Beyond the Six String Nation #62: Praise Doug!
The Nation's starmaker photographer
When we published the Six String Nation book with Douglas & McIntyre back in 2009, I wanted to make sure there were other voices reflected in it to acknowledge the many creative forces that went into making the project what it was and is. So there are the lyrics from Stephen Fearing’s “The Longest Road” – the song that officially launched the musical journey of Voyageur, the poem I commissioned from CANO founder, the late Robert Dickson, an interview with the luthier, George Rizsanyi, appreciations from musicians Justin Rutledge, Madagascar Slim and Kyrie Kristmanson, various key supporters of the project like Laurie Brown, Amanda Van Den Brock, Mark Kristmanson, and Gabriel Dube, materials photographer Sandor Fizli and portrait photographer Doug Nicholson.
My heart leaps a little when I re-read all of their contributions – so beautifully have they articulated some detail about the experience of sharing the project with the public, each from their own perspective. Doug’s commentary accurately reflects the earliest conversations we had about this whole portrait project but is far more articulate than mine and offers way more photo-world context. Yes, I wanted to offer these portraits as a way to formalize these encounters of Canadians with this most-Canadian object and I wanted it to be against a white background – mostly because I had so thoroughly absorbed the Apple design aesthetic of the time. When I talk about it now, I echo Doug’s notion that, as he writes, “So often in Canada the landscape becomes a character itself, but for these photos I wanted the subjects to stand alone with the guitar and tell their story without intrusion”.
That is absolutely what he has managed with these remarkable portraits, which is arguably the most ambitious photographic portrait project in Canada. I never tire of looking at them. Over some 150,000 images of 15,000 different people posing with Voyageur you see countless variations and layers of this experience of emotional resonance with this meaning-emitting object. Time after time – in what is often an exceedingly short amount of time and sometimes less-than-ideal circumstances in a soggy festival tent or a cramped conference room – Doug captures that thing that connects the subjects to their sense of themselves as Canadians in so many different ways, from deeply personal to heart-on-the-sleeve (or paint on the face!). Aside from the fact that the guitar is featured in all these photos, all of these people are really the stars of them. And most of them are just regular folks lucky enough to have had their portraits taken by Doug. I recently mentioned my amazing encounter in Cobourg with the daughter of one of Doug’s most striking portraits: Joe Viera.
There are hundreds of others like that, just as compelling and timeless.
What he doesn’t mention in his short essay is that we’ve been friends since high school. Along with his younger brother Gordon (whom I’ve mentioned before as my collaborator in our duo Catastrophe Theory), we shared a fierce enthusiasm for a wide variety of music (Doug always a little bit harder-edged than me in that regard - though sometimes a surprising softy. I’ll never forget how enamoured he was watching Ian Tamblyn play “Woodsmoke and Oranges”) and we both DJ’d at CKLN radio. For years I would spend some time on Christmas Day at the Nicholson house eating mother Mairi’s genuine Scottish shortbreads and being treated as an adult by father Bob. As I drifted off after high school and began exploring a universe of directions I might want to go in, Doug remained focussed (fittingly) on photography and became an ophthalmological photographer in the eye clinic at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. He also kept a strong tether with me. So while I was swanning around attempting to become some kind of star, Doug would check in regularly and it kept me grounded in ways I’m not sure he even knows. And that’s not to say Doug wasn’t adventuring on his own. Arguably, he was more adventurous that me but always with a more targeted sense of purpose - including his Canada World Youth experience in Bangladesh and Port Alberni BC that was truly formative for him and paved the way for returns to South Asia and coastal BC. I went to Bangkok and got me a radio show. Glamourous? Yes. Daring? Sort of. Useful to others? Not quite so much.
I have travelled the length and breadth of this country with Doug. Our wives Sarah and Andrea joined us on our trip to the Un Paese a Sei Corde Festival in Piemonte, Italy. Doug and Andrea’s kids Gabriel and Sally also joined us on our road trip to Atlantic Canada. Gabriel has assisted with our portrait station at multiple events including Parliament Hill and a couple of festivals. It was either in Grafton or Orillia where, in a cinderblock hotel room with a main bed and two cots provided for our overnight, Gabriel and I laid wide awake for hours on either side of the thunderously snoring Doug. It’s been separate hotel rooms ever since. I can’t sleep on 15 hour flight. Doug can sleep on a 15 minute car ride.
Later tonight Doug will be in action once again as part of our event at the SmallWorld Centre in Toronto. It’s been a while since our last portrait session. There will be some folks in attendance I’ve been dying for ages to have official photos of. Having just had to renew my passport and not recognizing the guy in the photo therein, I realize I need to update my own publicity shot as well. But I’m also hoping Doug will let Sarah at the Canon again and have his own portrait redone too. His history with this guitar is long and deeply entwined and it’s time we had a new portrait of the portrait-maker to reflect that. And if you’re reading this today and thinking you might like to have the “Nicholson Treatment” while holding history in your hands, there’s a link to buy tickets at the top of this paragraph. Would love to see you there and then see you forever afterwards as part of Doug’s extraordinary gallery.