Kevin O'Leary | 40 Years Of Photography

I get asked so often about my interest in photography: where did it come from? Why do I do it? Well, let me explain. When I was graduating high school, I told my stepfather, "I really want to become a photographer because I just learned how to develop film and I was getting into image making." He said, "That's great, but how are you gonna make a living?" I said, "Well, I'll be a photographer, and I'll make a living being a photographer." He said, "Maybe you should go to college and get a couple of years under your belt. Then, if you still love it that much, you can pursue it."

So, I had a lot of respect for him. I took his advice. Off to college I went. I got degrees in environmental studies, psychology, and professional shuffleboarding, which is basically what I did with my four years there. I was a party house. I'm just telling you the truth. When I finished that, I said, "Dad, I think I want to become a photographer." He said, "You're gonna starve to death, son. What you've done is basically party through college. You basically wasted four years." I said, "What about these degrees I have?" He said, "Yeah, great. Go get a job."

Now, I don't want to be critical of the arts, obviously, but he was right. His next suggestion was, "Look, why don't you go get a business degree and learn the basics of business? That way, if you really want to be a photographer after that, at least you'll know how to build a business around it." Again, it was pretty good advice. I went and got a business degree, an MBA. That was quite an eye-opener. First of all, it was really hard, but at the same time, I realized how tough business can be.

It really kind of triggered my entrepreneurial spirit because, in those times, I had learned that being an employee wasn't really good for me. While I was in the MBA course, I said to my professors, "Why don't you let me document this as a filmmaker? I'll shoot the two years I'm going to spend here, and you'll have an archival piece that you can show future generations of students what it's like to go through the MBA program. Help me fund it. I'll shoot it, I'll edit it, I'll produce it." That's what I did, and it was a really interesting journey for me.

I became a cameraman, not just with stills but I shot Arriflex 16mm film. I learned how to operate an 8 plate steamed back editor, which a lot of people that came out of the film industry know what that is. Today, it's done all digitally, and I've kept my editing chops. By the way, I still edit every weekend just to keep that feel of what it's like because it's a great talent I think to maintain. I found out I was a pretty good editor and a pretty good cameraman. I showed the film to my dad, and he said, "Well, what's the business about this?"

But what happened was that the film was really well received. I'll show you a couple of seconds of it just for the fun of it. It's tough. Anything worthwhile, it's tough. I think that if it wasn't tough, our students and our alumni wouldn't be very happy because it would have been a wasted couple of years. It's tough. I think that we do this deliberately when students arrive here on their first day in class, the first part of September. They can't believe the work— that we're serious about the workload that we provide. They can't believe the number of assignments, the amount of reading, the amount of time, the amount of study group work, the intensity of the classes day after day. It's really tough and it produces pretty high stress levels.

We've got some motion that says what doesn't kill you makes you strong. I'm really looking forward to it. I know it's a lot of hard work, and you hear a lot of stories about the hours that are put in, just how rigorous it is, but I figure I can handle the challenge. Well, how do I feel? That's a good question. It's, um, back in the mid-autumn, you're doing an awful lot of work, and the objective of what you're trying to do isn't always entirely clear.

The big thing that you acquire as the year progresses is the ability to determine what the key issues are and what's extraneous to the problem.

Okay, let's continue down the road. [Music] That's me in the mid-80s getting back in my old BMW 2002, a candy red car I just loved. Anyways, the film was a huge hit, and basically, I started getting calls from companies saying, "You're gonna keep this up, or you're gonna keep doing this kind of corporate documentary stuff?"

I said, "Why?" They said, "Look, there's a lot of interest in this kind of thing." We formed a company called Special Event Television. It ended up being a production platform for the networks in sports television, primarily around hockey shows like Bobby Orr and The Hockey Legend, the original six, and one that became a monster hit, Don Cherry's Grapevine. We owned the format, so if you lived in one of the original six cities like Boston and Detroit, these became immensely popular Saturday programming, etc.

What happened is we sold the company when we were approached. It was my first deal that we started from zero, and we sold it. I took the proceeds of that and started what became The Learning Company, and on and on and on to where I am today. But I never forgot my love of photography.

