Bob Book
Bill Bliothèque

In autumn of 1989, I got a freelance job to photograph the cover of a catalogue for an association of book publishers in Montréal. The graphic designer was my good friend Stéphane Olivier with whom I have often worked.

As a nod to the surrealism of André Breton and Man Ray, we came up with the concept of a man holding a book in front of his face. The book became a trompe l’oeil, doubling as the man’s head (we are what we read). The client approved the concept and final comp. We proceeded, hiring Luc Gagnon to model as Bob Book.

When the catalogue reached the printer, our client got cold feet just as the presses were about to roll. He replaced the photo of Bob Book with an innocuous painting. He feared that the image might “disturb” some publishers. We still got paid but it frustrated me immensely. As a freelancer, every time I submitted daring concepts, they would be rejected. When money was involved, in general, the client always picked the most conservative proposal.

I loved the character of Bob Book. He was too close to me. I could not let him die. Bob Book forced me to make a choice. It became obvious that there wasn't much artistic opportunity for growth in doing freelance jobs. It did allow me to become a better technician and make money but that’s about it.

With Luc Gagnon, I continued to photograph Bob Book in different situations with a vague notion that this was coalescing into a series. A local photography magazine, CV, announced its first portfolio contest. I decided to submit this series of pictures which was evolving into a chronicle of the first twenty years of Bob Book’s life.

Essentially, I dug into my past and images resurfaced. Soon this project became pure unfiltered autobiography. The photos were highly condensed re-visitations of crucial events of my youth. Almost a year after being evicted from that brochure cover, to my amazment, the Bob Book portfolio won first prize and was printed in CV no.14.

When I finished the first Bob Book series, I had so much fun I wanted to continue his adventures but try something different that would challenge me.

I decided to explore the principles of automatic writing, as defined by the surrealists, and let my unconscious dictate a second Bob Book story told within a narrative sequence totaling 40 images.

Set in a fantastic dreamscape, The Middle Age of the Soul would explore some of the recurring symbols of my work and have my characters act out on a grander scale. The difficulty would be to create this surreal world using my traditional photographic tricks. Once the images were done, I would cap the project by writing a short novel based on the pictures (published by Gogo Guy Publications in 1995 as Le Moyen Âge de l'Âme).

I wanted parts of chapter 2 to be a tip of the hat to the masters who had an impact on my vision and inspired me early on. Hence the surrealist influence represented by Breton, Miro, Dali, Bunuel and Gaudi. To accomplish this, part of the series was photographed in Europe where those artists lived, particularly France and Spain.

I managed to get a small grant to pay for my plane ticket and four others including Luc Gagnon, Michel Martineau (another photographer), Denise Lavoie and my first wife, Marie-Josée Duchesne. They accompanied me and played all the different characters Bob Book encounters.

For close to a month, I traveled around Europe with a humongous backpack containing the head of Bob Book, plastic dolls, costumes, props and a set of growing mustaches for Bob’s head. I put to good use my guerilla filmmaking experience as we shot in different historic locations on the sly.

When I got back to Quebec, I started to ponder how to photograph the complicated effect scenes. Throughout my career as a photographer, I always shot and printed full frame. This is dogma to me: never re-crop a photo or manipulate the negative in the darkroom; everything must appear on the original negative.

As a kid, I loved those old movies with special effects and was amazed to discover that some of those incredible shots were achieved with simple means but great ingenuity within the camera on the original negative. These artisans were magicians. For Bob Book 2, I devised the technique of Live Collages.

I would first photograph Luc Gagnon playing Bob, then in the darkroom I would print a twelve-inch version, cut him out, place him in different settings and re-photograph Bob. This way, I could create scale effects with other props. I made enlargements of eyes in different shapes, one as big as a head that became an actual mask for the actor playing the Cyclops. I placed cutout cityscapes in the distance and created false perspectives. To make it more real, I tried to match the light settings when I photographed separate elements so that when I shot the final collage, light seemed to come from the same source (in re-staging the second chapter of Bob for this website, I used Photoshop to fix a few images I originally discarded because I couldn’t achieve the effects I was after).

This led to experiment with ways to have these still photographic elements interact with natural settings. After Bob Book, I took on the Cyclops and gave them their own series. Perpetual watchers making their way through time, the Cyclops revisited the myths of creation. In 1995, one Cyclops accompanied me to India where I photographed it around the sculptures that adorn the Sun Temple in Konark. With the Jeremy the astronaut series, I took them to Cairo in 2001 and photographed them at the foot of the Great Pyramids.