a personal photo project doing porch portraits of ordinary people in extraordinary times, calling it Porchraits. I put a call out to my large mailing list and started receiving inquiries almost immediately. The idea was to give people back something they could hold onto so that future generations could see and understand what the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 was like. I asked my subjects to simply write a word on a board describing how they are feeling at the time they were being photographed. Then I directed them as I normally would from a distance.

What I was seeing was the full gambit of human emotion in their written messages of hope, desperation, loneliness, fear, positivity and humour.. exactly how human beings process a new situation when it is suddenly thrust upon them. Folks were grateful to be a part of a fun project, to have a unique experience either with their families, or alone outside in their own environment, while maintaining the required social distancing with me, the photographer.

For the entire month of April, I went out to people’s homes and apartments, stood outside and photographed them from a safe distance, something that as a portrait photographer I must say, went completely against the norms of how I work, of usually keeping a close distance to my subjects. This time I was confined to shooting my subjects from a minimum of 2 metres apart. I even started doing long distance photo shoots with people through live apps such as FaceTime. People were calling me to book who I hadn’t heard from in 15 years. The ball was obviously rolling.

At one point, about mid-April there was some flack on photographers in other parts of the country being told by an organization of photographers no less, to stop their own porch projects as it was deemed not an essential service. Many abided and followed suit, but I did not. I kept my project going for reasons which are more personal rather than collective, a choice I have no regrets about now. And all my subjects stood by me, agreeing that it was a worthy thing to do and should not be forced shut by a few naysayers.

By the end of April, 2020 I decided to stop the project. There was no need to continue on at this point. I had achieved what I had initially set out to accomplish. I helped bring some happiness into people’s otherwise mundane daily routines in this new reality which we all live in now, and had created some much-needed awareness for the importance and beauty of a well-executed portrait, a genre of photography that has taken a beating and has been hard hit the last ten years or so with a lack of demand for the services of established portrait photographers.

A picture tells a story, and is worth a thousand words… so they say. So let this series and others like it be a testament to the goodwill of the people agreeing to being photographed and their absolute resolve to stay positive and try to enjoy the moment.. in whatever way is humanly possible. Shine on, friends!