Kamakura, Japan

Closed for Season Reason Freezin, 2026

DAVID CRONENBERG, Toronto 1990

Director David Cronenberg is a hometown hero. Born in Toronto in 1941, he made his early name with the Canadian version of “video nasties” – films like Shivers (1975), Rabid (1977) and The Brood (1979), and basically codified the horror subgenre of “body horror”. He had perfected this kind of film in 1988 with Dead Ringers, why which point he’d also moved into then then-thriving realm of art house cinema – smart, edgy, low- to middle-budget pictures that attracted considerable critical attention (he was already the topic of academic treatises and book-length overviews like The Shape of Rage: The Films of David Cronenberg), did the festival circuit and had long post-release lives in rep cinemas and on video. This is the point where I met Cronenberg for the first time, when he was my subject for a photo shoot for a long-gone lifestyle magazine.

It would have been perfect if my 1990 portrait session with David Cronenberg had been to promote Crash, his adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel about (literal) auto erotica, but that wouldn’t come out for six more years. My assignment was to photograph Cronenberg with a C4 Corvette – a car that the gearhead director had been loaned by my client, Country Estate magazine, to review for a feature in the glossy magazine, a sort of aspirational Canadian clone of Britain’s venerable Country Life. We arranged to do the shoot on Sunnyside Beach, not far from my Parkdale studio, and I showed up early to do some Polaroid tests to make sure I’d placed my single light in the right spot.

My idea for my 1990 portrait of David Cronenberg was simple – to get him near or on the signature bonnet of the C4 Corvette he’d been loaned, and to use my bounced flash to knock the sky behind him down a stop or so; a job made easier by the electronic leaf shutter on my newly acquired Bronica SQ-A medium format camera and a rented wide-angle lens. I apparently had somebody assisting me for this shoot – among the first times I’d ever work with an assistant – and I handed them my Nikon F3 to take some behind the scenes pics of the shoot. (Also the first time I’d ever done that sort of thing. Unfortunately I have no memory of who it was. They even got a shot of the art director of Country Estate checking out my framing – probably the first time I had a client on set.) Thankfully the sky that day was suitably overcast, and I was able to get some ominous detail in the clouds on the slide film I shot. Somewhere at the start of one roll I produced an accidental double-exposure that, though the client had no use for it, still amuses me enough today to want to reimagine it in black and white.

Cronenberg’s career would keep on building (though Country Estate wouldn’t make it more than another year or so into the new decade.) He’d become something like a mainstream filmmaker, with films like A History of Violence (2005) and Eastern Promises (2007), and he has just releases his latest film – a return to body horror called The Shrouds. I’d photograph him two more times (three if you count a press conference for Naked Lunch, which I don’t), but more about those shoots later.