A wonderful photographer’s final advice: ‘Travel more. Take pictures. Have a cappuccino’
When I lived in Ottawa, I was always so impressed by the late, great photographer Bruno Schlumberger, who knocked it out of the park over and over and over again for the Citizen.
Schlumberger had already won a National Newspaper Award by the time I moved there. He would win another five — more than any other photographer. The photo above, a 2007 photo of veteran René J. Piché at the National War Memorial, is one of them. (Click here to see more.)
In those mid-Eighties years, the Citizen was — like the Vancouver Sun, Montreal Gazette and Edmonton Journal — part of the Southam newspaper chain, during a time when the editions were thick with ads, rich with editorial content, and gave pride of place to feature photography. Looking back, it feels like a golden time.
Bruno Schlumberger’s photos seemed to pop off the page. It was a regular occurrence for me to halt a quick scan of the front page to admire a photo … and then of course see his credit near the bottom.
He had his methods, I learned from this tribute by his colleague Bruce Deachman:
For more than three decades, Ottawa Citizen photographer Bruno Schlumberger wandered the city’s streets in search of angles, colour, lines and reflections — essentially looking for the ideal background for a photo whose subject he had not yet found.
Then, having constructed the perfect scaffolding, he would wait for the moment when something entered the frame and electrified it, turning an urban still life into a fleeting piece of theatre.
Photographers often march to their own beat, and I often respect how they value their own integrity. Here’s another insightful take from the same piece:
More often than not, though, he would return from an assignment with an image that far exceeded anyone’s expectations but his own. I say “image” because Bruno famously submitted just one photo from many assignments, figuring that, if he sent in more, editors might choose the wrong one. If asked for a secondary image, he was known simply to re-send the same image, but cropped differently.
Schlumberger, 77, died last Thursday, after battling ALS. He chose medical assistance in death to bring an end to a disease that months ago halted his ability to even take a photo.
My friend Wanita Bates worked with Schlumberger at the Citizen. “Bruno Schlumberger was a quick-change artist, moving from a funny face to deep conversation in a heartbeat,” she wrote in a Facebook post. “He was an award-winning Ottawa Citizen photographer and a friend I called an elegant crackpot… I am blessed to have laughed and worked with him.”
A few days before he died, Schlumberger passed along some worthy advice to Deachman: “So travel more. Take pictures. Have a cappuccino.”
I shall.