In the 1980s, I learned a lot about photography through magazines. Growing up in a small Nova Scotian village, my selection was limited, but publications like Popular Photography or Modern Photography provided excellent articles explaining the techniques that photographers employed to achieve the photos that I admired. Magazines like Life and National Geographic showed me what was possible when a camera was in the hands of a passionate photographer with a story to tell.

In early 2022, I got a Saltscapes assignment to photograph New Brunswick artist Jared Betts, for a story in the April edition. My experiences photographing creative people have always been among my favourites. Visual artists, musicians, writers, and chefs tend to make the experience feel more collaborative.

I started viewing Jared’s work online and what I saw excited me. His art was bold and colourful, full of deliberate mayhem and energy, a kind of precise chaos. What I saw made an immediate impact, taking me back to a photograph in one of those Life magazines decades earlier.

That photo of artist Pablo Picasso by Life magazine photographer Gjon Mili was seared into my brain. Black and white, it froze Picasso in a portrait but captured the movement of him drawing in the air with light.

I explained the concept to Jared, and we set to work. First, we had to block external light from entering his studio. Jared was then positioned and my camera, mounted on a tripod, was pre-focused on him. Next, I turned off the room lights. In darkness, I tripped the shutter, starting my exposure and firing a strobe that lit the room for a millisecond, creating the sharp photo of Jared as he stared into my lens with his arm raised, a small flashlight in his hand.

As the room blinked back to total darkness, except for his flashlight, my camera’s shutter stayed open for eight more seconds, during which Jared could doodle in the air with light. My only directions to Jared were to keep the light pointed at the camera as he doodled, and if possible, to try not to draw over his face.

The finished photo, my homage to Gjon Mili’s Picasso photo, features artist Jared Betts focused intently on my camera while chaotic colour and art surround him, on the walls, on his shirt, even in the air.