THROUGH THE LENS OF HISTORY
Photojournalist marks Canada 150 with retrospective on ‘the greatest country in the world’
To be an old newsman is to carry around an anvil of experiences — on saggy shoulders, in cobwebbed memory, in fat clipping files — an archive of the fleeting, pressed in paper and ink.
Paul Taillefer was a photojournalist for about 40 years, starting at age 16 at Le Droit with a camera, a Speed Graphic, straight out of a Bogart movie — with its massive flashbulb, accordion body and strap-on grip.
He’s sitting at a desk in a 23rd floor apartment, surrounded by all these files and black-and-white photographs.
At 93 years old, his hair white but with amazing buoyancy, he’s unburdened himself of all that news coverage the most suitably way he could: by writing a 500-page book about the history of Canada, more than half of which he actually lived.
“I enjoyed every moment of my life as a photojournalist,” he said one day this week. “It was like following history in the making.”
Taillefer was born on York Street and grew up on nearby Heney, one of nine kids, in a childhood that sounds straight out of a Brian Doyle story. You lived outside, became bilingual by osmosis, accepted the EnglishFrench elasticity that is Canada, yearned for something better than Lowertown.
He said his father, Alfred, was a government printer and yanked him out of school at age 16 to work in the printing shop at Le Droit, the French-language daily.
But it was the newsroom that attracted him, allowing him to fiddle with their one camera, the Speed Graphic that could anchor a boat. He was hooked.
So he shot and shot and shot: politicians, sports, fires, elections, and began to think in pictures.
“As a photojournalist, you dream of how you are going to illustrate the event.”
He was sent to the historic Quebec conference in 1944, photographing Churchill and Roosevelt, the same year he joined the Canadian army for a two-year stint. Then he was off to Montreal, to work for the Herald, then the Star for 26 years until it folded in 1979. He yet remembers the hour and day.
Among his most memorable assignments was covering the bulk of the 45-day visit by Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip to Canada in 1959, which included the official opening of the Saint Lawrence Seaway.
It was a different era. Just off an assignment in Cyprus and in a hurry, he asked his Montreal desk to order him a tuxedo so he could work a formal dinner for the Queen and Prince. They did so, but forgot the shoes, so he was stuck with a brown pair, a fashion faux pas that did not escape the scrutiny of Montreal Mayor Sarto Fournier. “When he saw me, he gave me hell.”
He has shot every prime minister from Mackenzie King to Pierre Trudeau and has stories about each, dozens of mayors and premiers, and probably took more photos at Expo 67 than any other living human being.
It was during Canada’s centennial, in fact, that he first had the idea for the book — but life and five kids got in the way, not to mention the FLQ and René Lévesque and all this endless, inconvenient news. So, four years ago, he finally started to bear down. What good were all these files, he wondered, unless he did something with them?
“Pictures are no good if they’re stuck in your camera. This was the same attitude.”
A photo was one thing, a book quite another. So he simplified things with a format: he chose one event from each year and wrote a short summary in English and French, giving us Canada 1867-2017, 150 Years of History, A Yearly Chronicle.
Choosing the single event was often the toughest part, he says, admitting to a tendency to stick to the positive, leaving out gruesome crime and natural disasters.
So we have tales of Barbara Ann Scott (1948) and Newfoundland joining Canada (1949) and the Avro Arrow (1953), the Canada-Russia hockey series (1972) and Terry Fox (1981), the Blue Jays’ World Series win (1992) and Obama to Ottawa (2009) as opposed to a catalogue of failure and misery. “We’re the greatest country in the world.”
No argument there. We’re flipping through photos that show a younger Taillefer, in aviator shades, with long ’70s hair and an open shirt, or the dapper one with a pencil moustache and a zoot suit.
“Television is fleeting. It’s there and it’s gone,” he says.
“Photography is different. You keep these things.”
Sure you do. And spend a life filling in the picture.