Unidentified Child at a Mock Beach n.d.

In this composite photograph of a little girl at a beach, Maynard pastes an image of her sitter on top of a separate background photograph of real outdoor rocks before rephotographing them into a single image. This work demonstrates Maynard’s ingenuity at the difficult task of photographing children in what appears to be a natural scene.

As the St. Louis and Canadian Photographer remarked in 1894 about Maynard’s skill for photographing children and her savvy in using this skill to market her business: “Her success as a photographer most certainly lies in the fact that she takes so much pain with children’s pictures, and also in her endeavour to please the parents of those children.”  It is impossible to attribute this success to anything other than Maynard’s kindness and patience, combined with her use of innovative techniques. Maynard’s studio records leave scant clues to her process, though the wealth of children photographed, as represented by her inventive Gems of British Columbia series, speaks for itself.

In the early days of photography, the camera’s long exposure times meant that sitters needed to remain completely still for up to a minute—an eternity for a child. Oftentimes, photographers rested their young sitters against a wooden armature that would hold their heads and bodies in place for the duration of the exposure. Many photographers, such as Ottawa’s William James Topley (1845–1930), also relied on parents to hold babies and young children up to the camera. In countless photographs, parents can be seen hiding under sheets disguised to look like furniture.

In contrast, Maynard avoided using armatures and other popular tricks by posing her young sitters in ways that came naturally to them. When photographing children, she further avoided the painted parlour backdrops, potted plants, and velvet chairs that appear frequently in her portraits of adults and family groups, such as Steve Tingley and family, 1874–1910. By contrast, the young girl in Unidentified Child at a Mock Beach—who relaxes on her rock almost as if she had really been at play—defies the stiff, formal poses characteristic of studio portraits of this moment. Sometimes, Maynard would remove the actual background all together by trimming out the photograph of her sitter and combining it with a different photograph of a landscape to produce a new setting.

As with Unidentified Child at a Mock Beach, Maynard was able to make even the most static of poses appear dynamic while also retaining the subject’s sharpness. In Studio portrait of three boys in sailor suits, c.1895, the boy in the middle is at a slight angle, giving the impression that he is mid-swing and pushed by the boys to either side. The scenery places the figures outdoors and at play. This type of posing was not the work of a photographer who simply made portraits, but of someone who wanted to capture the personality and playfulness of childhood, which is what set Maynard apart in her studio practice. Her ease around children may have also come from her own role as a mother, something that enabled her to understand her young subjects better while also appealing to Victorian sensibilities and expectations of what constituted acceptable clientele for a professional woman photographer.