Active History

Contesting Canada Day : A Tradition of Engagement, Challenges and Change

June 30, 2017 1 Comment

Department of Canadian Heritage

Matthew Hayday

“For God’s sakes won’t you listen? What have we got to celebrate? I don’t like what has happened over the last 500 years or 125 years.”[i]

No, that’s not a typo, and it’s not a quote that comes from the media coverage of protest against this year’s Canada 150 celebrations, although it certainly has the same feel. I came across this quote while working on new research this past week. It comes from Chief Georges Erasmus, who at the time was head of the Assembly of First Nations. He was commenting on plans for Canada 125 celebrations to be held in 1992 (and the possible, but ultimately abandoned, Canadian celebrations of the 500^th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas). It is striking how history repeats itself, and also disheartening to note the slow pace of change on key problems facing this country.

July 1^st marks the 150^th anniversary of the day that the British North America Act came into effect in 1867. I will be Ottawa, among the anticipated half million people in the crowds around Parliament Hill. Since the late-1950s Ottawa has been a major destination for those who want to celebrate the anniversary of Confederation, first as Dominion Day, and then as Canada Day, as it was renamed by a private member’s bill in July 1982 (in a parliamentary maneouvre that still arouses the ire of die-hard Dominion Day defenders).

Alongside the crowds who seek to celebrate on Canada Day, and throughout this year, there is also a vocal contingent who oppose these events. Active History has posted other thoughtful commentaries about the contestation of Canada 150 this year. What I would like to suggest in this post is that such contestation of national days and major anniversaries is part and parcel of how Canada marks its political anniversaries. It always has been the case. Moreover, as I have written elsewhere, I think that this kind of vigorous engagement with these celebrations or commemorations, whether through protest or through participation, is both a good and a necessary process. Continue reading →

Ten Resources to Contextualize Archives and Archival Labour

June 30, 2017 3 Comments

An office in the Dominion Archives of Canada, Sussex Street, Ottawa, Ontario

An office in the Dominion Archives of Canada, circa 1910. Source: Library and Archives Canada, C-034009.

To encourage further engagement of the issues presented throughout the archives theme week we have compiled ten resources to contextualize archival practice, archival labour, and the work archivists do.

There are many colleagues both within Canadian archives and beyond who have been writing and speaking about the challenges of counteracting the ‘why isn’t it already digitized’ question, directly confronting the erasure of archival labour in popular and academic discourse, and discussing the responsibility for archivists to confront our own failures to care for the legacies of marginalized communities and the overwhelming whiteness of our profession.

Rather than repeat the words of others, we would encourage Active History readers to follow the work of Melissa Adams, Michelle Caswell, Marika Cifor, Jarrett M. Drake, Raymond Frogner, Anne Gilliland, Rebecca Goldman, Myron Groover, Verne Harris, Bergis Jules, Analú López, Jesse Loyer, Mark Matienzo, Allison Mills, Tara Robertson, Nick Ruest, Rebecka Sheffield, Ariel Schudson, Ed Summers, Eira Tansey, Kate Theimer, Samantha Thompson, Stacie Williams and Sam Winn.

As a starting point the resources listed below provide insight into the archival profession and showcase some of the scholarly work being done by archival professionals. This list is in no particular order and is by no means conclusive. We encourage readers to add their own resource suggestions in the comment section. Continue reading →

Collaboration between archivists and historians: finding a middle ground

June 29, 2017 1 Comment

Anna St.Onge [i]

Let’s begin with a story

One afternoon, a few years ago, one of our student assistants called me up from the back processing area to answer a patron question.

“How can I help you?” I asked.

“I’m looking for a diary written by a woman who emigrated from Hungary to Toronto in 1954.”

I quickly ran through my mental rolodex of the over 600 archival fonds held by the university, not all of which I’m familiar with, trying to drill down to the the most likely source of such a record. I kept drawing a blank. I asked for more details: did the patron have a name for this woman? Had someone suggested the diary was held in this archives? Had they read about the diary in an article, book or film? What citational breadcrumbs had led them to our door?

“Oh! No. No one told me it was here. That’s the primary source that I want to study. I want to read a diary written by a woman who immigrated from Hungary to Toronto in 1954.”

And so began another rich conversation about the nature of archives, the survival of records, and how to use archival discovery tools to track down primary sources.[ii]

This post is about archival pathfinding and cross-pollination across the disciplines of archives and history. It is about finding space to cultivate collaborative opportunities but also how archivists and historians can meet each other halfway as we go about our work.

