About David
David Cooper originally studied architecture, but decided to pursue his interest in photography when an opportunity arose to work with the Vancouver Playhouse. He worked closely with the design and production departments there, collaborating on brochures, posters and advertising campaigns, as well as doing all the production photography for the company. He is now recognized across the country for his distinctive style of artists' portraits and show photography.
Cooper has also developed a nation-wide reputation as an excellent dance photographer, renowned for “Capturing the moment” – not easy in dance! He has photographed prima ballerina Evelyn Hart throughout her career, and created design and production Photography for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Alberta Ballet, Ballet British Columbia, and Les Grand Ballets Canadians, among others. Mr. Cooper's elegant photography has graced numerous programmes and souvenir books, each a valuable keepsake.
His work for theatre companies has appeared in newspapers, magazines and Souvenir programmes across Canada. Mr. Cooper has created design photography for use in brochures, and served as production photographer for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Shaw and Stratford Festivals. He was the still photographer for the television series McGyver for a year, and has worked as a unit movie photographer with Iatse in the Vancouver area.
Mr.Cooper runs a studio in Vancouver where, in addition to his performing arts photography, he works with design and advertising clientele.
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Theatre Portfolio
Most of my theatre work involves shooting an actual performance at the dress rehearsal – no setup shots with extra lighting. I shoot with Nikon digital cameras and distribute images
to the press by e-mail or our ftp site.
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I love working in my studio directly with performers to create advance publicity images. With a sprung floor for dance and a 2,500 square-foot studio we have the space to work with almost any size of ensemble.
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Chemainus Theatre Festival
I used the spectacular surroundings of Vancouver Island as locations for my Chemainus Theatre Festival season brochures. The arm- chair in the water seemed
like a simple idea, but I had forgotten about the tide – so we found ourselves moving camera, chair and actor every few minutes to chase the receding water!
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A "chairs" theme for a season brochure at The Grand Theatre in London, Ontario. Clockwise from top: chairs represent the three characters in Brian Friel's molly sweeney; a rocking chair becomes a metaphor for an elderly aunt on her death-bed in Morris Panych's dark comedy vigil; a child tries to put back together the pieces
of his broken family in David Mamet's the cryptogram.
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Yale Repertory Theatre
Strong concepts, strong silhouette images and strong type design characterize the graphics for Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven. These digital images were shot with my Nikon D1x, converted to black and white, and printed as duotones. Art direction and design by my frequent collaborators at Punch & Judy Inc, in Stratford.
Lower right: August Wilson came to Vancouver for me to shoot his portrait on a small set we made. He writes ideas on scraps of paper and eventually assembles these into the play. My collaboraters, Punch & Judy, hired a props builder to create a wall of notes for the background.
These poster images were created more than a year in advance – long before casting was in place. We turned this problem into an advantage by devising abstract concepts which don't rely on using the actual actors, and shot our models in strong silhouette and shadow.
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Oregon Shakespeare Festival
I have been shooting every season at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland since 1993. Performances on the outdoor Elizabethan stage begin as the sun is setting, but the light changes dramatically as the evening progresses. This photo is a composite, assembled from three different shots.
The marketing department frequently gives me free reign to invent images for their souvenir books and posters. For the photo at left, I worked with the cast and crew to re-block and re-light an entire scene from a Midsummer Night's Dream to turn a horizontal scene into a vertical shot to fit the cover format.
The covers above and right feature photos from hamlet and troilus and cressida.
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Shaw Handbook 2003
The Shaw Festival specializes in classic plays from the 19th- and early 20th-centuries. For the 2003 season handbook brochure, we used a 4”x 5” pinhole camera with long time exposures and Polaroid film to evoke the soft look of period images – but with contemporary saturated colour.
We often used old walls in old buildings to convey the historical period of The Shaw's repertoire.
We just barely got the photo at the top of this page – we were racing a construction crew which was starting to renovate this old factory in St Catherines into a new
restaurant.
My collaborator and designer Christina Poddubiuk came up with the idea of reusing the set from a production which had just closed and was about to be loaded out to the dump after closing night. We set it back up in the carpentry shop, painted it white, and it became my "studio" for the entire 2002 handbook photoshoot. This was The Shaw's 40th anniversary season, so Christina dressed the entire company in formal
wear to celebrate the occasion.
We used many beautiful, lush gardens in the Niagara penninsula as our locations for the 1999 handbook brochure. In fact, the “garden on a hat" photo above was our only indoor shot that year. An overgrown rusty gate on a local estate became the cover image, and gave the feeling of discovering a “secret garden". During our set-up for this shot, the crew discovered poison ivy clinging to the brick!
A magnificent power-generating station built in 1905 – situated only a few hundred yards upriver from Niagara Falls and long abandonded – became the location for our 1998 handbook photoshoot.
We loved the idea that this old industrial setting made a connection with our work of “generating art” in the theatre, and we began to think of this space as a sort of imaginary Shaw Festival rehearsal hall.
The photo at right was our image for Bernard Shaw's major barbara which, coincidentally, also dates from 1905.
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Shaw portraits
These photos of the Shaw Festival Ensemble are from a continuing portrait series which started in 1980. We schedule a half-hour session with every actor, director and designer each season. The portraits are reproduced in the house programmes, and large framed prints are displayed in the theatre lobbies.
