Walter Curtin; photographer (GREAT)

[Hyfler/Rosner]

"During one conversation - possibly one of Mr. Gould's
famous late-night phone calls - the pianist described a
nightmare he'd recently had in which he was a passenger in a
747 jet. A flight attendant came to him and whispered that
the pilot had just died and that only Mr. Gould could land
the plane. He woke up in terror.

In his darkroom, Mr. Curtin dug out the negatives from an
assignment he'd done that included a shot of a pilot at the
controls of a big jet. He printed an enlargement, then one
of Mr. Gould with his head at a matching angle. Carefully,
he substituted the pianist's face for the pilot's, framed
the result and sent it to Gould. He heard nothing, but later
learned that for years there had been a shot of Mr. Gould in
a pilot's uniform, with someone else's hairy hands, hanging
in the pianist's bedroom."

WALTER CURTIN, ARTIST: 96

He escaped the Nazis to become Canada's 'most brilliant
photographer'
Initially trained as an engraver in Vienna, he pursued a
passion for photography that led him to produce trademark
black-and-white images. The results took him to the heights
of his profession
CHARLES OBERDORF

Special to The Globe and Mail

November 3, 2007

TORONTO -- Peter Newman once described Walter Curtin as
Canada's greatest photographer. A Viennese Jew who fled
Nazism, he became one of the country's most successful
photojournalists of the Fifties and Sixties.

His best-known image is probably also the best-known
photograph of its subject, Glenn Gould. In it, the pianist,
wearing a heavy overcoat and a driver's cap, sits in
profile, hunched over the keyboard of a shopworn CBC studio
piano, his mouth slightly ajar, as if singing along with his
playing.

Mr. Gould himself seems to have preferred a different Walter
Curtin shot.

Over the years, thanks to several Curtin assignments, the
two had become friends. ("Walter," Mr. Gould once said,
"you're as crazy as I am.") The friendship had an
opposites-attract element: the charming, gregarious and
dapper Viennese and the unkempt, argumentative and reclusive
Canadian.

During one conversation - possibly one of Mr. Gould's famous
late-night phone calls - the pianist described a nightmare
he'd recently had in which he was a passenger in a 747 jet.
A flight attendant came to him and whispered that the pilot
had just died and that only Mr. Gould could land the plane.
He woke up in terror.

In his darkroom, Mr. Curtin dug out the negatives from an
assignment he'd done that included a shot of a pilot at the
controls of a big jet. He printed an enlargement, then one
of Mr. Gould with his head at a matching angle. Carefully,
he substituted the pianist's face for the pilot's, framed
the result and sent it to Gould. He heard nothing, but later
learned that for years there had been a shot of Mr. Gould in
a pilot's uniform, with someone else's hairy hands, hanging
in the pianist's bedroom.

Walter Curtin was born Walter Spiegel in the imperial Vienna
of Gustav Mahler and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Arthur Schnitzler
and Gustav Klimt. In that well-fed city, the Spiegels were
food importers and wholesalers. The business ran into
trouble, however, when Walter was about 15.

A few years later, in 1933, his father died, leaving him
head of the family. In November, 1938, eight months after
Hitler's Germany annexed Austria, the concierge in their
apartment building saved the family during the brutal
Kristallnacht pogrom by sowing such seeds of deceit and
confusion that the Nazi mob who came for them went away
empty-handed. The strategy gained precious time, and Mr.
Curtin and his brother, Otto, soon fled to Britain. Their
mother would die in Poland along with thousands of other
Viennese Jews.

In England, Mr. Curtin worked at odd jobs, tried to enlist
on the day war was declared in September, 1939, but was
rejected as an "alien." After the fall of France, both
brothers, along with 2,000 other German-speaking aliens of
military age, were shipped to an internment camp in
Australia. When British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
changed the policy to allow "friendly aliens" to enlist, Mr.
Curtin joined the British military and was advised to change
his name in case of capture.

The brothers served first in the 93rd Pioneer Corps, and
then Mr. Curtin joined the Royal Engineers "after passing a
test that required putting together two bits of
old-fashioned toilet chain. That's how I became an Army
engineer," he once wrote. He served until 1946, mainly with
the RAF.

Once out of the military, he decided to pursue a career in
photography. It was an interest that had followed him
through the years. In Vienna, he had studied photoengraving
and worked briefly for a portrait photographer; in London,
before he was deported, he had learned colour printing; on
the ship to Australia, he and some had formed a keen if
under-equipped photography club.

Returning to London, he talked his way into an
apprenticeship at a busy commercial photo studio. He was
soon behind a camera making copy photographs of paintings.
In 1948, he set up shop on his own in Kensington, where such
clients as Time-Life Books wanted his well-crafted photos of
paintings and art objects.