Pathfinding

Working in the archives inevitably means that you (and your holdings) end up disappointing patrons, many of whom are historians by training and inclination. Every archival institution operates slightly differently and what may work in an university archives may not work in an institution like Library Archives Canada, or, a local historical society. Terry Cook and Joan Schwartz have successfully argued that archives and records operate as “dynamic technologies of rule which actually create the histories and social realities they ostensibly only describe.” Archival records shape the institutions that hold and manage them. Archivists as a profession are the result of generational shifts of values, practice and prioritization. It’s the McLuhanesque proverb that we make our tools and then our tools remake us.

Over the years, I’ve learned to see my role with researchers as one of a pathfinder. As we have seen in the posts by Danielle Robichaud and Roger Gillis, the access tools used by archivists (print finding aids, file inventories, records schedules, descriptive databases, aggregators of descriptive data) are not comprehensive in their scope and are a product of the peculiarities of individuals – many of whom are, with increasing frequency, contract archivists under time constraints to process and complete finding aids- or indeed multiple generations of archivists building up strata of interpretations and workarounds over time. And as Sara Janes and Jennifer Weymark have so ably demonstrated, archivists can only lead paths through the collections they have available to them. Our tools are often improvised and not well resourced, and even the most knowledgeable pathfinder is limited by their biases and worldview. Continue reading →

Changing the Narrative

June 28, 2017 1 Comment

Jennifer Weymark

Much like the saying “history is written by the victor” history also tends to be written by the privileged elite. Within the archival field in Canada, this privilege is directly connected to the colonial nature of archives. Across Canada, archival collections tend to be filled with documents related to, and from, the perspective of the upper echelon of European settlers to Canada. Histories of communities are built using archival records and tend to focus on the impact of the white settlers with other stories being briefly mentioned, if at all.

The members of the Oshawa Historical Society, who began the archival collection of the Oshawa Museum, came from the privileged elite. Their collecting focus was on what they knew and what they determined to be important. This means that the initial collection focus was on the role of the early white settlers, early industrialists and politicians, and those who used their wealth to grow Oshawa. There is a lack of documents created by those who worked for the industrialists, who farmed the lands, or the people who were merely surviving as Oshawa grew around them. There is a silence in the archival record related to anyone who did not fit into the traditional narrative focused on white European settlers.

While this ethnocentric focus was very much of the time period, today we need to work on decolonizing our collections and to fill in the gaps created by our early collecting practices. The traditional historical narrative is now considered biased and antiquated. Communities are asking for a more balanced looked at the people, places and events that shaped our history.

Mary Anderws Dunbar – accession #: A992.4.5, from the archival collection at the Oshawa Museum.

How do the Euro-centric collecting practices of the past impact our ability to research and tell a more diverse history of our communities? Continue reading →

Archives, Constructed and Incomplete

June 28, 2017 3 Comments

Sara Janes

Archival collections are put together through many individual actions and decisions made by many individual people, and those people, sometimes without knowing it, have a massive impact on how we understand the past.

Records (documents such as papers, correspondence, photographs, maps, recordings, and more) need to get into the archives before they can be available for researchers.

Records come to the archives in one of three ways:

Internal transfers or records management processes. This is what’s going on with government records: they’re created, then kept as inactive records by the department for some period of time, then eventually transferred to the archives to be made available to the public. As Danielle Robichaud brought up earlier this week, this process doesn’t always go as quickly or as smoothly as researchers might like. Access to these records requires that the creator organization prioritizes records management.
Donation. Records are offered to the archives as a donation, often in exchange for a tax receipt. Records might be donated by the person who created or accumulated them, or a family member or friend of their creator; by an organization or one of its representatives. People’s motives for donating records to archives are varied, but often include the desire to be remembered or to have their story be part of the historical record.
Purchase. In some cases, a record or set of records might be judged so valuable that people or institutions are willing to pay to acquire them. This is not uncommon with rare books, maps, or literary papers. Still, many archives across the country will never have the funds to purchase records, and will rely entirely on donations.

None of these processes happen “naturally.” They all depend on human intervention.

An unprocessed donation of records to Lakehead University Archives. These papers were kept in a home basement for decades until the house was being sold; they needed some care once they arrived.

