Paul Rockett, who some credit with changing the face of Canadian magazine photography, has died at age 90 in Vancouver after a battle with liver cancer.
The Toronto-born photographer shot more than 100 magazine covers during his career. He worked for many national magazines and advertising agencies in Canada.
Rockett’s revolutionary poses helped transform fashion and magazine photography in North America from a still, stagnant style to one that stepped off the page, said Jodie James Elliott of Toronto art consulting firm Elliott Contemporary.
“He brought a lot more action into the still image,” said Elliott, who hosted Rockett during a 2008 exhibition of the photographer’s work in Toronto.
Rockett is best known today for his series of Glenn Gould portraits, one of which was chosen by Canada Post for a limited edition series of commemorative envelopes. The photos are on display in the National Gallery in Ottawa.
Rockett once told his wife Eve that he was Gould’s favourite photographer–not because of his pictures, but because he didn’t try to talk music with the Canadian pianist.
“One of his favourites was (prime minister) Lester Pearson, loved Lester Pearson. They would sit in his study having a drink and talk for quite a long time,” Eve Rockett said in an interview Monday from her Vancouver home.
Her favourite photo is of Leonard Cohen, cigarette dangling from his mouth, captured by her husband in 1979.
Canadian film director and actor Norman Jewison, musicians Ian and Sylvia, opera star Teresa Stratas, actors Paul Newman and John Wayne, former Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown and comedians Wayne and Shuster all found themselves staring into the lens of Rockett’s camera.
Rockett won a lifetime achievement award, more than 30 Art Directors Club awards and was a member of the Royal Academy.
Toronto Life Magazine called Rockett “Canadian photography’s only star” aside from the late Yousuf Karsh.
Rockett and his wife moved to Vancouver in the 1970s where he shot pictures and film documentaries for the CBC and the B.C. government. He worked into his late 80s.
