Silvia Pecota’s Hybrid Artistry
By Günter Ott

A whirlwind photographer blends innovative style and sophisticated techniques together with a strong social conscience.

Award winning, Toronto-based photographer and artist Silvia Pecota leads an incredibly busy life pursuing a whirlwind of activities that would daunt a lesser being.

Since 1985, she has been a regular contributor to the Toronto Sun and its affiliated papers; for many years she has photographed the Sunshine Boy and Girl, as well as shooting sports, fashion and photojournalism around the world. She’s done fashion shoots in such diverse places as Croatia, the Caribbean, and Italy and has had numerous exhibitions of her work in Canada, Italy, Germany and Russia. She has photographed actors, musicians, and sports celebrities and won awards for her documentary on boxers, Lacing On the Gloves.

Silvia is currently taking part in a Canadian Forces Artist program that will lead to an assignment in Bosnia and Afghanistan in the near future, along with three other artists. The resulting sculptures, paintings and photography will become an exhibition to be unveiled in Ottawa at the end of this year. Silvia is also the author, illustrator and designer of a newly released children’s book, "Hockey Across Canada", and in her spare time she used to head off to the Arctic to teach photography to school children. Who could keep up with that pace?

In addition, she just had an exhibit in Milan Italy at the Agfa Gallery, is preparing for an upcoming exhibit in Italy this June, and is working on a journalistic book Second to None: The Canadian Army, as well as completing images for the Canadian Forces Artist Program. Silvia also hopes to have her next children's book about an Inuit Boy in Canada's Arctic out for this fall.

We caught up to her for a few minutes in Toronto between assignments and Silvia talked about her background and some of her projects.

Silvia says she demonstrated an interest in art at a very early age. Her early drawings were soon replaced with a committed enthusiasm for photography. “At Ryerson University in Toronto I wanted to get into the film programme and prior to that spent two years in Sheridan College’s animation program but found animation to be too slow and film involved too many people. A good day’s work in animation was two seconds of footage. I wanted to accomplish things faster than that,” she declares. “So I gravitated to photography, which gave me the satisfaction of instant results -- and as a career, it offered many more opportunities.”

Arctic Adventures

One such opportunity occurred in 1994 when Silvia journeyed to the Arctic to work on a documentary film. She saw there wasn’t much for children in the isolated communities to do, so she arranged with her Sun newspaper contacts to collect a few pieces of hockey equipment for the children of Baffin Island. “Within a couple of weeks I had over 2000 pounds of gear where I was just expecting a couple of donated hockey bags!” says Silvia.

The project resulted in three delivery trips and over 7,000 pounds of gear for the children of Pond Inlet, Kugluktuk and Repulse Bay. “Taking the stuff up to the Arctic gave me the opportunity to take more pictures there,” says Pecota. “This led to an exhibition in 2000 called "Spirit of the North; Celebrating the First Anniversary of Nunavut" at The Joseph D. Carrier Art Gallery in Toronto. This show will be on exhibit in June 2004 in Desenzano del Garda, Italy where she maintains an apartment and travels there 3-4 times a year.

“I got frostbite in the arctic and sometimes wondered what I was doing going on 9- hour treks in the wilderness,” Silvia recalls. “But there’s a great deal of satisfaction in seeing the actual images later on. I grew obsessed with the huge white blank canvas of the Arctic and realized it was a perfect backdrop for image making.


Hasselblad Always Performed in Harsh Environment


“In the Arctic, I prefer shooting with my Hasselblad camera. I found that my 35mm cameras would break down, shutters would freeze or else the film leader broke in the cold, but the Hasselblad always performed, even in – 40 degrees weather.


“I love the quality I get from my Hasselblad. I initially gravitated to the Hasselblad because of my interest in portrait photography as opposed to photojournalism. The larger, square format was ideal for letting me crop in any direction. When blown up in a slide show, I can really appreciate the beauty and wealth of detail in the much larger 2 1/4 images. Also, the lenses are just beautiful. I tend to shoot with the Hasselblad 150mm lens as my standard lens 95 per cent of the time, and I find my vintage Hasselblad CM body meets most of my needs in photography.


