Ted Grant, shown at middle in 2008, is surrounded by some of the many images he captured in a decades-long career as a photojournalist. Check the gallery at the end of this article to see each photo in detail and learn more about them.All black-and-white photos by Ted Grant, courtesy of Thelma Fayle; 2008 portraits by Deddeda Stemler/The Globe and Mail/Courtesy of Thelma Fayle
Thelma Fayle is the author of Ted Grant: Sixty Years of Legendary Photojournalism (Heritage House, 2013).
As a young photojournalist in 1955, Ted Grant was among the nine million people in 69 countries to see The Family of Man, a travelling photo display. Curated by Edward Jean Steichen, director of photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the massive work was a turning point in the history of photography appreciation. The show was composed of 503 photos from 68 countries, taken by 273 photographers. Steichen’s goal was to create a snapshot of the human experience and to validate the role of photojournalism.
Ted never forgot the inspiring effect of The Family of Man exhibition. The black and white images were full of magic for him.
After 60 years in the business, he left behind a collection of over 300,000 photographs housed in the Ted Grant Collections at Library and Archives Canada and the National Gallery.
He received the Order of Canada, an Honorary Doctorate of Laws degree from the University of Victoria, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian Association of Photographers & Illustrators, and both a Gold and Silver medal for Photographic Excellence from the National Film Board of Canada. A retrospective of his life work was presented at the Leica Gallery on Broadway in New York in 2014.
Ted Grant, a man known by many as “the father of Canadian photojournalism,” died of complications from hip surgery in Victoria, B.C., on April 19 at age 90.
Mr. Grant was there to capture Pierre Trudeau's iconic slide down a banister at the 1968 Liberal leadership convention.
Most Canadians do not know Ted Grant’s name, but they know his iconic shots.
For those who remember the intelligent, confident, and playful nature of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, Grant’s single iconic photograph presents us with a symbolic facsimile of the man’s entire extraordinary public life. How many prime ministers, kings, queens or presidents have you ever seen hop on a railing and slide down – clean, completely balanced, with arms outstretched? The subject is clearly a man of character, a free spirit having fun – and not in bad shape either! He doesn’t look afraid of falling and embarrassing himself.
Although best remembered for these candid images of political leaders and dignitaries – Ronald Reagan, Jackie Kennedy, Margaret Thatcher, David Ben Ben-Gurion, Tommy Douglas, Sue Rodriguez and notably Ben Johnson’s short-lived moment of glory in 1988 – Grant is less known for his contribution to respectfully memorializing working class Canadians.
Anyone with the right press pass can land gigs photographing the upper crust. But all of the press passes in the world would not admit you to some of the places Ted Grant shot. “Respectful humility” is the required passport. Ted possessed it and made good use of his natural instinct in working with people.
Mothering in the North, 1969.
If you spent a few days looking at even a small portion of the hundreds of thousands of Grant’s archived images, you would make your own discoveries in the material being cared for by Library and Archives Canada.
In the carefully numbered boxes of negatives, you would find story-upon-story of the lives of uniquely-skilled, Canadians from 1953 to 2013.
From the 1960s alone, you would find: a series Ted did on male nurses; early anti-smoking rallies on Parliament Hill; profiles of the rigorous training for the first “Meter-Maids” (early police women); the regimens of ice fisherman in the north; training boot camp for the RCMP; a collection of photographs of students at a hairdressing school; blue-collar workers in the Canadian National Railway (CNR) workshops. The list goes on. There is even hilarious documentation of young kids in the 60s (boomers now) skateboarding in Ontario.
Ted captured the shining souls of every stripe of person in every region of the country – and little is posed.
Average Canadians clearly enlivened his own heart, in a culture where celebrity is usually featured and not much recognition is normally given to the pomp-less, sweaty working lives of “regular people.”
As one of his many lasting legacies, Grant focused on the people who made Canada what it is today.
Men at work: A B.C. logger sorting timber in 1967, and Nova Scotia lobstermen playing cards in 1968. In his photography, Grant captured the inner lives of blue-collar Canadians.
Men in politics: At left, former Canadian prime minister John Diefenbaker smiles at a garden party after being called 'Grandpa' by baby Catherine Clark, shown with parents Joe Clark (who then held Mr. Diefenbaker's old job as Progressive Conservative leader) and Maureen McTeer. And right, Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba gets a parliamentary tour in Ottawa with a Mountie and Canadian civil servant.
In the 1930s, people called it a lazy eye. Ted Grant had one.
The doctor gave him a patch to wear over his good eye, intending to strengthen the weaker one. Ted headed back to class at Toronto’s Franklin Public School, where he was promptly told by his teacher to “take that thing off.” She thought he was being the class clown.
What began as a difficulty in his childhood turned out to be an asset for the renowned photojournalist. Being a one-eyed photographer never held Ted back for a second.
Fast forward a few years, and if Malcolm Gladwell’s theory in his book Outliers is correct – that mastery of a skill requires 10,000 hours of practice – the intensity of Grant’s shooting regimen in early years might have been a factor in his ultimate success.
He completed those hours of photography practice before he was 25 years old – not bad considering he only received his first camera, a $30 Argus A2 35 mm, from his new wife Irene when he was 21.
