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Photographing the University of Alberta Alumni Awards
Every year the University of Alberta honours a group of its alumni, and every year they need a portrait of each one. The recipients live all over North America, so I photograph the ones in Edmonton, hire local photographers to shoot the rest with the same setup, and retouch all of them so they match.
- Years running
- 4
- Cities
- 20
- Photographers
- 20
- Portraits
- 90+
The job
A portrait of every recipient.
The Assignment
The awards run from the Distinguished Alumni Award to the Sports Wall of Fame, so the people in front of the camera are doctors, lawyers, writers, engineers, coaches and Olympians. This is the fourth year I've done it. The university asks for a quote every year and decides every year, so none of it is automatic.
The brief hasn't changed: a portrait of every recipient, in one style, wherever they live. Most years that's more than a dozen cities and a handful of photographers, and the portraits still have to sit together on one page.
Who's Been in Front of the Camera
Over four years the portraits have included:
- Medicine: Dr. Deena Hinshaw, Alberta's former Chief Medical Officer of Health; Dr. Louis Francescutti, emergency physician and public health leader; Dr. Bruce Ritchie, hematologist and U of A professor of medicine; Dr. Gordon Wilkes, the plastic surgeon who co-founded the Institute for Reconstructive Sciences in Medicine; Dr. Atul Malhotra, sleep and breathing specialist and vice-chair of medicine at UC San Diego; Dr. Nhung Tran-Davies, family physician in Calmar and children's author.
- Law and public life: Robert Philp, former provincial court judge and chief of the Alberta Human Rights Commission; Cheryl Arcand-Kootenay, the first Treaty 6 Cree woman appointed to Alberta's Provincial Court; Darrel Robertson, former superintendent of Edmonton Public Schools.
- Business: Robert Bertram, former chief investment officer of the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan; Eric Axford, former executive vice-president at Suncor Energy; Karla Buffalo, CEO of the Athabasca Tribal Council; Lana Cuthbertson, CEO and co-founder of Areto Labs.
- Writing and the arts: playwright and screenwriter Conni Massing; writer Myrna Kostash; Norma Dunning, Governor General's Literary Award winner; novelist and poet Thomas Trofimuk.
- Architecture and academia: Samuel Oboh, the first Canadian of African descent to lead the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada; Malinda Smith, vice-provost of equity, diversity and inclusion at the University of Calgary.
- Sport: Neville Wright, three-time Olympic bobsledder, now a sprint consultant with Canada Soccer's men's team; Olympians Chris Bowie (swimming) and Heather Jones (field hockey); Sarah Joly, who played for Canada at the 1999 Women's World Cup; Dale Henwood, Olympic hockey assistant coach and founding CEO of the Canadian Sport Institute Calgary.
The full lists are on the University of Alberta's Alumni Awards pages.
How it works
One setup, every city.
Built to Replicate
The first year, the university asked me to come up with the look as well as shoot it, and told me from the start that other photographers would be shooting it too. The recipients live all over the continent, so I was never going to be behind the camera for all of them.
So I kept it simple: one big light, diffused twice, a white bounce underneath, and something dark on the other side to hold the shadow. It's a classic portrait setup that any photographer who knows strobes can put together, and fewer moving parts means less that can drift from one city to the next.
Every photographer who joins gets the same reference sheet and the same setup, so nobody's guessing.
Finding the Photographers
Every year starts with a spreadsheet: that year's recipients, where they live, and when they're free over the summer. Some are flexible. Some have a two-day window before they're off-grid at the cottage until fall.
If they're in Edmonton, I shoot them. Everywhere else, I look for a local portrait photographer, ideally someone with a studio who's comfortable with strobes. In a big city I can pick from people I already know. In a small town there might be one option, if that. I won't ask anyone to travel further than they would across a big city, so 20 to 30 minutes at most.
After four years, a lot of cities already have someone. When a recipient turns up in one of them, I call the same photographer again, and they usually say yes.
This year one recipient was finishing work in Syria, spent a few months in Spain, then stopped in Montreal for a week on the way home. Alex Tran photographed them there. It's the third year I've worked with Alex. One year he drove three hours to Quebec City to photograph a recipient in their own home. If we ever meet in person, the drinks are on me.
A lot of the network came out of Peter Hurley's Headshot Crew. Kent Meister in New York, Rich Soublet in San Diego, Trevor Walker in Kelowna, Greg Thomason in Nashville, Anita Watkins in London, Ontario, and Robert de Wit in Ottawa are all people I met there and now count as friends, and they've all shot for this project.
Retouching Everything Myself
Every photographer sends me their RAW files when they're done, and nothing gets edited on their end. I retouch every image myself, whoever shot it and wherever.
Even with the same setup, every room has its own light, so small differences creep in. The retouching is where they get pulled back together: the same colour, the same crop, the same hand on every face. A recipient photographed in a small-town studio sits next to one photographed in New York, and you can't tell which is which.
The Network, Mapped
Four years in, the network covers 20 cities in Canada and the United States, from Halifax to San Diego, with 20 photographers counting me and more than 90 portraits, all from the same setup and the same retouching. Tap a pin to see who shot there and when.
Edmonton, home baseNetwork photographer
Four years in
The best part.
The Best Part of This Job
I went to the U of A myself, so a lot of the people in front of the camera came through the same buildings I did, a few years or a few decades apart.
The moment I look forward to most is opening the first proofs from a photographer I admire. Seeing good work come in, and then paying them for it, makes for a good day.
And I get to meet the recipients here in Edmonton. For the length of a session I'm in a room with someone who's spent a career on something, making their portrait. I still like that as much as I did the first year.
This Year
The 2026 group is 19 alumni across six categories, from the Distinguished Alumni Award to the Sports Wall of Fame, honoured at a ceremony at the Horowitz Theatre on October 22. Neville Wright, one of the two portraits near the top of this post, is one of them, for his track and bobsleigh career. The full list, with everyone's stories, is on the University of Alberta's Alumni Awards page.
The portraits
Year by year.
The Portraits, Year by Year
Every recipient from each year, newest first.
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