Rare Merit: Women in Photography in Canada, 1840–1940 by Colleen Skidmore (review)

Reviewed by: Rare Merit: Women in Photography in Canada, 1840–1940 by Colleen Skidmore Siobhan Angus (bio) Rare Merit: Women in Photography in Canada, 1840–1940 By Colleen Skidmore. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2022. Pp. 352. It was the summer of 1841 when the American daguerreotypist Mrs. Fletcher made history as the first woman to open a professional photography studio in either North America or Britain. Somewhat surprisingly, this groundbreaking moment happened in the small town of Pictou, Nova Scotia. In Rare Merit, Colleen Skidmore tracks the scant archival traces of Fletcher's peripatetic practice to Quebec City, Montreal, and Charleston, South Carolina, before Fletcher vanishes from the historical record. Fletcher's story opens Rare Merit and skillfully articulates Skidmore's main thesis: women's histories are central to the medium, and women played a significant role in the development of Canadian photography. It also establishes the important role women played in photographic industries and technological change and places an emphasis on regional histories. Building on Laura Jones's landmark study of female photographers in Canada, Skidmore centers gender as the key analytic, joining Naomi Rosenblum's global survey, A History of Women Photographers (1995), and Peter Palmquist's North American–focused Camera Fiends and Kodak Girls (1989), as well as work on Canada by Susan Close, Joan Schwartz, and Carol Williams. Skidmore traces how women made use of ever-changing photographic technologies, and in turn, how women were limited by social mores and the structural constraints of gender and class. The first three chapters demonstrate the strength of Skidmore's approach, which weaves together social, labor, and technological histories. Chapter 1 focuses on daguerreotypes before chapter 2 turns to the negative/positive process for works on paper, spotlighting the Livernois Studio (1854–74), founded by Élise Livernois in Quebec City. Contesting other histories that emphasize the role of Livernois's husband, Skidmore highlights Livernois's central role in the business, including working behind the camera. The Livernois Studio was the only one to rival the scale of William Notman's Montreal-based studio, which is the focus of chapter 3. Addressing the rise of industrial-scale manufacturing, Skidmore tracks working-class women, who did both skilled (printing room, darkroom, retouching) and unskilled (sales, reception, dressing room) work. The paucity of the archival record is deftly addressed through Skidmore's painstaking reconstruction of women's labor. Drawing on prints, payroll books, studio day albums, newspapers, and the Canadian census, she establishes a comprehensive survey of female photographers working in Canada between 1840 and 1940. In chapters 4 and 5, Skidmore turns to the fraught intersections of gender and settler colonialism through the case studies of Hannah Maynard and Geraldine Moodie. Skidmore acknowledges that both photographers operated [End Page 1347] within a fundamentally European way of seeing the world, conceding that, in the case of Maynard, her work was "not unusual, not unique, and not 'resistant' or anti-colonial" (p. 91). For Skidmore, this "Eurocentrism" is in part a technological problem embedded in the medium itself. Photography is "irredeemably mediated by the lenses and chemicals of the process to retain a European visual sensibility," such as the way the camera imposes linear perspective (p. 90). Curiously, in this analysis of camera technology and coloniality, Skidmore cites Laura Mulvey's feminist work on the gaze but does not directly engage with postcolonial or Indigenous scholarship. The Inuvialuk artist and critic Jade Nasogaluk Carpenter is cited in chapter 5, but generally, Skidmore focuses on gender at the occlusion of deeper considerations of race and ethnicity. In part, this is because Skidmore deploys the framework of the nation rather than that of settler colonialism, which has been at the center of much recent scholarship in Canadian photo studies. Rare Merit analyzes fascinating objects that show how photography reinforced settler colonialism. For instance, Skidmore reads Maynard's Gems of British Columbia—a series of unsettling composite photographs of (white) babies and children—as asserting the important role of women in nation building. Throughout these two chapters, however, Skidmore's voice is less confident, and the conclusions are less direct. Without a deeper engagement with settler colonial or Indigenous studies, an opportunity to complicate this reading of...

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