Toronto-based photographer Simon Willms’ recent series ‘Minor League’ takes us inside the world of talented young ballplayers in the Dominican Republic. The images capture the determination-and vulnerability-of boys who have grown up with dreams of making it in the big leagues. Willms documents a pivotal point in their lives that pause between childhood and adulthood-when everything is still possible. The formal portraits offer fascinating insight into the boys world on the island, where they live and where they play. The final compositions are spare and direct, brought into focus with an old Graflex four-by-five camera.
Jane Heller is a Montreal-based photographer. A graphic designer and art director by training, Heller switched gears after twenty years in the industry and went back to college to study photography. Her editorial work has been published in Dwell, Glamour, Fashion, Bicycling Magazine, Arrive Magazine, Report on Business Magazine (Canada), Red Bull (Austria).
Tell me how this touchingly intimate series began?
‘The project began with Pat. Pat is a friend of my friend’s mother. I would see her every year at Christmas gatherings. A very Christian lady with a wild sense of humor, I was told she had a pink bedroom. I was intrigued and asked to photograph her one day. Initially it was going to be a simple portrait but I ended up staying for four hours, photographing everything from her bathroom to the shoes in her closet. In those four hours she opened up to me and told me her amazing life story. I photographed Pat a year before she sold most of her belongings and moved to another province to live with her cousin at the age of 87. This experience has inspired me to create an ongoing series: to capture that fragile moment in time for most people over 80 years of age. I want to present them in all their glory amongst their prized possessions. And by doing so, help tell their life stories’.
There is something overtly feminine about your pictures, which I enjoy. How do you think being a woman influences how you explore a subject?
‘Definitely. How I see the world is part of who I am. It depends on how you define feminine, but for me, it’s less about lace and frills, and more about emotions and feelings. I like to see my photos as an entry point to a space or a place with layers of meaning’.
Liam Sharp splits his time shooting for editorial and commercial clients in Canada and the UK. Born in London, Liam moved to Toronto as a child and has leveraged his dual citizenship to build a career in both places. His new micro-site focuses on his series of drag queens taken backstage at various clubs in the village, during and after drag shows across Toronto. Interestingly enough, Liam has grappled with the release of them: ‘I’m afraid to send them out. I don’t want to be known as the drag queen photographer. The dilemma of a commercial photographer’s struggle, especially in Canada, is that Canadians are so literal. Internationally, the depth and range of what is accepted is so much greater. It’s understood that it’s not me that these pictures represent, rather, an interesting plot that’s graphic and photographic’.
He describes this experience as being in the trenches and how it put him right out of his comfort zone (he’s a married man of 25 years, with two adult kids). ‘I had to convince myself they were women. I told them how beautiful they were and gave them everything they wanted’. They in return gave Liam what he wanted. And then some. After one shoot, (the woman in the fluffy white collar), grabbed him by the shoulders and kissed him square on the lips. These intimate portraits of people straining to assert their identities are remarkably fresh and layered. All the subtext of their life struggles are brushed upon, and the moment at which these images are captured hits their strength.