“At Pond Inlet, I made friends with students and taught photography for a couple of weeks. That’s when I got very involved with Agfa products; I asked them to provide supplies for my teaching,” Pecota recalls. “They donated a lot of products for the students. Eventually I worked on Agfa’s Scala calendar in 2002 and got invited to the Photokina World’s Fair of Imaging in Cologne to show my work.”


Silvia recalls, “At Ryerson, where I tested a lot of Agfa product, I mostly shot B/W and discovered the beautiful tonality of Agfa film that is not too contrasty. It’s important to find the right film because you are only as good as your exposure. Scala film is interesting because it’s a B/W transparency film and therefore not forgiving. You have to be precise in your metering. With the calendar and a slide show I was amazed by the incredible detail – the drops of sweat on a fireman’s body that could be clearly seen. That’s where you see the real difference between 35mm and the larger 21*4 format -- when it’s projected on a large screen.

Achieving a Painterly Effect

“My big love at school was the arts and I wanted to make photographs look more like paintings. I remember trying to achieve a painterly effect through various odd processing techniques, so I was always experimenting to get the effect I wanted. What I’ve tried to achieve with these effects is to find a fresh, expressive way to combine my love of painting and photography.

“I accidentally discovered the Joyce Tenneson style of effect and used it for taking the hockey team pictures in my children’s book Hockey Across Canada. I shot the subjects against backdrops that I painted and then, using double exposures, soft filters with soft lighting and experimented with very pale makeup. I refined the image in postproduction to bring the image closer to painting.


“I try to shoot the photo to look as much like a painting as possible, then combine it with a painted backdrop to mesh the tonalities together. Next, I refine the image in Photoshop. That’s how I produced the book and this style of imagery.


“The idea for the book came from an image of an Inuit boy I had photographed during my first hockey drive. I had brought a backdrop and had an idea of meshing these elements together in a painting even before I knew about Photoshop. I actually hated the computer at first, finding it difficult and non-intuitive, but eventually I figured out how to make it do what I wanted.

“For example, it took me a whole day just to paint in the snowflakes on the photo of the Quebec children playing hockey in the book. It took me about two weeks to do each picture for the book.

Of course the correct paper is also important to the creation of the final image. Silvia has found that Crescent paper, distributed in Canada by Amplis Foto, has been an important addition to her bag of techniques. “The Crescent paper really enhances the quality of the image. It’s incredible, especially when I retouch with watercolour and ink. When it comes to creating an image, the final product depends entirely on the paper used, and to see one’s work beautifully reproduced is the ultimate satisfaction for an artist,” Silvia says.

Making Sacrifices

In another example of merging painting and photography, Silvia painted an oil painting of clouds based on a photograph, then blended it together with an image of a parachutist with a red Maple Leaf flag parachute. She then drew in a lot of details. The Army commissioned this illustration for the SkyHawks, the Canadian parachuting team.

She also used this technique for a series of postcards she produced to honour the Canadian Armed Forces. Another card, featuring a beautiful, blonde model wrapped in the Canadian flag, received much positive response from troops going to Afghanistan. Silvia also created another image honoring the Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan.

“I believe we have to make a contribution to humanity; we have to give something back to society,” Silvia says. “Since I’m in the media, I have opportunities to do something positive. If I brought a smile to an Inuit child for a week – that’s something; or if they take up photography in a place where there is too much poverty and lack of opportunities that lead to boredom and social problems; or to take pictures that honour our soldiers overseas for the hard, dangerous work they are doing. That’s where I can perhaps make a contribution.”

Pecota adds, “I gave up a trip to Mexico to participate in a grueling boot camp experience in February 2002. It was miserable and cold and tough and I kept asking myself ‘Why am I here?’ But it did give me a new appreciation of our troops and an awareness of the important role they play. If I can communicate that to people through my photography, then I can feel I’m doing my job.”


Silvia Pecota combined photography, computer manipulation and oil painting to create a series of images focusing on children playing hockey for her book Hockey Across Canada.


Silvia has a way of knowing just the right way of putting even tough portrait subjects at ease, such as when she photographed sports commentator Don Cherry recently. He demanded, "Silvia, how long is this going to take?" Silvia replied, "'til you get it right!"

"She's the only one that can talk to me that way, and get away with it!" noted Cherry.