J.G. Ballard, Toronto, October 1987
The first few years of my career as a photographer were full of the thrill of actually meeting and shooting portraits of people who I'd only known through books or movies or records - people like the British writer J.G. Ballard, who I photographed for Nerve magazine (I think) in the autumn of 1987. Ballard's cool, surreal, dystopic sci-fi stories - books like High-Rise, Concrete Island, The Drowned World and Crash - were particularly popular with the whole post-punk edgelord crowd I knew and moved in. But that was about to change: his autobiographical novel of his childhood experiences in a Japanese prison camp, Empire of the Sun, had been a hit three years earlier and Steven Spielberg's movie adaptation would be released in December.
J.G. Ballard was in town to promote The Day of Creation, has latest novel, and from the furnishings in the background of these shots I'm pretty sure he was staying in the Park Plaza hotel (now the Park Hyatt), which was sort of the literary hotel in downtown Toronto. I found him charming and garrulous; I assume I probably interviewed him in addition to the portrait shoot, but I have no record of such a thing today. A widower at just 34, I couldn't help but note how openly Ballard flirted with the female publicists in charge of the interviews - a rakishness that, as I noted when I first published some of these photos on my old blog six years ago, I couldn't help but envy.
I worked fast when I photographed J.G. Ballard - I'd already learned that time was the least thing I had to work with when shooting - and for some reason only loaded a 24-shot roll of Tri-X into my camera. But I managed to get at least a few variations in the whirlwind shoot, with Ballard in one of the hotel room's wing chairs, in the middle of the room, and silhouetted against one of the windows - an attempt at stark, minimal high-key lighting that I was only vaguely aware how to pull off. One of these shots is a bit of a surprise - a more than decent portrait that I somehow overlooked when printing/scanning negatives over 35 years ago and again six years ago. I have also colourized one of the high key shots, to give a slightly better sense of how Ballard looked on that day in 1987.
