In The Playroom With The Meticulous Jonathan Hobin

To watch Jonathan Hobin work is to think a line that Julianne Moore repeats in the film The Big Lebowski: “He’s a good man, and thorough.”
Hobin is thorough, meticulously, and likely to exhaust anybody posing for his elaborately staged photos. This past summer I tagged along as he posed several young children for a photo shoot at the Canadian War Museum. He posed the children this way and that way, over here, over there, looking up, looking down, standing still, jumping, sitting, arm-in-arm, standing apart... The child models bore it stolidly. I was childishly bored (though, in my defence, I wasn’t allowed to jump on the mini trampoline Hobin had brought along).