- Rare Benefit: Gals in Images in Canada, 1840–1940
- UBC Push (2022)
[Editor’s Note from UBC Press: The following excerpt from ‘Rare Merit: Women in Photography in Canada, 1840–1940’ delves into the unknown history of the first woman photographer to set up shop in North America. In ‘Rare Merit,’ Colleen Skidmore presents, for the first time, the exceptional range of women’s work in photography in Canada, proving that women’s practices and images — knowingly omitted from founding narratives of photographic history — were diverse, compelling, widespread and influential. Whenever and wherever women photographers lived, travelled and worked, their impact undermined the status quo.]
On July 7, 1841, the very first females to work as a expert photographer in North The us opened up shop. Mrs. Fletcher, “professor and teacher of the photogenic artwork,” declared her company in the Mechanic and Farmer, the regional newspaper of Pictou, Nova Scotia. Evoking the novelty of the medium, she enticed the skeptical and the curious by praising the “extreme perfections, elegance, and great minuteness” of the daguerreotype.
A thirty day period later, she shut store and boarded a steamship certain for the St. Lawrence River. On Aug. 6, 1841, she reappeared, announcing the opening of her second Canadian portrait studio, this time in Quebec Metropolis, centrally situated in Higher Town. A thirty day period later she once more moved on, to Montreal, and all over again she strategically positioned her daguerreotype rooms in the heart of the metropolis, on Place d’Armes subsequent to the Union Bank. In equally towns, Fletcher utilised the similar wording for regional newspaper audience. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” exclusively, were “invited to get in touch with.”
No trace continues to be of Mrs. Fletcher’s daguerreotypes, as is true for individuals made by her feminine successors in Canada. This reduction creates an immutable gap in our understanding and being familiar with of the foundational decades of images as a visible, social and technological phenomenon. It will make knowledge about early women photographers all the more elusive, for as the images disappeared so too did memory of their creators and their roles in the advancement of the medium as a visual exercise and a company pursuit in Canada.
These are some of the issues that can be explored, in spite of the reduction of visible artifacts, mainly because Mrs. Fletcher made the fortuitous conclusion to advertise her service and wares: Who were being they, and wherever did they function? How and why did they enter the job, and how did they fare? What did their visuals glimpse like, and why did they look as they did? Who had been their clientele and who have been not? How and where did their daguerreotypes flow into, and what meaning did they make for individuals who considered them? In what means did women of all ages and men photographers interact in their new business job?
Mrs. Fletcher’s adverts offer you a slice of perception into women’s methods, experiences and importance in the early background, follow and impact of images in an industrializing, colonizing and capitalist environment. The manner in which she ran her business enterprise, the problems she confronted, and whom she specific as clientele can be gleaned and analyzed. There is also substantially that are unable to be regarded and questions that can’t be entirely answered but that nonetheless need to have to be stored in thoughts when drawing conclusions about the procedures of early females photographers.
How did Mrs. Fletcher and her colleagues, both equally females and men, see her own and other women’s opportunities and boundaries? How did she and other women negotiate their gender with patrons and with colleagues? What were the social profiles of people who patronized her rooms? And how considerably revenue did she make?
She described her small business as “lucrative” and supplied to instruct “enterprising young ladies” in its insider secrets. Was she certainly as financially thriving as she claimed? Her ads are also more broadly instructive, as they discover a vary of social, economic and aesthetic things that can be explored to figure out how these types of factors informed or ended up probably themselves formed by women’s procedures in photography among 1840 and 1940.
Fletcher’s organization was transnational, aggressive and entrepreneurial. It was community and qualified the operate of generating a daguerreotype, allow alone operating a company (internet marketing, building a clientele, delivering a last solution to beneficial reaction), was elaborate and specialised. The item — a portrait — was at very first a luxurious item but soon grew to become a meaningful discretionary cost for a burgeoning center class.
In time, it became an indispensable software for proclaiming and portraying social standing. Industry need for both equally the company and the products developed by daguerreotypists grew as exposure to the new medium spread, in section as a result of the perform and terms of photographers like Mrs. Fletcher. Her business enterprise, and by extension Fletcher herself, were being positioned in the public intellect as fashionable and progressive, engaged as she was with technological know-how, journey, marketing and schooling.
The “professor and trainer of the photogenic art” was a literate girl who was intelligent adequate to grasp the technology and wealthy more than enough to pay for the needed teaching and equipment. She was also a particular person of ambition and aspiration to economic return from her very own expert pursuits, an primarily hard goal for girls in mid-19th-century North America. In addition, she not only promoted the medium to customers but enabled other gals to choose it up as an occupation by instructing them the system. And so, however she was the 1st girl photographer in the occupation, she was not by itself for prolonged.
Tailored from the ebook ‘Rare Merit: Girls in Pictures in Canada, 1840–1940’ penned by Colleen Skidmore and published by UBC Push. All legal rights reserved. For more facts, check out the UBC Push site. 
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