Now, I've been very fortunate in my business travels. I've been almost everywhere, always taking that camera with me. Sometimes the film camera, sometimes it's digital, but I always have one with me— not just my cell phone, because you need to be able to sculpt images with a lens. You want to have wide angles with you and telephotos. It's not easy to do that with a digital camera, and I'm not against them. I do have images from my digital cameras, but the images you're going to see here are taken primarily with all kinds of different professional cameras.

I have a lot of them now. I've kind of gone back to where I was when I was graduating high school, except now I can afford the best equipment. It's been a really interesting journey, and I've said to my dad, "Look, I want to get back into photography." He's been looking at these images, saying, "This is what you're destined to do. Not to try and make a life out of it. You've pursued business, that's great. Now you can afford cameras; go ahead and shoot your heart's content," which I do. I sell these images and give the profits to young entrepreneurs. I think it's wonderful.

But let me take you on the journey. Let's first look at what a show looks like, and then I'll get into the specific prints. Here we go. Kevin's been an amateur shutterbug since the 70s. Now he's selling his prints and giving the proceeds to help young entrepreneurs. Earlier today, he walked me through his exhibit "40 Years of Photography."

So here's the inside scoop on some of his prints. Well, back in 1980, I had a career as an editor on a steam back. My work was in a darkroom cutting film for the Olympics. I was always interested in pursuing a career as a photographer, so I always had a camera with me. I've taken thousands of images over the years, wherever I've traveled. TV is a career, and my business career has taken me everywhere. This is a collection of my 40-year journey and images from all these different places I've been to.

It's very difficult to curate a show like this, but when we took that theme, all of a sudden it came together. So, there's 40 years of photography here, and obviously, that's gonna be a whole range of not just your experiences, but also different types of cameras. What's the kind of first camera you had?

Well, the first camera I could afford was a Soviet made Zenit II. It was very inexpensive, it had limitations. In fact, I have a photograph of it here in the exhibit, and it was the first time I ever had an SLR, which you shoot through the lens, a 35 millimeter. I took my very first images with that. As I could afford it, I always upgraded my photography equipment. Today, I have many, many different cameras. I shoot with Hasselblad's, Leica's, all kinds of different technology, but it's remarkable in this show. Some of my, in other people's view, my best work comes from my earliest lowest-cost cameras, which shows you photography is an eclectic art. You just don't know when you're capturing an image how great it will be as time passes.

Do you have a favorite out of these images here? Obviously, this is distilling down a lot of your work of the ones you've chosen to show here, or there's something that really jumps out for you? There is one that I took decades ago in an Armenian Church using the light of candles. It's right over here. What I like about this image is it's been reborn in a different way using technology. These candles provided very, very limited light, and this was not digital at the time. This was taken with Tri-X black-and-white film, and because of its limitations, there are two characters in here: a face on the far left and one on the right, which is very haunting that I could never pull from the negative decades ago.

Using today's digital technology, re-scanning the images and working with some great technicians—there were almost 20 people involved in this show—we were able to find that person existing in the silhouette. He was there before we could be. We knew he was there, but we couldn't pull him out, and we were able to do it using this remarkable new technology.

I think now this image is completely different than what I envisioned. If I showed you the original one versus this, this face is very haunting. Actually, the most interesting part of it is the kind of tension in the image is his face. Exactly. So, which is why I find this work so interesting, because it's a combination of what happened that moment decades ago and technology that allowed it to be reborn.

You have, I mean, we look at kind of the range of stuff you've got here when you're out, you're wandering. This is obviously kind of a iconic piece. This piece, the curator who hung this, Peter Hill, this is his favorite piece because he's of this generation. This bust was stolen after he died; you cannot find it anymore. It's a very rare piece, and it captures that moment when Morrison's bust, which is somewhere on this earth, but nobody knows where it's been stolen.

These are very recent. These were taken this year in St. Barths. I call this woman on chains. I love the soft woman on these hard chains. This is just a whimsical picture that happened this summer on Nantucket. The lifeguard actually was taking a bite out of a sandwich. I didn't Photoshop his head out of it, and the more you look at it, the more it raises questions— all kinds of naughty questions.