Along the way, Mr. Curtin became acquainted with a talented
young British painter 10 years his junior whom he met
through an old military friend. As it happened, his friend
was married to a painter who had decided to play matchmaker.
Invited to dinner, Mr. Curtin showed up in all innocence to
be introduced to a beautiful young woman named Isabel Kann.
She was Catholic and he was Jewish, but no matter. As these
things go, a relationship quickly developed and they fell in
love. They married in 1949.

On visits to Paris, he made friends with the founders of the
Magnum photo agency - including Robert and Cornell Capa,
Dimitri Kessel and Henri Cartier-Bresson - who were setting
new standards in photojournalism made possible by the
inconspicuous mobility of the 35 mm camera and the
versatility of high-speed film.

In 1952, hard economic times in Britain, together with the
needs of a young family, led the Curtins to emigrate to
Canada.

Settling in Toronto, Mr. Walter decided to follow the lead
of his Magnum friends and began shooting people and events
rather than paintings and sculpture. Within months he had
sold a cover to Liberty magazine. It was a portrait of the
hockey giant, King Clancy. Not long after that, the National
Film Board in 1953 commissioned him to document the first
season of the Stratford Festival.

It soon became apparent, though, that photojournalism would
not support a growing family that by 1963 would number six
children. So, according to his colleague, John Reeves,
"Walter did this amazing thing. He unleashed that Viennnese
charm of his on the ad agencies and somehow convinced them
that his kind of shooting was just what they needed. All of
a sudden, these black-and-white, available-light images
started showing up in magazine ads and at the art directors'
shows."

It was during this period that he worked with the journalist
Peter C. Newman, who was then a senior editor and columnist
at Maclean's. In a hand-written dedication, Mr. Newman
wrote: "To Walter Curtin, the most brilliant photographer in
Canada. With admiration and best wishes. Peter Newman, May,
1961." It was a respect that was to remain unchanged through
the years.

By then, Mr. Curtin had moved the family back across the
Atlantic to again try his luck in London. There, he
replicated his Toronto ad-agency breakthrough, most
memorably in a series of ads for Wills cigars. Each one
featured a large informal close-up portrait of a man,
clearly not a model, usually working-class - one was a
street sweeper - each in his working garb and almost
off-handedly holding a cigar. Freed of their ad copy, the
series still stands up as a vivid collection of genre
portraits.

Eight years later, the Curtins returned to Toronto, where he
would soon begin an obsessive personal project to document
the major figures in Canada's classical music scene. In
concert or rehearsal, in their homes or sometimes his own,
he shot them all, from an aging Wilfred Pelletier in 1971 to
a just-unpacked-from-Finland Jukka-Pekka Saraste in 1994.
His Canadian Brass look slimly resplendent in the
bell-bottomed, peacock tailoring of the early 1970s. Lotfi
Mansouri of the Canadian Opera Company gesticulates, soprano
Teresa Stratas clasps her hands to her mouth in
embarrassment, the Huggett family clutter the floor with
their many wind and string instruments. In 1994, some 80 of
these images (from tens of thousands of negatives) finally
became a book, Curtin Call, published by Exile Editions.

One reason Mr. Curtin could indulge in this labour of love
was that just as he was reaching retirement age in the
mid-1970s, his wife, Isabel, took up painting again and was
soon a success in major galleries with calm canvases that
always included a vase of flowers, a colourful swatch of
fabric and a sun-shot view through a window. Increasingly,
in paintings made in winter, the window looked out on a
corner of Cannes or Albuquerque.

The six Curtin children also flourished. All of them have
worked in the arts, but as one son, John, said, "We keep out
of each other's way." One daughter paints, another sculpts,
another writes poetry, another designs stage sets. John
Curtin makes award-winning documentary films. Joe, a
designer and builder of concert violins and violas, recently
received a $100,000 "genius" fellowship from the MacArthur
Foundation for advancing the science of his field.

At the age of 80, Walter Curtin, an agnostic Jew, converted
to Roman Catholicism - primarily, his friends speculated, to
be buried with Isabel. Characteristically, he took Israel as
his baptismal name. Until his early 90s, he seemed to live
as energetically as ever, though, travelling whenever
possible, especially to Europe, at home running errands for
Isabel, entertaining friends and eating heartily in the
Viennese style, always with a glass of port before dinner,
music after. He loved walking the dog, Bertie, and sitting
in Isabel's overflowing garden of lilies. In the last year
or two, though, he loved more and more to sleep, claiming it
was preparing him for "the eternal snooze."

WALTER CURTIN

Walter Curtin was born Walter Spiegel, on Aug. 16, 1911, in
Vienna. He died of age-related causes in Toronto on Oct. 21,
2007. He was 96. He leaves his wife, Isabel Kann, and two
sons and four daughters. He also leaves four grandsons.