The Martlet

For $32, Julie Gubisch will transform someone into a Mexican bandit. For 44, she’ll make a couple into swashbuckling pirates — eye patch optional. For 60 she’ll turn three young tourists into saloon girls. For eight people or more, see pack¬ages. Dogs, add $10.

So reads the price list of Tony’s Old Time Portrait Studio, nestled downtown Victoria on Broughton Street, where Julie works alone.

As they descend the steps into the shop, unsure and curious, Julie entices her potential customers from behind her desk with snapshots of who they can be. “This is a formal scene. That’s a saloon. You guys can be saloon girls. You can be a Mountie.” They’ll shy away, or make subtle head nods of agreement, and Julie will welcome them in, brush her dark hair back across her bronzed skin to rest in its bob. She’ll approach them in suede hiking boots. “Come on in. Let me give you a fishnet stocking first.”

The studio, founded 1975 in Prince George by Tony Bohanan, specialized in traditional portraits. It was something of higher quality than, but comparable to, what you’d find in the back corners of Sears and the Bay. The business moved to Vancouver and evolved from catering exclusively to children to incorporat¬ing adults, who in a way were required to be children themselves. In the city, the studio departed from tradition. Julie volunteered there and met Tony. Once a week she helped costume customers into Victorian dresses, hillbilly overalls and naval uniforms. Black men became suit and tie passengers of the Titanic. Freckled white women became feather crowned-In¬dians. Julie would jump into the frame to place a pad under an elbow propped on a bar, or sculpt a lady’s hair back with curled fingers, and Tony would stand behind the camera with a boyish smile, ready to flash. Julie moved with Tony and the studio to Victoria in 1985. After finalizing the residual divorce paperwork that’d followed him from the mainland and setting up shop, Tony married Julie. She’s now in her fifties. Tony died a year and a half ago.

Julie comes through the jungle of hanging ponchos, corsets, and sombreros to the bar, atop of which sits a woman from the U.K. Her Romanian husband leans against it, pistols in hand: it’s a holdup.

“Hokay! Hang on.” Julie’s not ready. She crosses overlapping red patterned rugs and carpets, passes tripods and light stands and comes to the prop wall. Not an inch of any surface is left to breathe in Tony’s studio. The wall is smothered by whips, horns, cowboy hats, lanterns and feathered belts. I watch, overwhelmed. Julie knows where any prop is like it’s a carton of milk in the fridge.

“Here you go.” She hands a pistol to the couple’s two year old, sitting between them.

In front of the bar is a table Julie tops with two square jarred mickeys of Jack Daniels. “Booze on the tabe-ull. You want a shot, ten bucks!” She mixes different candle gels for the right colours of her fake alcohol. The backdrop showcases a country sign that reads: “Rooms: 50¢/Hour. $3.00/Nite.” Empty bar¬rels, labelled in print-out box letters: “WHISKEY” and “RUM,” rest atop either side of the bar.

The woman sits in fishnets and black boots; Julie cuts the back of them so they’re universal in size. One leg rests over the other, wrapped with a garter belt that straps down a wad of fake five dollar bills. Her dress hangs off the side and over the bar. A tight-strung push-up top accentuates her bust. A thin leather necklace is clasped tight about her neck. Her head is adorned with a headband holding a feather.

Her husband sports a cowboy hat, bow tie, and black jacket that hangs past the back of his knees. His hand’s on his holster. His lips and facial muscles rigidly contort to a smirk.

Western shots like these are the most popular at Tony’s Old Time Portrait Studio. Second are the Civil War photos and third the Victorian style.

Julie stands behind the camera. She slides a lighting stand over an inch. To the side of the bar stands a bear with a beret. It won’t be in the tight square of the frame. The shot is complete — except for the toddler. The two-year-old cries, piercing wails, not sobs. Maybe it’s that her parents are dressed as bandits, that there’s a foreign metal toy in her hand, or that when she spins in protest she sees a deer head mounted on the wall, or the bear four feet over.

Julie stands behind the camera clapping like a monkey to hold the child’s focus. At last she’s quiet. The sound of gulls met by pop radio is audible again, and Gwen Stefani sings: “this sh— is bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S.” Julie’s been snapping away, but now she’s ready.

“Okay,” she calls, “this time, for serious.”