She wasn’t too pleased with him at the start of his career when he used their kitchen as a dark room one night and turned her baking tins black. He hightailed it out the next morning to buy her a replacement set.
Grant in an undated portrait.
By the time Ted was 35, he had learned to trust his gut and to recognize the best lighting by instinct. He did not need to take time to think about F-stops. His motto became: “shoot first and ask questions later”. He worked for a steady stream of newspapers and on photo-essay assignments for the National Film Board stills division. In later years, he was fondly remembered by many professional photojournalists for his time as a teacher at Carleton University. Ted often reminded his students: “you get what you give in life.”
My friend and former colleague was a born teacher and – unusual for a man of his era – cried freely when moved. He once failed to carry out an assignment to photograph a police officer pulling a toboggan carrying a drowned young boy. He was crying too hard.
Even at 89, as he enjoyed life in Victoria’s Parkwood senior’s residence, a place he called, ‘The Palace’; he still took pictures and was fascinated by the powerful images he saw in the other seniors around him. Ted never stopped seeing the richness in humanity.
Grant looks at his famous Trudeau banister photo at his Victoria home office in 2008.
Canadians knew his images, but I wanted them to know the name of the hard-working Canadian artist. Through fifty interviews with him in his family home in Victoria in 2012, and a month-long research stint of the entire Ted Grant collection in the Ottawa archives, I came to know a man who laughed easily, worked hard, spoke from his heart as a matter of practice, loved his family and found a best friend in his wife of sixty-three years. It was no easy task to narrow it down to 134 images for the book I wrote in 2013. He claimed to be “just lucky” in getting great shots – but no one could be that lucky.
Ted Grant was predeceased by Irene, wife of sixty-three years and daughter Cyndy. He leaves behind his sons Ted and Scott, daughter Sandy, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, many relatives and good friends – and a legacy as a motivator and inspirator of both amateur and professional photojournalists.
Ted Grant’s Canada
Jackie Kennedy, then the U.S. first lady, watches the RCMP Musical Ride in Ottawa, in 1961. With scores of other photographers seeking to catch a shot of one of the most photographed women in the world, Grant positioned himself so that he was capturing Ms. Kennedy with soft light on her face. He waited until he observed her captivated eyes. It was a short wait.
A man works on a Prairie oil derrick in 1967.
A Vancouver Island veterinarian kneels to examine a dog in 1988.
Ted Jr. at bat in the 1960s.
An ice fisherman with a good haul, in 1972.
An elderly woman with muscular arms tends her apple orchard in the Okanagan, near the Trans-Canada Highway, in 1962.
Charlotte Whitton, a Canadian feminist and former Ottawa mayor, was giving a radio interview in 1978 when Grant took this. 'She had no idea I was taking that picture,' he says. 'If a person is aware of the photographer when they are having their picture taken, something changes.'
Grant met this one-eyed, old-time cowboy who lived in a log cabin. 'He was about five feet tall and had to stand on a box to get on his horse. I asked him what happened to his eye. He said he was chasing some rangy old cow through the woods one day, and something poked him in the eye. He said it hurt for a few days and then it all swelled up and then it all leaked out. That’s what happened. He never even went to see a doctor.'Courtesy of Thelma Fayle
John Diefenbaker and Tommy Douglas share a laugh in 1962 with an unnamed Scandinavian ambassador, middle, at a Rideau Hall reception. Judy LaMarsh, a Liberal MP, is barely visible in the background.
Lord Mountbatten at the Calgary Stampede, in 1967. Grant was in Alberta on a ranching assignment and stopped in Calgary to cover the event, where Lord Mountbatten, Queen Victoria's grandson, was guest of honour. At first, he did not know what the audience was reacting to, but the sneers told him something bad had happened: A chuckwagon had just crashed. 'I looked around and realized I couldn’t get a decent picture of the crash,' Grant recalls, 'So I chose to focus on the spectators.'
An Ottawa 'meter maid,' circa 1968. These were trained police officers in the early days of women being allowed to join the force. The disciplined sharpshooters had to begin their careers on the streets tending traffic and looking after parking meters.
A survivor of the Chernobyl disaster in 1992. What could the glaring eyes of the six-year-old boy with the bald head be saying to us? 'That child didn’t smile," Grant recalled. 'There was something about the look in his eyes. He looked right through you. In my mind, the caption to his image says: "Look at what you bastards did to me."'
On an NFB documentary shoot in 1968, Grant photographed these fishermen unloading their catch of fresh salmon at a plant in Steveston, B.C. 'I got lucky with that shot,' he recalled. 'Not so lucky another time when I was invited on a salmon fishing boat off the B.C. coast with fisheries inspectors who were checking stocks of fish. It was not one of the smoothest rides. As they were hauling nets, I was standing on the roof of the wheelhouse. The boat was rolling and rocking, and I started to feel sick. They were bringing in the first big net of fish and I couldn’t miss the shots, but I had to throw up. I leaned to the opposite side to be sick and then ran back to shoot more pictures. This went on several times. Sometimes you just have to grin and bear it in order to get the pictures.'
A fisherman at Lake Winnipeg, in 1972. Grant was lying on his belly on the ice, shooting through the net to catch the early morning light in -40 degree weather.
Grant, at far right, dines with an Inuit family after a seal-hunting expedition in Frobisher Bay, in 1969.
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