Noel Norton is dead. There, it's said. Now I can contemplate the hard, uncompromising edges of those four words and their finality. I met Noel Norton when he was roughly the same age that I am now. He was a mature, successful photographer with children almost my age, a thriving business on Marli Street, and a display wall in that space with continuous photographic inspiration. It is one of the curiosities of our relationship, forged over processed film and dozens of dusty days in the Savannah on a Carnival Tuesday, that he never told me a single thing about the craft of photography, yet he taught me everything I know about being a photographer in T&T. Over the last six years and right up until two weeks ago, Noel continued to teach me what this business was about, what it took from you and what you were honour bound to give in return. His work, shelf after shelf of it in a room at his home, is an unprecedented and continuous photographic record of T&T's development since the 1950's and is unequalled anywhere in this country.
He worked at it until he couldn't anymore, and if there was one thing that Noel managed to fail at during the three and a half decades I knew him, it was retirement. The Nortons shrank and finally closed the studio at Westmall, moving operations to their Diego Martin home. As the years went by, digital technology and family decisions led to them scaling back to a cosy apartment in the space, but the work continued with impressive industry. The final meditation of his life, then, was an instruction on facing the inevitable end of a career. If the man was sometimes irritable, it was because the photographer became frustrated with the almost constant changes in technology that upset his routine. Time is relentless. Noel began to have difficulties with his eyesight. Mary, the scaffolding of his soaring career, became grievously ill. The complications of digital colour correction and printing became increasingly confusing. Carnival, some distance now from the agreeable festival he had begun photographing half-a-century before, was difficult, the costumes indistinguishable, the music unintelligible.
In 2010, I found myself presiding over the end of that era. That February I drove in through the gates to Dimanche Gras with Noel, the sun still low in the sky. What happened over the next few hours will always haunt me, I think. Let's just say that I made a lousy Mary Norton and by the end of the show, Noel's camera was irreparably broken. I'll never forget walking back to the car that night, skipping over suspicious pools of water trailing away from sewage trucks, trying to make chit chat with Norts and knowing in my heart that he wouldn't ever be back. It wouldn't be his last heartbreak. Never bitter, his work became progressively more challenging. His health was faltering. Mary, ailing for so long, finally passed away. At her funeral last August he looked so frail, so lost. The photographer stripped of his life partner and so much of his craft. Still, he offered lessons in dignity, even in infirmity. Just a few days ago, he cracked wise with his nurse about his lunch. This was still Sgt Norton, the bombardier who climbed into a massive British Lancaster to do battle lying on his chest, studying the terrain from its nose windows.
He was a teenager when he stared down death by flak shrapnel, and he hadn't lost his grit in the 70 years since.
• Read an expanded version of this column and other pieces on Noel Norton from 1999 and 2005 here: http://ow.ly/8yAKg.