“I started taking pictures. My grandfather taught me. I actually won my first camera with my grandfather when I was five. It was a see-through box camera.”
This is a simple story about a girl and her camera.
“Throughout my whole life I was always interested in photography. I was always the one who didn’t cut the heads off people. It was basically a hobby. You know, I got married, had kids, and it fell by the wayside.”
For the record, not cutting the heads off people is a hobby everyone should have. Celebrity photographer Dee Lippingwell had other passions. One was concert-going.
“Every time I went to a concert, I thought ‘why didn’t I bring my camera?’” Not again.
“I did have a 35mm camera,” she says. “I didn’t know how to use it. It was an underwater camera, totally manual. My brother had won tickets to see Pink Floyd. My mother wouldn’t let him go without a chaperone, so I borrowed a 500mm lens to put on this 35mm camera. We were in the nosebleed section. For a contest winner, they were pretty poor seats. I had put the 500mm lens on, and my brother had to hold the camera because it was too heavy. So, I took it off and I put my regular lens back on again, and I made my way down to the floor, which you could do in those days. I worked my way to the front. There was no way I could get the guys all in one picture… I had colour film in my camera, too.”
In the heroine’s journey, here comes the moment.
“I took [the roll of film] to a Shoppers Drug Mart to be developed. I took 24, and I told the girl not to print any of the bad ones. And when I got the prints back, there were these gold stars on the outside of the envelope.”
Dee asked the girl what the stars were for. When the girl asked the others in the back if they knew anything about them, they must have assumed Dee was there, and they came running to the front and squealing about what awesome pics she had taken. Dee must have felt like a rock star or at least someone who had taken pictures of them. Her path was beginning to come into focus.
A few weeks later, Dee was walking in downtown Vancouver and as she walked past a record store, she saw a sign that said, “Pink Floyd concert photos on display inside.” Dee went in and had a look.
“They had these black and white pictures. They were just awful. White blobs in black. You couldn’t even tell which band it was. There were no close-ups,” explains Dee.
The budding photog that she was, she went to the manager and told him that if he were going to put a display up, they should be good photos. After a bit of back and forth, Dee raced home to get her photos. When she returned, the manager asked her name.
“Dee Lippingwell.”
“Is that a made-up name, like your photo name?”
“No, that’s my name.”
Down came the other photos, and up went Dee’s.
Working in the medical field, she was one of the first of what came to be known as a unit clerk. The job entailed data collection and organization of patient records. Dee was good at it, and that would come in handy down the line.
But her passion for photography continued to develop. She set-up her own darkroom, went to black and white, and taught herself how to make prints. Off she went to concerts, taking shots, and putting together a portfolio.
Dee knocked on the doors of The Georgia Strait, a west coast arts & entertainment magazine. Its editor was Bob Geldof. Yes, that one. He’d been globe-surfing in advance of his other career. He told Dee she’d have to get together a broader portfolio as it would be more than sweaty bass players he’d need photos of. That she did, and eventually Bob said he had some work for her.
“When I went into the office on a Monday to pick up my first assignment, everyone was looking at me kind of funny. They told me Bob and his girlfriend had overstayed their work Visa. Immigration was after them. They’d left on the first plane the night before back to Ireland.”
Dee, too, hated Mondays for a time.
Undeterred, she worked the room, as it were, getting to know the relatively small community of record executives in Vancouver. It got her gigs doing a meet and greet or a gold record presentation or a radio station appearance.
“I probably worked photography and my day job from 1976 to 1980. That’s when I quit my day job and started photography fulltime. I was also working for Music Express Magazine out of Calgary and I was still working for The Georgia Strait. I couldn’t do just rock and roll because I would starve to death.”
Dee published her first book in 1987. It was all photographs called The Best Seat In The House. Inevitably, people would ask Dee if she had met all these musicians. She had. ‘And? And?’ they would ask. The next book was a no-brainer. First Three Songs… No Flash! was next. It was the stories that went with the photos. Dee refers to it differently.
“How many running shoes can I get in my mouth at the same time without making myself look like a fool?” she laughs. “People always want to know what goes on backstage.”
Hint: it involves a lot of sneakers.
Dee has a picture-perfect CV, too. She’s done and is still doing it all: weddings, mitzvahs, models’ and actors’ headshots, babies.
“I was the photographer for 17 years for the Merritt Mountain Music Festival.”
Dee was determined to put together a compilation of all the photos from those festival years. It took 10 years, but it got done. Her fourth book is full of all the country stars Dee’s had the pleasure of turning her flash on. Think Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Reba McEntire, et al.
Here’s where Dee’s work experience, its attention to cataloguing and detail, comes in handy.