Before the digital age, in the prime of Polaroid, paper was slid into the back of the camera. The image was pulled out and put through a roller. A protector was peeled off and the photo then hung in a dark room. Things have changed in the business though, and Tony has passed away. She tears up at mention of it. “This —” she says with a spastic expansive gesture that reaches out to curtains, muskets, feathers, drums, lanterns, a model boat and hilted swords, “this was all his ideas.” For her and Tony it was about detail. Faux sleeves thrown onto the ends of wrists to simulate cufflinks for men wearing t-shirts under Victorian jackets. Incisions made on the backs of gun holsters so that they’re easy to slip on. They shared a dream of having the shell of a 1920’s Ford Model A for mafia photos. Maybe even a horse drawn caravan. “There’s so much you can create,” she says. He did, and she does.

Julie snaps off twenty shots and pulls them up on a monitor at the front desk for the customers to view in full-colour, sepia, black and white, or retro tone.

She moved from the Philippines twenty-two years ago. She breezes over the “where are you from” question without importance, or disdain. “This is my home now. But, originally, the Philippines.” Her answer satisfies the Romanian cowboy.

She steps back to the camera, observes her frame, and shoots.

Julie looks at the square screen to see that everything’s shown well: light shadows from the right angles, no one’s chin or shoulders have blurred into background or been swallowed by the oblivion of shadow. But something’s not right. She steps into the country bar, walks up to the pistol-toting cowboy and with the light cradling of two fingers, moves his chin up an inch and over to the right. With a palm over his shoulder she eases his stiff posture. He becomes less wooden and more cowboy.

Julie takes her shots, snapping with paparazzi rapidity — but still allows herself contemplation. She has the energy of an enthusiastic school girl happily involved in a play. Her black hair, devoid of grey, springs in its bob as she moves to and from the camera. From behind her perfectly circular glasses she takes in all the camera shows.

“Mom, your head a little that way — hold it.” She snaps a shot. “Now one more time a little that way — hold it.” Flash. “Now I’m going to give you a gun — hold it.”

There are more complicated shots than these. The bathtub requires precision. No one is actually photographed naked, but the shot suspends disbelief. If a model rests too high out of the porcelain, the shot’s spoiled. Large group shots are especially tricky. Julie can handle up to ten people herself. Any more and she calls in help, assistants like she once was in Vancouver, to dress customers in costume. “A really big shot? Twenty-five people. Two and a half, three hours.”

What complicates things is people’s increasing tendency to be picky about how they look. “Men often give double chin,” she says. The double chin is a result of the head being angled too far down in pose, a tendency, Julie explains, increasingly common in men, self-aware of how they look on camera. A decade ago this was a non-issue.

“Very seldom, very seldom, people still complain,” she says. “Sometimes I like it” — the photo — “but people don’t like it themselves.” Much of her time is eaten up while customers gab from the other side of the desk, fingers pointed at the monitor discussing which shots make them look best. Occasionally Julie is accused of making someone look fat. She refutes this: “You brought fat to me!” — at least that’s what she’d like to say. According to Julie, while people are becoming more concerned with how they look, they’re also getting larger. In the last ten years she’s had to order in new costumes and dress children in adult sizes. She points to the picture of a pudgy boy in a Victorian suit. “Extra-extra-extra-large!”

Julie’s computer saves photos on file indefinitely. But Julie remembers faces, the country a customer visited from, and sometimes whether they were a mobster or a Mountie. A couple from Spain revisited the studio after fifteen years. Another man brought his wife for a wedding photo. Years and a divorce and marriage later he returned with his second wife for the same western stick ’em up shot. He joked about cutting out his ex’s half of the picture and replacing it with hers (he liked his previous pose better).

A teenage girl enters with her father, hands waving. Her voice raises pitch, brings to mind a Disney princess. “I want like — a big giant dress.” Her Dad’s just off work from a construction project. His thumbs tuck into jean pockets, eyes scan over lassos and bullet-hole stickers plastered against a crate. His lips shift to the side. He can be a boy again. “Howdy,” he says, “I want guns.”

Over the years Julie’s had customers invite her home with their families for dinner. But she stays put in the studio 11 a.m. – 7:30 p.m., 364 days a year, closed only on November 11 for Remembrance Day.

In the gallery, accompanied by tens of the thousands of pictures he’d taken, Tony is framed in black and white, 20-something, trekking through the Malaysian jungle in cargo pants and a military issue helmet. It’s the one “real” photo.

The sound of gulls squawks in from Broughton Street and its brick buildings. Julie had wanted to travel across Canada before Tony died. She takes a Civil-War jacket and gown left in the dressing room and hangs them back in the jungle of costumes.

There’s no dark room with its red aura to pin pictures in. Julie comes to the desk, her boyfriend sit¬ting behind the computer. He plays YouTube clips of jazzy singers that bring to mind Edith Piaf. She leans across his lap and bookmarks the webpage of a prop she’s found on eBay. She waits for the next customer to stray in, to wander back, to, even if for a moment, slip into the make believe.