Photography legend Ted Grant to be honoured for life’s work
Ted Grant — the man many call the father of Canadian photojournalism — returns from his home in Victoria to Ottawa to receive the Order of Canada
Ted Grant’s first published photo was of a stock car race, printed in the Ottawa Citizen in September 1951. Sixteen months earlier, Grant’s wife, Irene, gave him a camera for his birthday, and he had since hardly ever been without it. When he approached the Citizen with photos of a track mishap that left a driver injured, the paper eagerly bought his work.
“I could hardly wait to get home and tell my wife I was going to have a picture published and I was paid $3!” he recalls.
On Friday, 65 years later, the man regarded by many as the father of Canadian photojournalism returns to Ottawa from his home in Victoria to receive the Order of Canada.
He’ll spend some time here visiting his son Scott — also a photographer — but can’t linger for long at his old haunts; the 86-year-old has to get back to a feature he’s shooting on seniors keeping fit in Saanich, B.C.
He chokes up with emotion recounting the phone call he received from Rideau Hall last fall, informing him of the honour.
“I totally lost it. I was coughing and crying, and if I have any difficulty (at the ceremony), it will be to not stand there, crying.
“It’s unbelievable. I look at it as, ‘I’m just a photographer,’ but people go ‘Yeah, but what a photographer, and the assignments you’ve done and the places you’ve travelled.’ “Everything from birth to death.” That’s no exaggeration. He’s photographed at least 100 births, and also documented Sue Rodriguez’s right-to-die campaign.
His best-known image, though, is of a young Pierre Trudeau sliding down a banister at the Château Laurier, during the 1968 Liberal leadership convention, his arms raised above his head.
When Grant took it, the other photographers on hand had already gone outside to get ready to shoot Trudeau getting into a car to leave. Grant decided to hang back a bit.
“The way I operate is to be the first there and last to leave. That gives you all kinds of little opportunities that others don’t have.”
Ironically, it was a childhood eye condition that contributed to his mastery of the lens. A weak right eye when he was just seven or eight led a doctor to recommend he wear an eye-patch over his left eye, to help strengthen the right one.
But when he arrived at school wearing the patch, his teacher, suspecting some kind of pirate-inspired tomfoolery, insisted he take it off.
As a result, the right eye never improved, and he never developed any depth perception. In other words, he sees the world in two dimensions, like a photograph.
“Medical people have said to me, ‘Ted, you have something over all the people with two perfect eyes: you see the scene as a flat photograph. And that’s probably helped you see and capture a lot of the things that you did.’”
Grant’s body of work is staggering in both scope and size.
The Ted Grant Collection of photographs at Library and Archives Canada includes 280,000 images, the largest collection of a single photographer in Canadian history.
The National Gallery of Canada, meanwhile, is home to a further 100,000 of his photos. He has no idea of the total number of pictures he’s taken in the past 65 years, except to estimate it’s in the millions.
He’s photographed countless political leaders, including John Diefenbaker, Joe Clark, John F. Kennedy, Robert Stanfield, David Ben Gurion and former Ottawa mayor Charlotte Whitton. He was the official photographer of the Ottawa Rough Riders (son Scott is currently the Redblacks’ photographer).
He photographed sprinter Ben Johnson crossing the finish line ahead of American Carl Lewis at the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul. The caption accompanying the photo in the 1993 book Treasures of the National Archives of Canada states that it “epitomizes the photojournalist as consummate thief, stealing for posterity a fleeting moment in time and space. It was not a matter of luck and motor drive to record the moment of victory of a race that lasted less than ten seconds.
Grant studied the track during the heats the day before the final, then claimed a vantage point on a low wall near the finish line five hours before the race began. With the eye of an artist, the concentration of a surgeon, and the reflexes of a cat, Grant produced this quintessential portrait of what, for at least a short time, was a proud moment in Canadian sport.”
He covered the Six Day War, between Israel and Egypt, Jordan and Syria in 1967.
He’s shot features in Africville, N.S., and the French Riviera, covered Munich’s Oktoberfest, bullfighting in Spain, and children of Chernobyl. He’s been to and photographed just about everywhere in Canada.
For one Christmastime assignment, he flew in a CC-130 Hercules cargo plane in Canada’s Far North, dropping presents for children in remote communities. For 30 years, beginning in 1969, he photographed every Summer and Winter Olympics, Commonwealth Games and Pan Am Games. A residential street in Hunt Club, Ted Grant Private, is named in his honour.
He has published more than a handful of books — on such varied subjects as working cowboys, women in medicine and politicians’ residences — and his photos have appeared in arguably the three most seminal modern-day collections of Canadian photography: A Day in the Life of Canada, Between Friends/Entre Amis, and Call Them Canadians.
Additionally, a retrospective book of his work, Ted Grant: Sixty Years of Legendary Photojournalism, was recently published, in conjunction with a 2014 exhibition at the Leica Gallery in New York.
“I have met all kinds of people of society and royalty and everything else,” he says, “and always try to be polite and respectful of who they are. The guy lying in the gutter, you treat him and speak to him in a kind and simple way, no different than you would speak to the Queen in a kind and simple way.”
And while Order of Canada recipients are asked not to bring cam- eras to the ceremony, he’s not sure he’ll be able to abide that request, insisting that the unobtrusive black Leica he’ll have slung over his left shoulder won’t be a camera, but a “just-in-case instrument.”
“I’m there BECAUSE of my camera,” he insists.
“So I’ll have it, just in case. Just in case there’s a mega-earthquake and everything is falling down and people are running all over the place, I’ll use my just-in-case instrument as a camera, because of the earthquake. Not because of the awards.”
I totally lost it. I was coughing and crying, and if I have any difficulty (at the ceremony), it will be to not stand there, crying.