Is detailed portrait of Hazel McCallion an insult or an inspirational reflection?

To me, the Star’s front-page photograph marking the death Sunday of Hazel McCallion, showed a woman who led a busy and interesting life.

My mind didn’t immediately go to the heavy wrinkles, the obvious signs of aging that one would expect to see on the face of a person who nearly lived to see her 102nd birthday.

That might be because I had interviewed McCallion many times as a reporter when she was Mayor of Mississauga. I knew what she looked like in her later years, so I didn’t think the photo this week stood out or was jarring.

But others, including some of my colleagues, and especially some Star readers, had a different take, arguing we erred badly in running this picture on the front page of the newspaper.

“Whoever was responsible and approved that front page of our beloved Hazel should be FIRED!!” thundered Rose, who included the caps and exclamation marks to make her point in her letter to my office.

“What were you thinking? Of all the hundreds of pictures you could have chosen, you print the most unflattering picture you could find. So disrespectful,” Rose continued.

“Why would you publish such an unworthy picture of Hazel McCallion on the front page?” wondered Bob C. another reader.

“I am so sad and disappointed,” Anthony, a long-time reader from Oakville, said wistfully, adding: “you must have taken this picture in her death bed.”

Linda, one of the readers I managed to contact, called the photo “appalling,” though she hastened to add that McCallion was “no beauty queen.”

Linda added: “I recognize that the picture has merit, but, as a final reminder (of her life), it was almost scary,” she said, adding the black, blue and grey tones in the photo were too stark.

Another reader, Mary, delivered this blunt assessment. “What a disgraceful page 1 photo. You made Hazel look like a turtle. Do you think Hazel would have liked that photo?”

Don Dixon, the professional photographer who took the picture of Hazel around 2015, told me this week McCallion did in fact approve of the shot.

Dixon, who has his own photography business and doesn’t work for the Star, took the still of her as part of a self-published photo series featuring Canadian icons. He launched the project in the late 2010s to commemorate Canada’s 150th birthday in 2017. McCallion posed for him in what was then his studio on Carlaw Ave.

“I shared the pictures with her afterwards and she was fine with them,” Dixon said in a telephone call from San Francisco, where he’s now based.

He used the same method — desaturation, which entails taking the colour out of a photo, so it almost appears as a black and white picture — for all the icons he shot for the 150 project, including astronaut and neurologist Roberta Bondar, Olympic champion sprinter Donovan Bailey and former Gov. General Adrienne Clarkson.

Dixon said the McCallion photo “wasn’t about vanity” but relentless public service. It’s the face of someone who spent a lot of late nights and daylight hours working for her constituents, he argued. “She pounded the pavement. She was an advocate,” Dixon said.

“What you see is what you got,” he said referring to the photo.

Some of my Star colleagues told me they didn’t like the choice of the front-page photo either. So, why did our editors choose to run this photo to mark her passing?

Jordan Himelfarb, a managing editor at the Star, said a good portrait captures something essential about its subject.

“We selected this photo because we believed it embodied some of the qualities that distinguished McCallion: directness, firmness, power, pride. And yes, she was that all-too-rare phenomenon: an older woman in politics. Why shy away from that fact?” he added.

“It’s unfortunate that some see in this photo a negative judgment. That’s certainly not what we see,” he went on to say.

There was criticism from others, Himelfarb noted, as some readers, more critical of McCallion, took issue with the headline over the photo, “Force of nature,” as being too positive.

Concern over photos of McCallion in the Star isn’t new and this isn’t the first time the public editor’s office has written about it.

One of my predecessors, then Star ombud Don Sellar, noted in one of his 1998 columns that complaints about a front-page colour portrait of McCallion that year included one reader who said: “it’s unfair to show Hazel’s wrinkles like that.”

And in 2010, former public editor Kathy English, wrote in her column that she received dozens of complaints about a photo of McCallion that readers felt was cropped in a “highly unflattering and mean-spirited manner.”

Thinking about this issue, I’m struck by and finding myself agreeing fully with the point Himelfarb makes about how we as a society process an image of an older woman who is in the public realm. My mind goes to the public backlash last summer over former CTV anchor Lisa LaFlamme’s dismissal, where many people firmly believe she was let go for letting her hair go grey (an allegation CTV denies).

Many in the public rallied to LaFlamme’s defence, and lots of women let their hair grow grey as a sign of support/defiance. So, this sign of an aging woman is OK with us? But wrinkles, not so much?

I’m also thinking about double standards and why we don’t really bat an eye when a man who has wrinkles or grey hair delivers the nightly news or is photographed in the newspaper. I wonder: would our front page photo have raised the same level of concern if it was a 100-year-old man?

So, whether it’s McCallion’s wrinkles or LaFlamme’s grey hair, there are some complex and nuanced issues around gender and aging at play in all of this.

The “error” in running the front-page photo of Hazel is in the eye of the beholder.

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