Oh, you have to go there? I have to, because people have told me about this image now, and I've had lots of emails about it saying it's one of their favorites in the exhibit. Did you take it knowing that he was gonna bend over and take the bite out of this? I started to see it happen because he was eating the sandwich repeatedly, and I thought, "This is interesting." Yeah, his head's gone.

I only had that one frame that I was able to get, but it was it, and I just loved the technology. Now, this is a metallic paper called flex. You can almost touch that wood. Yes, technology in photography now is so remarkable. These are Archival Museum prints. They're very expensive to make, but I'm going to be selling them at this exhibit.

And what are you doing with the money and why are you doing this? I want to support an initiative to support teenage entrepreneurs, so that's what we're promoting here. I'm going to take this exhibit across North America, staying on that theme.

All right, let me show you my favorite one. Please do! This one, this one. This has a very interesting provenance. Here's what happened: it was one of my first digital images, and I lost the original digital file. I had one paper image left of it, re-scanned it, and now it's this. Thank you very much, Amanda.

You know that old classic line, "Every picture tells a story"? Well, of course, it's true! How about the one behind me? I took this picture from 2,000 feet in a giant Sikorsky helicopter over Greenland, working on a show for Discovery Channel called Project Earth.

Now I'm gonna do something really crazy here. Watch this dissolve! Now, let's get into the image. What happens in July and August on the surface of Greenland is rather incredible. It is a complete desolate ice desert. You don't even see any life there at all, but when a dark piece of metal like a meteorite falls out of the sky and hits that white snow, it immediately becomes a heat sink.

In other words, the sun setting on it, it's heating up the ice, which melts to water. Water is blue, and it's darker than the ice, and it absorbs more sun, so it starts to heat up. Within hours, these giant rivers are formed, and they become the size of the Grand Canyon. An entire glacial lake builds up; it gets so heavy in a matter of just a few hours that sometimes, and if you watch them on satellites, it becomes the size of a 2 or 3-mile lake.

Then, BOOM! It's so heavy it cracks the ice, it fissures it, and the water plunges down in a matter of seconds to where the ice hits the rock. Now, this is why you have to care about these lakes—these giant lakes forming—because the more that form, the more of them that cap, that's the process of breaking and having water flush to the bottom. The more the ice moves off, and the glaciers basically are lubricated by this surface of water between themselves and the rock, and they plunge into the oceans.

That’s what we were doing, and the show was starting to investigate. I was actually asked to go to one of the boats so they could film me on the water. The problem with that is I was getting hip to the idea that, wait a second, if this thing collapses, the entire thing will flush like a toilet in a few seconds, and this water will plunge down the fissure along with me, and I'll be found in 10,000 years frozen like a woolly mammoth! So I said to the cameraman, "I'm not doing that, buddy."

They wrapped up the soundman to look like me, and off he went in that boat. Believe me, he was scared; he was shaking in his boots. They were only out there for a few minutes to get that shot, but a few days later, that lake disappeared. Had we been on that, they would have disappeared too.

That's the crazy stuff documentary filmmakers like to do, but you've got to be hip to what they're thinking. I love making TV, but I'm not risking my life for it. At least I want to reduce the risk. What a phenomenal shoot that was! We were in 38 different countries in 11 months, so basically I took a lot of images. Here's more of them. [Music]

You know, I've always believed if you want to be successful in business, you have to have the discipline of what business is all about. It's very binary: either you make or you lose money. It's very black and white, but to be successful in it, you need the chaos of art. You want to combine the two things together, find your artistic side— the yin and the yang, the left and the right side of the brain.

Find whatever that is for you: is it music, is it photography, is it painting? Whatever it is, you've got to explore that while you're focusing on growing a business or being an entrepreneur. They fit together. The better you are at blending them, the more successful you'll be.

I hope you really enjoyed this little journey into photography with me. I've been doing it for a very long time; it really helps you think about what life is all about. I love making money, you know that, but I love the arts too. Blending—that's what it's all about. Yin and yang. Until next time, wonderful on photography. Take care of my friends.