Like many of you, I am slightly obsessed with Googling former acquaintances, such as people I went to high school with. In the case of people I didn’t like, there’s a nasty part of me that wants to learn they’re in jail or otherwise miserable.
Some people I Google are from more recent times, like the guy who gave me my first job in Montreal. It was 1987, and this guy hired me to be a “photographer’s assistant” at his studio. He specialized in high school graduation photos. He differentiated himself from the other photographers by providing (for an extra fee) a second set of “casual” portraits outside of the traditional “cap & gown” stuff.
He was very good at it, and his business was thriving. So he had decided to expand – quickly. By my third week on the job he was sending me off to schools on my own. I was no longer the photographer’s assistant, I was the photographer.
As I said, the guy was good at what he did. He was a natural clown, a hit with the teenagers. He would photograph a dozen or more people every hour, each getting three or four cap & gown poses and another three or four casual poses. He made a huge profit by selling armloads of highly-priced prints. It bought him an expensive house on Nun’s Island, three cars (including an antique two-seater roadster), a trophy wife, a sailboat, and real estate investments all over the West Island of Montreal.
So there’s me – with less than three weeks training – expected to go out and produce portraits at the same speed and quality as he did. Right.
It was tough work. I’d be at the studio at 7:00 AM, loading up the van with equipment, and at the school by 8:00. I’d be shooting by 8:30. It would be busiest at lunch time, so I’d inhale a sandwich during a ten minute break before noon, and would work through until 3:00 or 3:30 in the afternoon.
Then I would pack up and head back to the studio where I would deal with the exposed film and do paperwork. I wasn’t allowed to leave until 5:00 PM, even if I had done all my work, because “business hours are from 9 to 5” (regardless of the fact that I’d been working since 7:00 AM and had only taken a ten minute lunch break). Sometimes there was so much administrative work that I wouldn’t get out until 6:00 PM or later.
One day, just before 5:00 PM, he announced that he was really tired and didn’t want to shoot the photos for an award ceremony at one of his high schools that night. (He had agreed to shoot the ceremony in exchange for getting the portrait contract for the school.) So he “asked” me to fill in for him. I had 90 minutes to go home, change into a suit, get back to the studio, pack up the equipment, and find my way to some auditorium in Laval. I didn’t get home until almost 11:00 that night, but next morning at 7:00 I was back at the studio gearing up for another day.
I didn’t get any extra pay for that evening gig, nor even much of a “thank you.” Although the guy was really popular with the students, he was a self-centered prick with a massive ego and a complete lack of empathy for those around him. He initially paid me only $250 a week, but after a few weeks he bumped it up to a whopping $375 after I mentioned I was starving. You see, he was one of those “entrepreneurial” types who figured he had to drag me down and then build me up again in his image, and that I had to pay my dues. If I survived, maybe I’d have a crack at a big and rich life like his, or so went his logic.
I stuck with it because I needed the job and because part of me thought I might actually learn something. I clung to it even when his ego was unbearable and he made me feel utterly stupid. Nothing I could do for this guy was ever good enough.
I didn’t complain about the long hours because we had a “gentleman’s agreement” that I would work my ass off from September until school closed for the Christmas holidays, and in the new year (the slow season) I could take it easy and work part time (at the same pay) until things got busy again in the late spring.
But sales dropped. I tried to do a good job, I really did. And I didn’t do so badly. Most of my work was decent, some of it even good, but I couldn’t match this guy in either speed or quality. While I’d be at one school struggling, he’d be at another whizzing through it like it was nothing. He expected that having double the number of photographers meant he’d get double the profit. His plan was to hire even more people to follow in his footsteps so eventually he could just sit back and rule his empire. “I won’t be doing this in ten years” he said to me from behind the shutter one day.
But it didn’t work out, so a week before Christmas he fired me and that was it.
I few years later I noticed that he had closed the big expensive studio and moved to a smaller one in a cheaper part of town. I’ve never seen any advertising or Web sites for his operation. I saw him once in the early 90s at the Atwater Market but I did a quick 180 and went the other way.
Today I Googled him. I found a handful of references to other people with a similar name, but only one hit referred to him. It was from some kid’s blog, dated 2001, in which the kid complains about something stupid that the grad photographer had done – something about retouching the posing chair or whatever. The kid then wrote “stupid <that guy’s name>.”
And there’s my nasty little revenge. Fifteen years later, in a world transformed by the Internet, where a Google search of my name returns more than 150 direct hits, this guy is still snapping grad photos in obscurity and his only presence on the Web is a one-liner where someone calls him stupid.