Kevin O'Leary: 40 Years of Photography

Amateur shutterbug since the 70s, now he's selling his prints and giving the proceeds to help young Canadian entrepreneurs. Earlier today, he walked me through his exhibit, "40 Years of Photography." It's at First Canadian Place here in Toronto. So here's the inside scoop on some of his prints.

Interviewer: So why photography for you? How, when did you get interested?

Photographer: Well, back in 1980, I had a career as an editor on a Steenbeck. I worked for Hockey Night in Canada for a company I started called Special Men Television. My work was in a darkroom cutting film for the Olympics, working on Hockey Night in Canada. 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, and 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.

Interviewer: What's the kind of first camera you had?

Photographer: You're really old, so it's really a brownie. Well, the first camera I could afford was a Soviet-made Zenit II. It was very inexpensive and had limitations. In fact, I have a photograph of it here in the exhibit. 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 Hasselblads, Leicas, all kinds of different technology.

But it's remarkable in this show — some of my, and 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.

Interviewer: As time passed, 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 does something really jump out for you?

Photographer: There is one that I took decades ago in an Armenian church using the light of candles. It's right over here, and what I like about this image is it's been reborn in a different way using technology. These candles provide a 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's 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, rescanning the images and working with some great technicians—there are almost 20 people involved in this show—we were able to find that person existed in the silhouette. He was there before; we knew he was there, but we couldn't pull him out. We were able to do it using this remarkable new technology, and I think now this image is completely different than what I envisioned.

If I showed you the original one, this face is very haunting. Actually, the most interesting part of it is this kind of attention in the image; it’s his face.

Interviewer: 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.

Photographer: You have—I mean, we look at kind of the range of stuff you've got here. When you're out, you're wandering, and this is obviously kind of an iconic piece.

Interviewer: This piece, the curator who hung this, Peter, he’ll—this is his favorite piece because he's of this generation.

Photographer: 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. Barts. I call this "Woman on Chains."

I love the soft woman on these hard chains, and 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.

Interviewer: Oh, you have to go there.

Photographer: 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 the sandwich?

Photographer: I started to see it happen because he was eating the sandwich repeatedly, and I thought this is interesting. Yeah, his head's gone, and I only had that one frame that I was able to get of it. But I just loved the technology now. This is a metallic paper called Flex; you can almost touch that wood. Yes, technology and photography now are so remarkable.

These are our Kaiba museum prints; they're very expensive to make, but I'm going to be selling them at this exhibit.

Interviewer: And what are you doing with the money? Why are you doing this?

Photographer: I'm on to support an initiative that the CBC is launching to support me—teenage entrepreneurs. So you'll be able to go to the website starting October 23rd, put a three-minute video up there, tell me if you're in grade 11 or 12 why you deserve $5,000 to start your entrepreneurial journey, and I'll write you the check. So that's what we're promoting here, and then I'm going to take this exhibit across North America, staying on that theme.

Interviewer: All right, let me show you my favorite one.

Photographer: Please do! This one has a very interpretive 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, we re-scanned it, and now it's this.

Photographer: Thank you very much, Amanda!