A portrait of an artist is always their subject. We may know the photographer from the photograph in the way they see the world and the artifacts that they make, in the moments captured, the fractions of time captured eternally on the page. The portrait is really a self-portrait, something like a duet, a conversation made through the eyes as we see and be seen by the camera, the Third Eye of this physical realm. The keeper of the capture: the photograph, and the photographer is s/he who knows the world as a place where time stops.
It is here in the photograph as they fill the book that we sense a pattern, a rhythm of life as it is being lived by the photographer and all who come before the lens, on their way to and from, the journey a series of destinations fulfilled as the world turns. The pages turn, one after another and we look and think, “Who are these people whose lives are but ink spilled across the page?”
Stolen Moments: The Photographs of Ronny Jaques by Pamela Fiori (Glitterati Incorporated) presents a powerful collection of portraits taken by Jaques throughout his illustrious career at Harper’s Bazaar, Town & Country, Holiday, and Gourmet. The book is edited to show the mind of the man who gave himself to this medium at a time when the power of the glossy page was at a premium. Whether photographing WeeGee at work, looking through the viewfinder as he expertly balances the camera with two hands while a cigarette jaunts out the side of his mouth or photographing Pola Negri sitting beside a framed portrait of Rudolph Valentino, all moody black and whites, Jaques photographs reveal a talent for the soul vibrating deep inside.
Perhaps this is an expression of Jaques soul itself. Born in 1910 in England, Jaques was the son of a bookmaker who was later run over by a train in the London Underground. Jacques recalled, “Scotland Yard got after him, so he may have committed suicide.” When he was nine, his mother closed the business and moved the family to Canada. At the age of 14, Jaques moved to New York where he was a runner on Wall Street til the Crash of 29 came. In 1932, he decided to go bicycling in Europe. “I don’t think we had a bath in two years,” he recalled.
“It cost us fifty dollars a month to live, to eat and occasionally go to the opera. We had a wonderful experience, but I knew it was time to get serious. ‘I think I’ll see if I can become a photographer.’ Up to that point, I’d been fooling around with a little Kodak camera called a Hawk-Eye.” After eight months at the Regent Street Polytechnic in London, he returned to Toronto and opened the Ronny Jaques Studio at 24 Grenville Street. It is here Carmel Snow of Harper’s Bazaar found him in the mid-1940s.
It was here that his career began to flourish as Jaques crossed paths with artists and models, writers and musicians, actors and socialites, the beautiful people. His photographs embody the luxury that is life itself, the way in which a moment of pleasure lasts a lifetime. Consider his photographs of Marlon Brando, which appear together in the book. It is a moment with a man, the first of his kind, a man who would launch an archetype. Jaques presents Brando as he does each of his subjects, in a moment of freedom lived, breathed in and out, a connection shared, just between us. Stolen Moments, indeed.
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