The actors are encouraged to bring ideas, clothing or props to express their individual interests and personalities – and over the years I have had to incorporate pets, lovers, roller blades, fishing tackle, scuba gear, musical instruments and even a motorcycle. All photos are shot digitally with my Nikon D1x, and printed on archival matte paper.
Space is always at a premium in Niagara-on-the-Lake, and I never know where I might have to setup my portable studio – in the Festival Theatre Lobby, the Royal George bar, various rehearsal halls, church basements, a vacant storefront or even in the tiny living room of an unoccupied house.S
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Shaw Production Photos
I have shot thousands of dress rehearsals over the years. With larger companies like the Shaw Festival, I usually have two dress rehearsals in which to get the variety of shots needed for press and our various publications.
I never get tired of sitting in a theatre with hundreds of empty seats to choose from, feeling the excitement in the air when the house lights go down and the show begins.
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Christopher Newton
Christopher Newton was the Artistic Director of the Shaw Festival from 1980 until 2003. These photos are a sampling from our annual photo sessions over those years – with a wide range of locations and concepts. I have had the privilege of working with Christopher all the way back to 1976 at the Vancouver Playhouse – he has always been a huge influence
in my theatre career.
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Digital Work
Here are several examples of how I can enhance our concepts using the digital tools of Adobe Photoshop. All these images were created by the team of Shaw Festival Art Director Scott McKowen, designer Christina Poddubiuk, and myself.
To create a dream/nightmare mood for Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House, we blurred the actor's movements using time exposures. Then we added layers of texture from a piece of scratched film, and finally added the unsettling colour to the image in photoshop.
Two young Frenchmen decide to emigrate to Canada in the play s.s. tenacity. We wanted our image to convey the idea of crossing the ocean – but also the sense of jumping off into a hopeful future.
We searched all over the Niagara region for a wooden dock with a view to the horizon – but had to settle for a metal dock on the Niagara River looking across at New York State! We got our basic shot of the two actors jumping into the river; then built the final image using four other frames – painting in a Lake Ontario horizon, adding wood pylons and adding several layers of texture.
The Coronation Voyage is a dark story about a Montreal Mafia Chief and his two sons, set on an ocean liner in 1953. Our surreal image shows one of the boys – underwater – wearing an oversize pinstripe suit.
We started with a photo of actor Jeff Lillico lying on the floor of the studio. We shot the suit separately in order to make it look like it was “floating”, and to be able to play with scale. We cloned this composite into a stock underwater photo, and added the bubbles – one by one!
Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's musical happy end is the story of Hallelujah Lil, a Salvation Army worker who falls in love with a Chicago gangster during the roaring twenties. To represent these two worlds in our poster image, we photographed actress Lisa Norton wearing a Salvation Army uniform – and a burgler's mask.
Over this basic image, we layered music from “Surabaya Johnny” – one of the famous songs from the show – and some texture to break it down and make it grittier.
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Dance
For the opening of the Vancouver Dance Centre, the corporate sponsors colours were incorporated into the dancers jumps.
The composite of hands and feet belong to dancer Emily Molnar.
I built a portable sprung stage over the hard concrete floor in my studio to protect the dancers from injuries. Here is Judith Garay’s Vancouver company, Dancers Dancing during our first studio session together.
Clockwise from to left: Dancers Dancing, DanStaBat, Vancouver Tap Society, Dancing on the Edge, Dancers Dancing.
Lola MacLaughlin Dance in my studio. I love the way strobes freeze the motion of every wisp of hair.
Using a square format Hasselblad and a 16 million pixel Imacon back, Vancouver dancer Emily Molnar and I experimented shooting only cropped portions of her body in frame.
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Ballet BC
John Alleyne has created a fantastic ensemble of dancers over the years at Ballet BC with a diverse repertory.
Photographing on stage during a dress rehearsal is always a test of timing and instint. It is by far the most difficult of the perfoming arts to capture.
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Royal Winnipeg Ballet
I have been shooting at the Royal Winnipeg since I received a dance grant from the Canada Council to photograph the company in 1978.
I set up a photo studio using white seamless paper in one of their large studios. We try to concentrate on the current repertory for use in upcoming ads and brochures.
Evelyn Hart is one of the great dancers of our time. I know of no other dancer who discusses the lighting and mood that she wants me to experiment with when we shoot photos. There is also a lighter side to her that is so funny and clown-like that it’s hard to focus the camera sometimes. She gave my new born daughter a pair of baby point shoes that became one of my favorite images of her.
I sat in on a day of rehearsals for Mark Godden’s new ballet version of Mozart's The Magic Flute using a fast f1.4 85mm lens.
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Music
Credits clockwise from upper left: Conductor Sergiu Comissiona, Elektra Womens Choir, Jon Washburn and the Vancouver Chamber Choir, The Vancouver Symphony.
Credits clockwise from upper left: Katari Taiko Drummers, Musicians from the Shaw Festival, Spirit Of The West, Uzume Taiko Drummers.
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David Cooper Photography
202-950 Powell St.
Vancouver BC
V6A1H9
604-255-4576
www.davidcooperphotography.com/