In fact, Bill Taylor has been a photographer for several years and his work has been published - not least here - and exhibited. He's also a fine writer and was writing finely even when an ability to do was not required of staff hired by those marvellous objects we used to call local newspapers. Let him take up the story of how his love of the still image has developed (and if you like what you find, treat yourself to his series of short stories about the earlier stages of a County Durham man's life in North America) ...Funny thing, ambition. I’ve never much had any, except perhaps for a vague yearning to be a rock drummer. That, of course, never happened and never will. Charlie Watts can stop shivering in his brothel-creepers/winklepickers/corrective, anti-slip footwear for the elderly or whatever it is he wears.
He’s even older than I am and I believe, though definitions vary, that I absolutely should now count myself as old.
Okay, I DO have an ambition – to keep getting older.
On the other hand, if 70 is the new 50 and 50 is the new 30, then I’m still just a pup. That piece of wisdom comes from one of the specialists monitoring my prostate cancer.
Anyway, enough about me. This is supposed to be all about… me. Oh yes, and ambition. I was lucky enough to fall into journalism and find it a comfortable fit.
English was the only thing I could do at school without much effort. I didn’t see much point in applying myself to learn anything else and I could have paid the price for that in later life.
Instead, after being chivvied out into the world at 16 and two years selling shirts, men’s underwear and “semi-precious glass” cufflinks in a department store, I found a reasonably if not overwhelmingly renumerative home in newspapers.
I never set out to be a photographer. I always say I was – in all honesty, I can no longer say “am” – a journalist by profession and a photographer by choice. Except I didn’t really choose it.
I was also lucky enough at the Toronto Star to fall into a travel-writing job. It worried my dad that I would roam hither and yon, doing no work as far as he could see and being paid for it.
He half-believed I was working some kind of scam and would eventually get caught. It was harder work than he thought – you try sitting on a beach in the sun and deciding if the sea is azure or simply turquoise – especially as I had to shoot my own pictures. And I hardly knew one end of a camera from the other.
Fortunately, the Star also paid for the film. So I’d click haphazardly away in the hope that I’d get one usable image from each roll of 36. It was hit and miss, at best.
But, as time went on, I found I was getting better at it. I still had no idea how to work a camera, other than put it on automatic, point it and go click, but without actually knowing how, I was beginning to produce decent pictures.
For Christmas, 2003, my wife Lesley bought me my first digital camera, a clunky 4-megapixel thing about the size and weight of a house-brick. It was new technology and therefore scary. I circled it suspiciously for a few days and then, greatly daring, picked it up, pointed it and went click.
And THEN – and this was a real revelation – I was able to see instantly what I’d shot. And if it wasn’t any good, shoot it again.
Fifteen years later, I have a much more sophisticated camera, still set on automatic, and I can look, fairly objectively, at the images I produce and say, “Yeah, that’s good.”
I’ve come to think of myself as a photographer. There’s not much money in it but the satisfaction is endless.
What this is leading to – you knew it had to have a point, right? – is that Monsieur Salut, Colin Randall, is not only my friend of longest-standing (we were in school together and he was kicked out, too, for lack of application) but also the most generous of mortals.
When he heard that I’d finally made the effort to re-do my photography website he offered me space here to announce it to the world.
So, world, if you’re still with me, may I crave your indulgence and invite you to click on the link and see for yourself: www.billtaylor.ca
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