His lens has adjusted around the visage of presidents and sheiks, movie stars and military leaders, but his most famous photo - the one those celebrities can't stop talking about - is the black-and-white snapshot of his father standing by the woodshed in Salmon Valley.
Rob Gilbert has accrued an international reputation as a portrait photographer. His most recent retrospective was in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, attended by as many of the region's rich and famous as were depicted on the walls of the exhibition.
With portraits of actor Ian Tracy, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and Portuguese prime minister Antnio Costa along one corridor, it is the face at the end of the line that he constantly has to discuss, even with the most hoity of the toities in attendance. When he was interviewed by media on the scene, it was that portrait they insisted be in the background. Not Bill Clinton, not Amal Clooney, not Sharjah's chief of police major general Humaid Al Hudaidi, but Henry Gilbert who had gone outside to smoke his pipe at the woodshed when his son said "hey dad, look over here."
It was that photo that got Gilbert a particularly special job, and led to the Sharjah exhibition. He was recommended by a friend in Europe who knew Gilbert could take stellar photos and also had the highest levels of international security clearance (one cannot simply show up to a photo session with the prime minister of France). The organizers of an annual political-cultural summit in Sharjah needed an official photographer. Gilbert said it was the portrait of his father that stood out to the interview panel selecting the candidates.
Gilbert got the job of taking portraits of all the global leaders and celebrities who took the stage of that high-calibre symposium. After doing so for a few years, he was offered the chance to show the best of those photos as art pieces. And the star of the show was dad
"It's a long way from Salmon Valley, if you know what I mean," Gilbert said.
Yet, Salmon Valley has always been with him. He grew up one of 12 brothers and sisters in the hand-built cabin his parents still live in. Nine of those siblings still live in the Prince George area, and Gilbert comes back as often as he can to reconnect with his tight family and the city he loves.
"I definitely want to retire there," he said, noting his hometown coming up a lot in conversation down in his current city of Vancouver. "I have a feeling that P.G. is going to grow dramatically in the next five to 10 years. With UNBC and an international airport and all those developments, and at the same time, down here, people in Vancouver are getting set to cash out of the inflated housing market down here, they are looking at Kelowna and Kamloops and Salmon Arm and they aren't liking what they see with real estate values there and I keep hearing 'Prince George, Prince George' so I'm excited about that."
Gilbert moved away in 1991 shortly after graduation. He knew at that time he wanted to be a professional photographer but he didn't know how to go about it except inordinate amounts of hard work.
"I've never taken a class," he said, somewhat proudly but somewhat sheepishly. Instead of school, he volunteered to be an unpaid apprentice of two of North America's master photographers who lived in the Lower Mainland: Waldy Martens and Gaetano Fasciana. While they paid him zero dollars, they were generous with expertise. He also read voraciously the books of Patrick de Marchelier, Peter Lindbergh, David Bailey and other stars of the profession.
"I remember one time Waldy told me 'I have have bad news and worse news.' The bad news was, 'kid, you're going to need about $80-grand worth of lights to be competitive in this business, and the worse news is, once you have all that, you have to learn how to use it.'"
He slowly cobbled together the tools of the trade, the knowledge of the craft and painful amounts of trial and error but every click of the shutter took him forward to what he imagined back in his childhood.
There wasn't much TV in the Gilbert household, back then. Only two channels and parents reluctant to have it on very much, but music was prevalent.
"My mother's record collection was my first introduction to photography. I remember specifically it was Cat Stevens, Neil Diamond, Simon & Garfunkel, Rod Stewart, Gilbert & Sullivan - these big album covers, records, not the little images on CDs or iPods you get now - and that was when I was first conscious of portrait photography. They were portraits, but in a storytelling kind of way. That got my attention. And when your nearest neighbour is two miles away, you spend a lot of time dreaming about what's over the horizon, what is beyond, what New York or London must be like, and so it draws you to go find out."
Even when a celebrity is looking down the barrel of his camera, even when he is jet-setting to foreign lands to capture star-power images, his Salmon Valley upbringing is at the front of his mind.
"When we were growing up, it wasn't unheard of to chop half a cord of wood in December before lunch," he said. "So when you get a career going in photography you still have that sense of hard work and just getting things done no matter what, but you aren't out in subzero temperatures in he middle of winter, so it's always a joy to go to work. Work is a pleasure."
His current project, in his spare time in between commercial portraits, is professionally shooting the portraits of street people in his neighbourhood. His studio in Gastown is only a few blocks from some of the poorest streets in North America and he is snapping those images with charity in mind. A gallery in Vancouver has already agreed to host an exhibition of these images with the money raised going to ease street life in the area of Hastings and Main in inner-city Vancouver.
Gilbert will also be home for Christmas, so he looks forward to chopping more wood and getting reacquainted with subzero temperatures, and family - the people he pictures in his head no matter what his camera is doing.