It’s useful to make a distinction between “institutional archives,” which primarily preserve the records of a parent organization, and “collecting archives,” which preserve the records of people and organizations in their communities. The line is rarely strictly drawn: for example, Lakehead University Archives, like many other university archives, acquires the institutional records of the University itself, and also collects records of people and organizations across Northwestern Ontario. Government and business archives are often primarily institutional archives; community archives and those embedded in libraries and museums are often primarily collecting archives.

Most archives will have an acquisition policy or a collections mandate. This policy document will set out what types of records the archives is interested in acquiring. In many cases this will be set out in broad strokes, but provides a basis to choose to acquire records or turn them away. It is also very common for archives to cooperate with each other: each builds an area of strength while deliberately not competing for donations or purchases.

Some collecting archives will be much more proactive about identifying and acquiring records; others are much more passive. The approach that the institution (and the people doing the work) takes will have a significant, and cumulative, effect on which records they will be able to acquire, and which records will eventually be available for research.

***

For the rest of this post, I’ll be focusing on collecting archives, and “private records”, i.e., the records of people, families, or organizations, which have been donated to an archives.

First, the records need to exist. Someone needs to have created each document. Records creation may appear straightforward, but is dependent on so many factors:

Necessary technologies (computers, cameras, duplicating machines, typewriters?)
Affordability (consider studio portraits versus snapshots, as cameras become a consumer item, and the proliferation of digital photography today; also consider the costs of paper and ink and postage)
Literacy (literacy rates in Canada have increased considerably over the decades; literacy may have been less available to women, people of colour, and working class people; not all languages have written forms)
Social norms (which people correspond by mail? Who keeps a written diary? Which aspects of life are written about, and which are kept private?)

Already, only a subset of people have created documents about their lives or work. The rest are silent, or only represented through the words and images of others.

Then, the records must be kept, intentionally, for years, decades, even centuries. Often there is a kind of “benign neglect”: documents are stored away in a quiet dark place, and forgotten about. At least as often, papers will be thrown away, or destroyed.

Labour demonstration in Port Arthur, 1914. The Finnish immigrant community played an important role in labour and socialist politics; records were kept within the community for decades before being gathered as an archival collection in the 1970s. MG8-D-4-57-H-I477

Continue reading →

What makes for an archives? A look at the core archival functions

June 27, 2017 4 Comments

Photo credit Archives. Licensed under CC0 Public Domain

Roger Gillis

Archives is a term that can have many different connotations. In the loosest sense of the word it can be taken to mean a collection of historical records, and what counts as “historical” varies from one setting to the next. As institutions, archives tend to adhere to several core principles: acquisition, appraisal, arrangement & description, preservation, and access. These core archival functions are, in and of themselves, the subject of much study by archivists and archival scholars (see Archivaria; American Archivist).

Acquisition – the process through which archives obtain archival collections takes several different forms. Archives might obtain records through formal records management processes in their organizations (if established) that ensure that records designated as having archival value are transferred to the archives. Or, they might obtain records through a private donation, transfer from another institution, or by other means. This process of acquisition is explored further in some of the other featured blog posts this week.

Appraisal is the process through which archival professionals assess what records hold intrinsic value and suitable to long term preservation through archives. Archives do not have the capacity to keep everything. They must make decisions for what is appropriate to keep and decide what they have the capacity to preserve and make accessible over the long term. Moreover, archival appraisal is often employed in determining priorities for arranging and describing archival collections and sometimes determining monetary values of collections.

Archives and Archivists, as the keepers of the “raw materials of history” put considerable work into not only preserving the records to ensure that they can be accessed by researchers, but also into arrangement and description. By being made accessible to researchers, archival records undergo efforts designed to preserve them, understand their origins, and make them accessible. Continue reading →

Missed connections: looking for everything in the archives

June 26, 2017 5 Comments

Danielle Robichaud

Archivists are commonly asked by researchers to produce everything available about a particular topic. While understandable from a researcher standpoint, fulfilling the request is a challenge. Unlike library holdings, archival material is rarely described to the item-level. This makes it difficult for archivists to do more than point researchers to where everything about a particular topic could be. The result is a persistent disconnect between researcher expectations and archival practice. It’s also an underlying cause of the increasingly prevalent, though by no means new, “lost in the archives” narrative in which archival material is deemed lost because it was not readily described in desired terms or, perhaps more accurately, widely recognized to exist.