“While I was compiling the Merritt book, I had to go out to my storage locker, which consists of filing cabinet after filing cabinet of negatives. My husband had to move a storage container, and he asked what was in it. I told him it was full of slides. He opened it up and said, ‘Oh my God!’”
The reason for her husband’s gasp was the sheer volume. Probably for the meticulous storage a bit, too. Since the mid-seventies, Dee had been stashing away pics of favourite bands over the years. She also worked Expo ’86 in Vancouver and had all the slides from being their photographer for six months.
“Do you realize who you have here?”
Dee had The Rolling Stones, Tom Petty, Tina Turner, The Who.
“Well, this is your next book.”
They were photos people had never seen. All in colour. That’ll be her fifth book.
Dee has a bone to pick with the industry now. Gone to a large degree are the days of the candid and intimate shot that was such a focal point of Dee’s work.
“These days they make us shoot from the sound board because there is no pit. I have to stand on a milk crate. It’s a whole different ball game. I haven’t done a concert for a couple of years. The last concert I did was Lady Gaga, and I took pictures from my seat,” Dee laments.
It’s all more material for the book in progress, but she does post a fresh pic on her Facebook page every Friday, usually in the form of a birthday wish or memorial. There is also a series of limited-edition prints. Dee makes 25 copies, and when they are sold out, that’s the end of it.
“I’m not in it to make money. I’m in it because I love to do it.”
But now, the big pay-off.
“I got a call from the National Music Centre. They want to do a special section on me… And before I’m even dead, I can’t believe it, you know?”
You can almost hear the squeal in her voice.
“So, I’m donating my whole collection.”
What?!
“I often wondered what I would do with my collection. All my good stuff, I’ve digitized. But I still have negatives up the ying-yang,” laughs Dee.
It’s a massive honour to be in the National Archives, but here’s one of the best parts of it all.
“I get calls now or an email ‘Oh Dee, remember 1999, I was in a band called blah, blah, blah, and you took our promo picture. Wow, it was so cool, and I just found it, but it’s wrecked. Can I get a copy of it? Can I get it blown up?’ I get a lot of those calls.”
A lesser photographer might hang up on the bald drummer from the defunct hair-metal band. Not Dee.
“Oh no, I tell them I can help them. When I first started, I had to set up a whole filing system because for the first two years, I was doing everything alphabetically.”
ABBA, AC-DC… Would you believe the girl Dee hired to help her file didn’t know the alphabet?
“Things got misfiled, so I had to set up my own numerical filing system, which I did. I also kept track alphabetically so I could look up a band. I kept index cards on every band and every person that I shot. So, I’ve got all that, too. If you tell me ‘I was in Roch Voisine’s band, and you took our picture.’ I’ll ask what they played. I only charge a fee if I have to go out to my storage vault. But with the fee, I also include an 8 x 10.”
Here’s the requisite rock ‘n’ roll story you’ve been waiting for:
Many road managers, Dee explains, interpret their job as keeping everyone away from the star.
“I was doing a meet and greet with Cher. There were eight people. That was it. That was all the road manager would allow. The road manager came in and said to everyone, ‘You do not talk to Cher. You do not look at her. You have your photo taken and you leave. Do not ask her for an autograph.”
Cher came in the room. Dee snapped the photos.
“People stood beside her like at attention. ‘Smile’ I’d say, and the people looked at me as if to say, ‘can we smile?’ I never ask to have my picture taken with artists because I just don’t. But the record company rep knew how much I like Cher. He asked if I’d like him to take my picture with Cher. I said sure if it’s allowed. So, Cher puts her arm around me and asks, ‘why is everybody so weird here?’”
Dee explained to Cher about the riot act that had been read to them by the road manager.
“‘What?!’ asked Cher. ‘Listen, I don’t think I was smiling for that last picture so let’s redo it.’ And we heard later that she’d given the road manager holy hell.”
The ladies Dee has shot stick out for her.
“Bette Midler serving me a glass of champagne in her dressing room. Diana Ross telling me that I could take her vegetable platter home with me if I wanted,” laughs Dee.
Can you picture that?
Dee is keeping busy. Headshots, CD covers, weddings, babies, not always in that order. Aside from all the digital, Dee is kind of old school. From the moment her grandfather introduced her to the art, photography was a passion. Capture, distill the essence of a subject. Make the image as real as the original. This is what Dee does.
SIDEBAR
Who or what are you most grateful for?
“There are so many people that have helped me on my way just by encouraging me. That’s what I’m grateful for.”
What would you tell your twenty-year-old self?
“Start sooner.”
What keeps you grounded?
“Well, my husband has this big, huge pin, and every once in a while, he comes and pops the bubble over my head.”
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