Deborah Samuel is a leading Canadian photographer with an international career.
After graduating from Sheridan College with a major in Applied Photography, her work soon caught the attention of Toronto critics. The emerging Goth subculture was an early subject matter as she told the Toronto Star in July 1979: “Yes, it’s morbid but everybody thinks about death at one time or another… Despite the horrific image that immediately strikes the eye, there’s something sensitive going on here.”
Deborah Samuel was approached by a leading Yorkville gallery to put on a fine art photography show in November 1981. Subsequently, Toronto Star art critic Christopher Hume described her second Gallery Quan show in March 1983 as “dreamlike” and “never anything less than striking”. He added: “Samuel’s hand-colored photographs spring from a source that lies somewhere between rational thought and unconscious musing.”
Simultaneous to a fine art career at this time, the photographer was inundated with commercial assignments with a specialty in fashion and music. The client list and number of assignments was large.
She shot the cover of Rush’s 1981 Moving Pictures album which became the band’s most commercially successful album selling over four million copies in the USA alone. The front cover includes the image of a large photograph in a gold frame carried by movers which is a self-portrait of Deborah Samuel being burned at the stake. With designer Hugh Syme, she won the Juno Award for Best Album Graphics for Moving Pictures in 1982.
In 1984, the music video directed by Deborah Samuel for the band Parachute Club titled At The Feet of The Moon provides a good overview of her aesthetic vision at the time. The largely greyscale palette is muted with occasional bursts of primary colors, pastels and earth tones. Covered in beach sand, the set is surrealistic and “dreamlike” (as in the sense of the Christopher Hume review). The band members are elegantly presented with eclectic art historical references from classical portrait painters to early photography.
“When I was 10 or 11 years old, I read two magazines – National Geographic and Vogue. I used to wonder how I could make a living just taking pictures of people. It’s funny how it’s all worked out.”
–Deborah Samuel quoted in “Fashion photographer uses lens to create art”, Toronto Star, April 9, 1987
By 1985, the fashion photography of Deborah Samuel was singled out for praise by the creative director of the French fashion house Chanel. In a handwritten note, Karl Lagerfeld observed that the photographer’s work presented the spirit of his designs so insightfully that it “made my day”. For an article on her Jane Corkin Gallery fine art show Headshots in April 1987, Toronto Star fashion writer Nancy Hastings noted that the Samuel is “one of Canada’s leading fashion photographers”.
Headshots, the gallery show, is a fine art spin on fashion which the photographer referred to as “altered realities”: “With these, I’m going beyond, creating something that isn’t there to begin with by manipulating the film after the fact and changing the classic headshot into something magical.” But, Headshots was in many ways her ultimate engagement with fashion as a subject.
Deborah Samuel next branched out to an international career that would take her to Los Angeles, New York and London. In this part of her career, the photographer focused on celebrity portraiture for magazines such as Rolling Stone, GQ and Esquire. Around Y2K, the success of this tastefully executed commercial work would ultimately enable a fine art photography career following her own muse.
The new direction is seen in three books: Dog, Pup and later in 2016’s The Extraordinary Beauty of Birds. This new work surprised the people who knew her for portraits, music and fashion work. But, it made sense given that she told the Toronto Star back in 1987 that National Geographic magazine was a formative influence.
So, it wasn’t a total surprise that the Royal Ontario Museum presented the Deborah Samuel show Elegy in April 2012. This photographic suite featured her photographs of the museum’s collection including animal bones and skulls. The curvilinear triptych Cobra I, II, III works as both an abstract image and a striking representation of the snake’s skeleton. Murray Whyte wrote in the Toronto Star that the images are “sharp, haunting forms”.
Curiously, in the same Toronto Star review, Whyte observed a late teen Goth wearing black lipstick and nail polish attending the ROM show. He quotes the Goth saying: “These are totally sick! I love them!” The art career of Deborah Samuel had come full circle as her first review some 33 years earlier in the same newspaper was of a black & white photo of two Goths in a bathtub.
Deborah Samuel continues to evolve as an artist pursuing different subject matters. Her work is found in the permanent collections of Royal Ontario Museum, Winnipeg Art Gallery, Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, her most recent show was online for the Oeno Gallery in April 2020.
Further reading on Deborah Samuels can be found at her website:
https://www.deborahsamuel.com/
We extend our thanks to Lawrence Brissenden for writing and contributing this artist biography.