In actuality, most records that are deemed to be “found”, or “discovered,” have been available for use by way of archival finding aids and lost thanks only to the failure of anyone to read them. A recent example is media coverage regarding the “discovery” of an unproduced Edith Wharton play that, as pointed out by Eric Colleary, Curator of Theatre & Performing Arts at the Ransom Center where the work was housed, had been listed in print finding aids since the 1980s and in electronic finding aids since 2006.

Photograph of writer Edith Wharton, taken by E. F. Cooper, at Newport, Rhode Island. Cabinet photograph. Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. Public Domain.

The disconnect between researcher expectations and archival practice was also evident in Dennis Molinaro’s piece regarding the discovery of Canada’s Secret Archives. Molinaro rightly draws attention to the substantial number of government records that have yet to be transferred to Library and Archives Canada for use and access by the Canadian public. I argued that this issue is symptomatic of decades of chronic underfunding and non-existent political will, rather than a concerted effort to suppress the public record. After unsuccessfully requesting files pertaining to wiretapping during the Cold War or obtaining finding aids for untransferred records, Molinaro concluded that the Canadian government is maintaining a secret archives where “no one in the general public is permitted to know the contents, and there’s a separate system that has been developed for storing and sorting this information.”

While Molinaro’s framing of the Canadian government’s legacy of undervaluing and failing to prioritize recordkeeping as a secret archives is one that merits further consideration, it will serve here as an entry point for examining what researchers expect and what archivists can provide. Specifically, why it isn’t possible to ever obtain everything about X held in an archives or, more importantly, to bypass the sometimes daunting and unglamourous work of archival research. Continue reading →

Archives Theme Week: Creating Dialogue Between Archivists and Historians

June 26, 2017 3 Comments

Krista McCracken

On May 25, 2017 numerous national media outlets covered Dennis Molinaro’s experience researching the PICNIC wiretapping program and his search for archival records related to wiretapping during the Cold War. To coincide with the media coverage Active History shared a post written by Molinaro which explored an in depth account of his experience attempting to access the wiretap records.

The media framed this experience as “Canada’s secret archive” and as an intentional attempt to hide these records from Canadians. In his Active History article Molinaro wrote:

…if it isn’t a secret archive, where’s the “finding aid,” i.e. the list of what’s in there? When historical documents are kept outside of the public archives, archivists are working outside the public archives, no one in the general public is permitted to know the contents, and there’s a separate system that has been developed for storing and sorting this information, what else can it be called other than a secret archive or archives?

Immediately after Molinaro’s experience hit the news cycle archivist twitter exploded with comments on archival labour, chronic underfunding of records management and archival programs by the federal government, and the complexity of making material accessible to the public.

Many of the tweets, written by archivists in response to the secret archives story, focused on the context behind archival records being made accessible, the records management system of the federal government, and the relationship of Library and Archives Canada (LAC) to federal departments. The tweets highlighted some of the archival nuance that was missing from the media’s secret archive narrative.

A lot of people had strong feelings and thoughts about the news coverage, the archival community response, and the clear divide between the historical and archival profession that was highlighted in the ensuing discussion.

Making records accessible to the public takes a tremendous amount of work. It takes time, money and professional expertise. In the case of the records of federal departments this work is also directly tied to the funding of LAC, records management programs, MOUs, and numerous pieces of legislation. The work of professional archivists, which goes into making records accessible, is something that is often misunderstood, underrepresented, or marginalized.

This theme week has been designed as a way to encourage a conversation between archivists and historians. Historians and archivists often have overlapping and similar concerns. However they are two distinct professions which would be well served by communicating openly about their work.

All of the week’s posts are written by archivists. The week highlights current archival realities and concerns within the archival profession. The contributing archivists tackle issues of archival labour, how private records end up in archives, the legacy of colonial collecting practices, collaboration within archives, and archival outreach.

This week is designed to spark dialogue and deepen discussions between archivists and historians. As such, throughout this theme week I encourage Active History readers to engage and further the conversation in the comments section and on Twitter.

Krista McCracken is an Archives Supervisor at Algoma University’s Arthur A. Wishart Library and Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre. She is an editor at Active History. Krista lives and works in Robinson-Huron Treaty territory on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe and Métis people.

Sir Hector-Louis Langevin, “Architect” of Residential Schools?

June 23, 2017 7 Comments

The Langevin Block, Ottawa. Wikimedia Commons.

