Papal photos are a Devine inspiration

By ALANNA MITCHELL, The Globe and Mail
Friday, July 26, 2002

Evan Devine, 47, a counsellor with the mentally handicapped adults who live at the centre, immediately called his wife Sheila, 43, and asked her to bring over his binoculars.

She couldn't find them, so she brought his camera instead, a Minolta 301 that he bought in 1976, a 300-millimetre telephoto lens and a single roll of film.

It was that piece of serendipity that allowed Mr. Devine, known as Heaven, to some of the centre's residents who speak with difficulty, to take the day's only photographs of the pontiff.

Sent around the world by The Canadian Press wire service, the shots are affectionately known as the "Pope on a Boat," and feature John Paul II on a pleasure cruise around Lake Simcoe, north of Toronto.

Mr. Devine took the shots from a paddleboat next to the yacht on which the Pope was a passenger.

The media frenzy over the pictures began just minutes after Mr. Devine got the roll of film developed at a one-hour photo shop in Orillia on his lunch break, he said yesterday. He heard cries of: "They're looking for you!" and before he knew it, a photographer from the National Post had one of the two sets of prints and all the negatives.

"I never realized how well watched the Pope was," he said.

Dazed, Mr. Devine figured the Orillia paper, The Packet and Times, might like a shot, too. He sold the two best to The Packet, which in turn sent them to Canadian Press. His shots appeared yesterday in all the Toronto newspapers and many others across Canada.

Doug Ives, a photo editor at Canadian Press in Toronto, said it's impossible to know yet how many newspapers in other countries used the shots. But he said they were the only ones to come out of the Pope's Canadian visit on Wednesday.

Mr. Devine was reluctant to say precisely how much money he got for his photographs of the pontiff, except to say he got less than $1,000 in total.

"I'm not a business-minded person," he said a touch ruefully yesterday.

A National Post employee told Mr. Devine the paper would give a charitable donation on his behalf to the Huronia Regional Centre in place of payment to him.

Mr. Devine, a father of two children, said he hopes he will make enough from the famous Pope shots to buy himself a new bike to ride to work.