These photos of Robert Smith of The Cure sat forgotten in a negative binder for over 35 years until I rediscovered them last fall while looking for something else. I had, in fact, done my level best to forget about them, as they were evidence of what I remembered as a massive fail made during my earliest years working as a photographer. They were a major stumble on a steep learning curve, and I was sure all evidence had been lost. But let's start at the beginning, when I was assigned to interview Robert Smith and The Cure when they were passing through town on what was apparently called the Beach Party Tour, playing the Kingswood Music Theatre just outside Toronto on July 13, 1986 with 10,000 Maniacs opening.
Another writer at the magazine, Perry Stern, was a huge Cure fan and phoned begging me to let him do the interview; I agreed, provided I still got to take the photos. (I also asked if he could give me a ride to and from the venue.) I had an idea: I'd seen an article in a photography magazine showing how you could get interesting colour washes on your backgrounds by putting complimentary coloured filters in front of your lens and flash. This might have produced interesting results if I bothered doing a test shoot, but I was too cheap/rushed/arrogant for that sort of thing, so I showed up with green and red filters on my Pentax Spotmatic and my Vivitar flash and shot away in a fenced-off grassy area beside the stage.
It's worth talking about the unusual look Robert Smith was rocking during at least part of 1986 - trainers and golf shirts and jeans and short hair. If I still had the transparencies I shot that day including the rest of the band I'd be able to tell you if the Cure as a whole were taking a vacation from their Goth image and dressed down similarly, and if this was one of the few artifacts attesting to a brief sportswear period in the band's history. But the results were awful - overexposed, with a greenish tint, mostly because I had no clue what the ideal ratio between the bright sunlight and the flash strength should have been. The magazine might have reluctantly printed one remotely salvageable frame but my ambition had definitely overstripped my skill and I tried to forget about this shoot.
But at some point a few months after my disastrous Cure shoot I thought I might be able to salvage the results by converting the slides to black and white negatives. I either found someone who could produce an internegative or borrowed the gear to do it myself, but inexperience won again and the four portraits of Robert Smith that I produced were too overexposed for me to work with all those years ago, so I filed them at the bottom of a negative sheet and forgot about them.
Until last fall when I found them again and decided to see if they could be saved with scanning and the neural filters that were recently added to Photoshop. The film grain that was so hard to deal with back in 1986 suddenly became a feature, adding to the retro feel the shots had acquired either with time or in my own mind. With some judicious application of the restoration filter these frames cleaned up nicely, but I decided to push things one stop further by using the colorizing filter as well - making sure Smith's signature smeared lipstick wasn't just retained but highlighted. Now I like to imagine that these shots were taken in 1937 with an old Kodak folding camera like my Jiffy Six-20, and hand-coloured by some underpaid darkroom assistant working for a developing lab in a building down in the warehouse district of town. It's certainly a better story than the one about the kid photographer who screwed up on a big job nearly forty years ago.
