Photography in Canada
Initially focussed on promoting a positive vision of the nation, by the 1960s the division transitioned to documentary photography attuned to individual photographers' artistic inclinations.
According to critic Penny Cousineau-Levine, contemporary photography in Canada de-emphasizes documenting reality; rather, it treats photographs as an invitation to consider the otherworldly.
[9] A year later, Valentine and his partner, Nova Scotia-born Thomas Coffin Doane briefly took rooms at the Golden Lion Inn in St. John's, Newfoundland.
[16] Establishing in Montreal in the late 1850's, he was honoured as photographer to the Queen for his work during the 1860 visit of Edward, then Prince of Wales, to Canada).
[10] Canadian photographers such as Frederick Dally, Edward Dosseter, and Richard Maynard were commissioned by government agencies including the department of Indian affairs to conduct ethnographic portraiture of Indigenous peoples in Canada.
Photographers of settlers, including Hannah Maynard's series Gems of British Columbia, advertised the colonial frontier to prospective white newcomers.
[29] The CPR and Canadian National Railway, which also maintained a photography collection, provided pictures free of charge to writers on Canada.
[31] Local professional and amateur photographers in the Canadian West also documented the region during this period, often focussing on farm equipment.
[34] Around the turn of the 20th century, developments in printing technology made it possible for Canadian amateurs and professionals to produce their own photographic postcards.
[36] In Toronto around the turn of the 20th century, newspapers and other periodicals documented the Ward, a poor and largely immigrant neighbourhood, in photographs.
Copious halftone prints in papers including The Toronto World and The Globe,[37] many by William James,[38] illustrated articles designed to shock, entertain, and attract readers with the lives of Ward residents.
[42] The CPR had used photography to memorialize and promote its operations at least since 1885, when the last spike was driven in;[42] Alexander Ross of Calgary took the iconic photograph, which was widely distributed.
On 8 August 1941, the Still Photography Division, sometimes simply called Photo Services, was transferred to the National Film Board of Canada pursuant to an order in council.
[52] This was part of a broader turn towards modernism in Canadian thinking about photography: it was viewed as an art form, not solely as a means of reporting on reality.
A professional association for photojournalists, PPC aimed to create "a strong national identity for all those involved in the photographic industry".
[61] She identifies a set of portraits taken by Karen Smiley in 1976, and the work of Anne-Marie Zeppetelli, as exemplars of Canadian photographers' use of this realist medium to explore themes beyond the everyday.
[63] This tendency to dislocate the photographic subject from its background persists, says Cousineau-Levine, in Canadian architecture photography by artists including Orest Semchishen.
