Over the years the National Post has used the following descriptive phrases, among others, to identify Kevin O’Leary: “hobby guitarist,” “CBC funnyman,” “vintner,” “businessman,” “Dragon,” “billionaire tycoon,” “business television personality,” “ex-software executive turned investor,” “ruthlessly curt” and “highly opinionated venture capitalist.”
“Billionaire tycoon,” may have been pushing it a bit; a recent Canadian Business list of Canada’s 100 wealthiest people does not mention Mr. O’Leary. Mr. O’Leary, now a guest on Shark Tank, which airs on CTV and ABC, says, “It’s bad karma to discuss net worth. I don’t need any more money. I need more time.” Starcasm, a U.S. celebrity website, pegs his net worth at US$300-million.
Whether he is a billionaire or not, we can certainly add another descriptor to Mr. O’Leary’s long list: photographer.
“I consider myself a starving artist, hold the starving,” he says.
He comes by his craft as a photographer honestly. Long before he got rich in software design, Mr. O’Leary toiled as a film editor, making short films to play between periods on Hockey Night in Canada. He peppers discussions of his trajectory in film and photography with brand names of machinery that he has operated.
“I was an editor on an eight-plate Steenbeck,” he recalls, using the brand name of a German-made editing system for 16mm film.
“We shot on a Borex 16-mil and an Arriflex, then had to transfer to a satellite an hour before the show.”
As a kid he dreamed of becoming an industrial photographer. “My dad pointed out the risk to that strategy,” he says. Now he is pretty sure his dad was right, noting, “Today, everybody is a photographer. The difference between the eye of an amateur and a professional is blurred.”
Mr. O’Leary bought his first camera in 1970, a Soviet-made Zenit-E SLR (a camera for people who could not afford to buy a Pentax), with money that he earned washing trucks. He joined the photo club at Nepean High School in Ottawa.
“We would sit with those chemicals in the dark all day,” he recalls. He sold the Zenit-E to buy better equipment (a decision he now regrets), and like everyone else, eventually moved to digital photography.
After 45 years, Mr. O’Leary has amassed hundreds of thousands of photographs, including over 300,000 negatives, which a company in Seattle scanned so he could more easily curate them. In October 2013, he published a sleeve containing 25 photo plates, and held an exhibit of his photography in Toronto, both titled Kevin O’Leary: 40 Years of Photography. He sold limited editions of the framed prints for $6,000 each, and has, he says, raised $97,000, with all proceeds going to teen entrepreneurs in Canada through the Future Dragon Fund. He hopes to launch another exhibit soon.
The collection of photos is eclectic, demonstrating, yes, skill behind the camera, and also giving us a glimpse of the crazy life that Mr. O’Leary has led.
One of the most arresting black-and-white images depicts Mr. O’Leary in 1975, a much hairier phase of his life: shirtless, hairy-chested, beardless, but with a full head of hair. Other images take us to Puerto Rico, Russia, Hawaii, Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris, Ukraine, South Africa, New Orleans and Greenland. These are not snapshots; one image of an abandoned pineapple farm on the island of Lanai is poignant in its bleakness.
Among the most curious are two black-and-white photos that Mr. O’Leary shot of the air show at the Canadian National Exhibition in 1988 with a Leica M3, which he describes as, “the classic photojournalist’s camera.” He shot the photos and then left the camera body in a box and forgot about it.
“I had moved three or four times and got married along the way,” he says. “One day my wife said, ‘What the hell is this box?’ I said, ‘Holy s—, there’s film in here.’ ” He took the old film in for processing. The denigrated silver on the negative produced kaleidoscope patterns in the sky above the spectators. Now there’ s something you’ll never get with a digital camera.
Even so, Mr. O’Leary insists on keeping up with the times. These days he shoots largely with a Sony 7R camera.
“I shoot a JPEG and a raw image,” he says. “I have cloud-based storage for a very large file. A lot of people are just storing JPEGs. But in the next decade when the wall in your house is a digital screen, and you can tell your life’s story, if you just keep the JPEG it’s going to look like crap.”
Mr. O’Leary visited Vancouver and Hawaii over the holidays. He took photos.
“I shoot every day,” he says. “I’m kind of back in the saddle.”
National Post
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Source:: National Post
