Canadian photojournalist Ted Grant finally gets his due: Goar
Thanks to an unlikely chain of events, a self-effacing Canadian photojournalist named Ted Grant has his own one-man show in New York.
Photojournalist Ted Grant took the iconic photo of Pierre Trudeau sliding down a banister in Ottawa's Chateau Laurier Hotel at the 1968 Liberal leadership convention. An exhibit of Grant's photos will be on display from April 24 to June 7, 2014, at the Leica Gallery in New York.
By: Carol Goar Star Columnist, Published on Mon Apr 21 2014
If you’re planning a trip to New York this spring, there is a treasure chest of Canadian memories at the Leica Gallery on Broadway.
The exhibit is called Ted Grant: Sixty Years of Legendary Photojournalism. It opens on April 24 and runs till June 7. The gallery’s directors, Rose and Jay Deutsch, call Grant “the father of Canadian photojournalism.”
You’ve seen his images, including the iconic shot (at the top of this column) of Pierre Trudeau sliding down a banister at the 1968 Liberal leadership convention. But you probably don’t know the photographer.
Grant never sought the spotlight or looked for accolades. When people praised his work, he’d say he was lucky or he just happened to be in the right place at the right time. But his “good luck” kept occurring. His portfolio includes some of the best candid photographs of Ronald Reagan, Jackie Kennedy, Margaret Thatcher and David Ben-Gurion ever taken.
The story of how his work ended up in one of the world’s top photo galleries is as interesting as the man himself.
I can’t tell it dispassionately because I like Grant very much (and had a trifling role). But it is worth hearing.
Throughout his career, Grant made time to share his knowledge. At the height of his professional prowess, he would slip away to Carleton University once a week to teach an undergrad course in photojournalism. I was lucky enough to be one of his students.
I have no photographic talent whatsoever. I didn’t have the right kind of camera and couldn’t afford a better one. I was awed by his professional stature. But Grant was so encouraging and so determined to find something good in the ham-handed pictures I took that I finished the course with a passing grade and a huge debt of gratitude to the man who helped me see the images around me, understand the play of light and watch how a master of the craft frames his subject.
I thanked him as well as a 22-year-old could and kept in touch with him when he moved to Victoria, where he now lives.
On the west coast, he continued to teach photojournalism. One of his students was a freelancer named Thelma Fayle. Like me, she was struck by his generosity, his eagerness to share his knowledge and his total lack of pretension.
Twenty-five years after she took his course, Fayle sent a letter to Grant asking for advice on a magazine profile she’d been assigned. Not only did he respond to her letter, he came to her house with his wife Irene. They chatted at her kitchen table for three hours. Without being asked, he accompanied her to the interview, stayed in the background and took some of the most evocative photos she’d ever seen.
Fayle asked Grant if he’d consider letting her write his biography, interspersed with some of his finest photos. He agreed.
It took her almost four years. She spent many hours at the National Gallery and Library and Archives Canada, poring over 300,000 of Grant’s photos to choose the 100 that appear in the book. She conducted more than 100 hours of interviews. She sought anecdotes from friends, colleagues and former students. And she wove it all together, highlighting his photos.
She learned about the improbable source of his skill: a childhood condition known as amblyopia or lazy eye. A doctor tried to treat it, giving him a patch to put over his good eye so the weak one would strengthen. But his elementary schoolteacher, thinking he was trying to be a clown, made him take it off. So his visual imbalance was never corrected.
But Grant trained his good eye to do the work of two. He became one of a handful (2 per cent) of left-eyed professional photographers. On assignments, he positioned himself differently than his competitors and shot from a different angle.
Slowly at first, then with gathering momentum he rose through the ranks. Successive editors discovered there was something special about the pictures he brought back.
Although Grant’s reputation grew, his practices didn’t change. That is clear from the list of “Ted’s tips” at the end of the book. There are 37 of them. Here are a few of my favourites:
“If you walk into any newspaper in the country, they will know Ted Grant’s name because of his reputation for giving back,” said former colleague John Harquail.
Fayle’s manuscript was rejected by a dozen publishers before Heritage House Publishing took a chance on an unknown writer. Since then, its staff has thrown itself into promoting the book and Grant. They arranged the one-man show in New York.
If you can’t get to New York, the book is an excellent alternative. If you can visit the Leica Gallery, you’ll see Grant’s most memorable photos showcased as they’ve never been before.
Carol Goar’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
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