Shoot first. Ask questions later

The CEO of Aeroplan hopes Damien Hirst isn't reading this. But Rupert Duchesne was astounded by the controversial British artist's recent Sotheby's auction, which sold $200 million (U.S.) worth of dead animals submerged in formaldehyde, glass-fronted medicine cabinets stuffed with cigarette butts, and drawings of Hirst's signature dots, butterflies and skulls. "It's mind-bogglingly bizarre," says Duchesne.

That's not to say Duchesne--who sits on the board of the Art Gallery of Ontario--doesn't respect Hirst's work. "He has produced some extraordinarily interesting pieces," he says. But there are some who don't consider Hirst's collections of peculiar objects to be art. Likewise, "there are people who've argued for years that photography isn't the same quality of art as, say, painting," says Duchesne, his blue eyes staring out the window of his eighth-floor Toronto office.

"I say this at my peril, but if a shark in a tank is art, then photography is art."

Duchesne, 49, has been taking photos all his life. His father, a "passionate photographer," gave him his first camera for Christmas when he was 6. Even while doing his degree in pharmacology at Leeds University, he was a member of the photography club, developing prints in his own darkroom. He went on to start a master's in neuropharmacology. "But I decided I couldn't bear to be locked in a lab with a rat all day," says Duchesne.

Instead, he ended up at business school, snagging an MBA and embarking on a jet-setting career in strategy consulting that eventually led him to Air Canada (where he orchestrated the merger with Canadian Airlines), and later Groupe Aeroplan in 2000. Duchesne helped transform the loyalty program into an international brand with a market cap that now eclipses Air Canada's.

A decade ago, Duchesne would have spent his weekends racing a historic 1961 Lotus at tracks all over the world. He gave it up six years ago. "It was ludicrously dangerous. Those early Grand Prix cars do close to 300 kilometres an hour, weighed 880 pounds, and they're basically made out of coat hangers and fibreglass." Photography is currently more his speed, and he rarely leaves home without his Leica M8 (he went digital two years ago, though he still loves his bare-bones Rollei 35mm). Part of what draws him to photography is that it doesn't require the same amount of time as, say, suiting up for an F1 race. "If you have an hour and you're away somewhere interesting, you can produce really interesting work," says Duchesne. "Some of the great photographers, like Cartier-Bresson, would walk around the streets of Paris for half an hour and come up with visual images that are more arresting than the vast majority of paintings."

Duchesne fires up a MacBook to scroll through photos from a trip to Ethiopia he took this past March (he has a lot of Aeroplan points) with his wife, Holly, and their year-old son Jack: hazy vistas of the Rift Valley, crowded Addis Ababa streets, and his favourite--a photo of a young girl running after their truck whom he captured by chance, snapping madly as the vehicle sped away. "One of the things I love about photography is that it has so many legs to it," he says. "At once it can be startlingly realistic photojournalism that informs people in a very emotional way. Other times, it can capture an extraordinarily beautiful story, and at other times it is social documentary."

A recurring theme in Duchesne's work is the disappearance of traditional trades and rural ways of life. He slides a colour print across the table: a lone fishing boat stranded at low tide on the Bay of Fundy (he took it three years ago from the New Brunswick shore, where his wife's family was living at the time). "Farming is going, forestry is wholly mechanized, the fisheries have been decimated," says Duchesne. "You can go out in the country and see whole villages that are essentially abandoned."

The opposite is true in Muskoka, where Duchesne owns a cottage. "When I bought it 12 years ago, it was peaceful and calm. Now it's like living on a highway." So, Duchesne and his wife are working with Toronto architects Shim-Sutcliffe to build an off-the-grid, eco-friendly place in Gatineau, near Ottawa. "At the same time--and just as importantly--we'll have an amazing piece of architecture that works in the landscape." It will be constructed with gold-standard green building products, reclaimed timber and quadruple-glazed windows, and use geothermal heating.

Though he stresses that it will be more European in its proportions--just a couple thousand square feet as opposed to the monstrous homes that crowd the shores of Muskoka, north of Toronto--he will have a studio where he can print his photographs. And, of course, he'll be able to prowl the Gatineaus with his Leica. "Photography is very democratic because everyone can take a photograph," says Duchesne. "So where is the boundary between someone's snapshot and an Ansel Adams picture?" He doesn't wait for an answer. "I think it's just as much in the eye of the beholder as it is in what the experts in the art world might think."

MY CAMERA: THE LEICA M8

A couple of years ago, I moved to digital. This Leica, while digitial, is completely manual --it has no auto-focus or any of that stuff. So you end up thinking more carefully about the composition of the photograph than about all the billion bells and whistles you get in a typical digital camera. If you're forced to think about what aperture you need, about whether you want a sharp face and a blurred background or an extraordinary depth of field if you're doing a landscape, I think you end up taking a better photograph. I think Leica's lenses are the best in the world. I have five of them, and I just choose which one is right for the situation, and you get an extraordinarily crisp and precise photograph. I don't carry a zoom lens.