Portraits of Glenn Gould Shine Light on one of Canada’s Great Photographers
April 15, 2020
The Glenn Gould Foundation is grateful to Ronald Desmarais, son of the great Canadian portrait photographer Gabriel Desmarais, for sharing with us a series of rarely seen photographs of the young Glenn Gould, at the very beginning of his international career.
This gallery of photographs date from a 1956 session, around the time that Gould’s ground-breaking recording of The Goldberg Variations catapulted him to international stardom. Most likely taken at the CBC’s fabled Parliament Street studios in Toronto, the photographs capture the intensity and musical absorption of the young artist at the height of his powers. They also provide a gateway to rediscovering one of the most significant photographic talents of the 1940s through the 1980s, Gabriel Desmarais, whose career also gave us powerful images of some of the most significant artists and public figures of our time. We’re delighted to share with you not only these brilliant images of Glenn Gould, but also a gallery highlighting other notables taken by a photographer widely known as Gaby.
Gabriel Desmarais was born in a working-class family in Marieville, Québec, in 1926. He started his career in the arts by making and selling pencil portraits of his schoolmates. He graduated to photography when his mother gave him a Browning camera for his experimentations.
His only formal tuition in photography was a correspondence course he took from the American School of Photography of Chicago in 1945.
In 1947, he opened his first studio in Montreal. Some of biggest local and European stars of the day soon flocked to sit for Gaby, including Charles Aznavour, Oscar Peterson, Charles Trenet, and all the local names from the world of entertainment.
His rise was meteoric, thanks in part to Ten Commandments director Cecil B. DeMille who opened the doors of Hollywood to the young Canadian photographer, following a successful sitting in 1957 arranged by Gaby’s agent.
His reputation spread around the world after Montréal mayor Jean Drapeau asked him to photograph VIPs who visited the city, including Queen Elizabeth II. At the same time, he became the go-to photographer for Canadian politicians, from Louis Saint-Laurent to Pierre Trudeau.
He started travelling the globe to photograph such personalities as Harold McMillan, Louis Mountbatten, Jean Cocteau, Jawaharlal Nehru, Bertrand Russell, Robert Oppenheimer and, of course, Glenn Gould, while pursuing a top-flight career in Hollywood.
His work was shown around the world, including an exhibition in Moscow at the height of the Cold War, as well as shows in Los Angeles, New York, and across Canada, including a solo exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum in 1959.
In 1990, he conceived a massive project called L’avenir de l’humanité for which he asked nine of the leading thinkers of the time, whom he had photographed, to share their thoughts on the future of mankind. It was to be his final opus.
Like many serious portrait photographers of his day, long before the advent of digital photography as a serious medium, Gaby worked in large formats – with huge view cameras that used either 5”x7” or 8”x10” sheet film negatives, allowing a richness of tone and detail and the freedom to make big enlargements that would not be possible with the more popular 35 mm cameras used by photojournalists and many street photographers. In studio, he often used continuous or “hot lights” of many types which allowed the sculpting of the illumination on his subjects to create the remarkable depth and dimensionality of his images. Strobes (flash) were used by him primarily to capture action shots, as in his photograph of legendary hockey star Maurice “Rocket” Richard.
He died from cancer on 21 May 1991, in Montréal. Gabriel Desmarais was married to Lorraine Lapierre, with whom he had a son and two daughters.
