Remembering Bruno Schlumberger: Ottawa's Award-Winning Photographic Visionary
For more than three decades, Ottawa Citizen photographer Bruno Schlumberger wandered the city's streets with a singular mission: to find the perfect background before discovering his subject. He searched for angles, color, lines, and reflections, constructing what he called "the perfect scaffolding" for photographs whose subjects had not yet appeared.
The Art of Waiting for the Decisive Moment
Schlumberger would patiently wait for that magical instant when something entered his carefully composed frame and electrified it. "Maybe just a woman walking a dog," he would say, "or just someone coming into the frame to finish it." This approach transformed urban still lifes into fleeting pieces of theater, capturing what Henri Cartier-Bresson, the father of modern photojournalism, famously called "the decisive moment."
His method required perfect timing—that fraction of a second when composition, subject, and movement align. Miss that moment, and it disappears forever. Schlumberger's thick French accent would often mutter "What is this sheeeet?" when faced with mundane newspaper assignments, cameras dangling from his neck in frustration.
A Record-Setting Career of Excellence
Despite his disdain for routine assignments, Schlumberger consistently returned with images that exceeded everyone's expectations but his own. He developed a famous practice of submitting just one photo from assignments, believing that if he sent more, editors might choose incorrectly. When asked for additional images, he would simply re-send the same photograph with different cropping.
This confidence proved justified. By his retirement in 2014, Schlumberger had won six National Newspaper Awards—more than any newspaper photographer in Canadian history. In a profession where many photographers never win even one award, this achievement places him in a class of his own. Remarkably, many of his award-winning images were captured not at major news events, but on ordinary Ottawa streets where his patient eye transformed routine scenes into extraordinary art.
The Philosophy Behind the Lens
More than anything, Bruno hated boring pictures. Fortunately for Ottawa Citizen readers, he seldom took one. "He would only shoot something that he thought looked beautiful," recalls friend and former Citizen photo editor Howard Fagen. "The subject was almost secondary. It was the shot itself."
His award-winning portfolio includes powerful images like an eight-year-old girl hugging her father, Warrant Shawn Groves, which earned a National Newspaper Award nomination, and a Paris painter hiding his face alongside a self-portrait, which won the National Newspaper Award for feature photography.
A Quiet Farewell
Bruno Schlumberger passed away on March 5 at age 77, one year after being diagnosed with ALS. Characteristically, he chose medical assistance in dying without fanfare or sentimentality. He knew the time of the appointment but deliberately chose not to know the date, maintaining his artistic detachment until the end.
His legacy extends beyond his record-setting six National Newspaper Awards. Schlumberger demonstrated how patience, composition, and timing could transform everyday urban scenes into lasting works of photographic art. For thirty years, he showed Ottawa—and Canada—that extraordinary moments hide within ordinary streets, waiting only for the right eye to discover them.
