Ah Foo, Charles Frederic Newcombe’s cook 1885

Ah Foo was the cook of Charles F. Newcombe (1851–1924), a British botanist and ethnographic researcher, and this portrait is found among the Newcombe family’s collection of private photographs. In Maynard’s studio it was common for individuals having their portrait made to include props that would reflect an aspect of their daily life. Here, Ah Foo presents a version of himself that aspires to be more than a cook: the chawan (tea bowl) and pipes on the table, the folded fan, and the book held to be read vertically imply an educated man of high social status taking his leisure, though the rumpled vest, plain dress, and too-small shoes might suggest otherwise.  Moreover, he is confident and directly engages Maynard’s camera. Photographs such as this one were effective ways to reassure friends and family far away that one was doing well.

When Victoria incorporated as a city in 1862, three hundred of its five thousand citizens were of Chinese origin. By the 1881 census, that number had risen to 693. Victoria is often cited as having Canada’s first Chinatown, which continues to thrive to this day in its original Fisgard Street location, just one block from where Maynard’s Pandora Avenue studio had been. The Chinese community in Victoria was close-knit and industrious. They were vocal in demanding fair treatment as citizens and requesting that Victoria be designated as a free port, removing tariffs on Chinese goods. Despite harsh racist policies such as Canada’s Chinese Immigration Act of 1900 (known for implementing a discriminatory “head tax”) and the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 (also known as the Chinese Exclusion Act), as well as long-standing provincial and federal efforts to deny them voting rights, Victoria’s Chinese community remained strong and vibrant. Photographs are a wonderful record of this.

Maynard made several individual and group portraits of Chinese sitters. Unlike the Indigenous subjects she and Richard photographed, often made in the service of colonial ethnographic record-keeping, her Chinese sitters chose to have their photographs taken. As with Ah Foo, Charles Frederic Newcombe’s cook, there is a great deal of agency present in photographs such as the grouping of a father and four children, created between 1874 and 1910. Everyone is dressed in their finest attire and adorned with accessories. The child on the right has beautiful, tasselled embellishments on their plush velvet garment, both the man and the child on the left have fans, and all are in carefully embroidered hats and shoes. (These children also appeared in Maynard’s Gems series, and the painted backdrop and the rose-patterned floor are seen in many of Maynard’s portraits.)

Many of the photographs that Maynard produced, particularly for ethnologists such as Newcombe, who collected photographs of Indigenous and racialized persons, were made in service of larger colonial agendas. However, in this moment there were Chinese-born photographers, such as C.D. (Chow Dong) Hoy (1883–1973), who opened a studio in Quesnel, British Columbia in the early 1900s, that were catering specifically to clients like Ah Foo and were better equipped to visually express the interests of their sitters, as we see in Hoy’s 1912 photograph Chinese man in Revolutionary background. Meanwhile, in Victoria, Maynard understood that if her business were to thrive in a growing and increasingly diverse city, with a population drawn from around the globe, it would do so by welcoming that multifaceted community into her studio.