Matthew Hayday

On June 21, 2017, National Aboriginal Day, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that his government would be changing the name of the day to National Indigenous Peoples Day. He also announced that his government would change the name of the Langevin Block, which houses the Prime Minister’s Office and the Privy Council Office. The name change had been requested by Chief Perry Bellegarde of the Assembly of First Nations and a group of Indigenous MPs, including Romeo Saganash, Hunter Tootoo, Robert-Falcon Ouellette and Don Rusnak, among others. A few months earlier, the Langevin Bridge in Calgary was renamed the Reconciliation Bridge.

Shortly after the name change was announced, a series of predictable parties, including Conservative MP Paul Calandra, decried the name change as an attempt to “whitewash history”. Calandra and others like him engaged in this debate by arguing that Sir Hector-Louis Langevin had a mixed legacy, and that he also played many important positive roles in Canadian history, particularly as a Father of Confederation and as a senior Quebec Bleu MP, a Cabinet minister, and Sir John A. Macdonald’s Quebec lieutenant, who argued for clemency for Louis Riel.

There is certainly a debate that can be had – and which we historians are having – about issues related to renaming of statues, buildings, and the like. But that is not what this post is about. Rather, I want to engage with some questions related to the renaming of the Langevin Block that I posed to Twitter earlier this week. Continue reading →

A Focus on Family: Creating an Exhibit about 19th-Century Archival Photographs

June 23, 2017 1 Comment

Jay Young with Alison Little

Group at Table Rock, Niagara Falls, [ca. 1857]. Archives of Ontario, I0011269. Part of the Family Focus exhibit.

Family Focus: Early Portrait Photography at the Archives of Ontario is a free photography exhibit on display at the John B. Aird Gallery in Toronto, from June 27 to July 21.

The exhibit, part of the Archives of Ontario’s Ontario150 programming, features 15 original and 45 reproduction photos from the late 19th century that depict a diverse array of portraits of Ontario families in various social settings.

I sat down with the exhibit’s curator, Alison Little, to discuss the process of creating the concept, selecting the photos, and why cute photos of pets have been with us for decades.

Jay Young (JY): First off, can you discuss the thinking behind the exhibit’s concept?

Alison Little (AL): I wanted to develop an exhibit that would connect a few different threads: family memory, historical photography, and the lives of Ontarians at the time of Confederation in Canada. This connects to a larger conversation about diverse experiences of the past, which the Archives of Ontario featured in our current major exhibition, Family Ties: Ontario Turns 150. The Family Focus exhibit examines the early days of photographic technology in Ontario as seen through contemporary family portraits. It’s an opportunity for audiences to see real people during a period of incredible change – families who would have experienced the late 19th century in very different ways.

JY: Can you tell me a bit about your educational training and how it helped with your work on the exhibit?

AL: My education has definitely informed my work at the Archives of Ontario. I hold a Bachelor of Arts, Honours in Art History and Studio Art degree from the University of Guelph, and a Master of Museum Studies degree from the University of Toronto. I basically spent six years of my life and a lot of money analyzing different ways of seeing. Practicing photography at Guelph gave me experience with modern development processes. Having spent hours in the darkroom, I have a slight window into the work of early photographers. The University of Toronto’s Museum Studies programme then gave me the tools to become a storyteller: exhibit planning, audience testing, working with artifacts, developing panels, creating labels, and project management. Each of these experiences helped me take on the roles of curator and project manager for Family Focus.

JY: How did you go about selecting which photographs to include in Family Focus?

AL: There were a few requirements which helped narrow the field. I knew that I wanted to work with photographs from the Confederation Era , so the 1860s. However, given the rarity of photographic records from different photographers across Ontario during that decade in our collections, I broadened my search to between 1850 and 1905. Another parameter was that the exhibit feature family portraits, meaning I could only choose photos where some type of family relationship was represented. And finally, I looked for photographs which represented intersecting histories, and the diversity of experiences in Ontario during the late 19th century. So these factors led me to a few specific photographers represented in our collections, and from there, I tried to select pictures that would show the evolution of portraiture during that 55-year period.

JY: Do any photos really stand out to you as particularly memorable?

AL: I’m pretty partial to the portrait of the kids with their pet pug dog, taken by the Bartle Brothers – his face is adorable!

Three seated girls, three standing boys, and a dog, [1895-1910]. Archives of Ontario, I0053545. Part of the Family Focus exhibit.

