“To me, it's about how you’re in one spot at one moment and then years later, things change," Pierre Obendrauf says.
In this weekly series looking back over their exceptionally long careers, we asked our Montreal Gazette photographers to pick out their favourites and tell us about how they got made and what they mean to them.
In 2009, then Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, took an 11-day royal visit to Canada.
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The trip took them from Newfoundland to the Pacific coast, back to Ontario and, finally, Montreal before heading back to Ottawa for Remembrance Day.
It was in Montreal that Gazette photographer Pierre Obendrauf captured them during a tour of Cirque du Soleil’s St-Michel headquarters.
The royal couple were given a preview of the circus’s newest show before pausing to talk with the artists and acrobats involved.
Obendrauf likes the framing in the photo and the contrast in colour between the royal couple, who are dressed in all black besides their red poppies, and the artists wearing rainbow-coloured body stockings.
“But it’s not a great photo,” he said in a recent interview. What stands out more to him instead is how the photo shows the passing of time. Today, Charles is the King of the United Kingdom and Camilla the Queen Consort.
“The acrobats surrounded them like it was nothing. But now they would see the picture and be like, ‘I was with the king,’” Obendrauf said.
“To me, it’s about how you’re in one spot at one moment and then years later, things change,” he added. “It’s what life is all about.”
jfeith@postmedia.com
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