I also love the ambrotype family portrait at Niagara Falls from 1857 – it’s one of the largest examples of this rare photographic format our preservation team had ever seen, and it’s absolutely beautiful. The image itself has so many connective threads: Victorian society, fashion, tourism, and environmental histories, as well as ongoing conversations about land use and national landmarks in Canada.

JY: The exhibit takes the visitor through the evolution of photography in Ontario in the second half of the 19th century with a number of different sections, from Early Studio Portraits to Outdoor Portraits. What influenced the exhibit layout?

AL: During the research phase of developing this exhibition, it became clear that I needed to adopt a framing device which would clearly illustrate to visitors how portraiture changed as a result of photography. The exhibit begins with studio portraits – this was how many Ontarians first encountered photography. In these spaces, our ancestors learned to pose for the camera, so we see a certain formality in these earlier portraits. The next section – Portraits at Home – demonstrate how changes in technology made cameras more accessible to non-professional photographers, and growing familiarity with photography resulted in more informal, intimate portraits taken in and around the family home. The exhibit’s last section – Outdoor Portraits – shows that the camera became much more common amongst Ontario families by the end of the 19^th century. By this time, lightweight camera equipment, simpler development processes, and people’s common expectation that photographs might be taken at family gatherings yield fantastic portraits of Ontarians outdoors, posing confidently for the camera.

Alexander family, [ca. 1890]. Archives of Ontario, I0053551. Part of the Family Focus exhibit

JY: As you conducted your research on family portraits at the Archives of Ontario, did anything surprise you?

AL: I was definitely surprised by the sheer number of photographs produced by some early photographers in our collections; in particular, those of the Bartle Brothers from Eastern Ontario. Simon Peter Bartle (1875-1956) and Herman Arthur Bartle (1877-1958) were professional travelling photographers in Glengarry and Stormont Counties, and their fonds contains 1,880 photographs. These are primarily glass-plate negatives, and most are portraits – of individuals, groups, families, colleagues, friends, and communities. It was amazing to look through thousands of faces from the past and see so many similarities to portraits and selfies taken today. For example, the desire to include your pets in a family photo has been with us since the beginning of photography!

JY: What was the biggest challenge of curating the exhibit?

AL: It was difficult to limit the amount of information provided on exhibit panels and labels. As someone with a background in museum education, I wanted to provide the audience with as much context as possible. Sticking to a word count limit is a perennial challenge in exhibit development, but this show sits at the intersection of incredibly complex thematic material: technology, media, representation, family, memory, immigration, settlement, race, gender, and class. In addition, due to a lack of provenance information, we don’t know many of the names or histories of families and individuals featured in the exhibit. So I had too much information at some points, and too little at others!

JY: As someone working with archival collections, what do you hope this exhibit achieves?

AL: My hope is that the exhibit text provokes audiences to learn more about different experiences within Ontario’s past, and also to seek out the original records and their fonds at the Archives of Ontario to try and learn more about the people featured in Family Focus.

JY: Are there any special events related to the exhibit’s run? Why?

AL: We are thrilled to welcome Mark Osterman, an artist and instructor from the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, who will give a special presentation on early photographic processes on Thursday July 6, 2017 from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. in the St. Lawrence Lounge, adjacent to the John B. Aird Gallery in the Macdonald Block at 900 Bay St., Toronto. Mark is an expert photographic historian and artist who is an internationally-recognized authority on early photographic technologies. Mark’s audience will learn a lot about the technical processes behind the photos in Family Focus and hear from a real expert on the subject!

There will also be an opportunity to tour the exhibit with me as curator – I’ll be leading a guided visit of Family Focus on Thursday July 13 from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. in the John B. Aird Gallery in the Macdonald Block at 900 Bay St., Toronto. Visitors will have a chance to hear more about the larger historical themes tying all the images together, and ask questions about the Archives of Ontario’s photographic collections.

JY: What’s your biggest takeaway from curating this exhibit?

AL: Apart from practical lessons (always write down the container number of any image which catches your eye during research), curating this exhibit has made clear the importance of seeking out multiple narratives from the past. It’s not enough to create an exhibit which features the history of a single individual or family. By featuring many different experiences, which speak to a plurality of identities and communities, a curator can create an inclusive space where audiences can choose how they want to engage with the past.

Family Focus: Early Portrait Photography at the Archives of Ontario is on display at the John B. Aird Gallery from June 27 to July 21. To find out more about the exhibit, please visit the Archives’ website.

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