Significance & Critical Issues

Often at odds with one another, Hannah Maynard’s photographs participate in a range of critical concerns that reflect her relationships with others and with society, as well as the contexts in which her images circulated: her entrepreneurialism in a moment when women were not often afforded full participation in public life; her contributions to an international network of amateur and professional photographers through her experimental image-making practices and her writing; and her implicit participation in colonial settlement both as a woman and as a portrait photographer. Maynard’s innovative photographic practice and her complex legacy challenges us to rethink the intersections of art, identity, and power.

A Woman in Business

Photography was not an uncommon pursuit for a nineteenth-century middle-class woman like Hannah Maynard. Across Canada there were many amateur photographers, such as Mattie Gunterman (1872–1945), who picked up a camera out of interest and joy. It was also not unusual for a woman to work in a photographic studio or have a professional photographic practice. While women such as Élise L’Heureux (1827–1896), the matriarch of the Livernois studio in Quebec City, and Geraldine Moodie (1854–1945), who began a studio in Battleford, Saskatchewan, before moving to what is now Nunavut (where she would famously make portraits of Inuit for the Canadian government) stand out among Maynard’s contemporaries, it was quite rare for a woman to be the proprietor of her own photography business—not merely the proprietor, but a highly successful one.

It was likely a combination of factors that led to Maynard’s success. First, when she established her studio in 1862, the city of Victoria was still in its infancy. That gave her a chance to provide a service to a growing, and increasingly wealthy, clientele with little or no competition. The more open environment of a “frontier” town also allowed for a hazy attitude toward conventions of gender and class.

The second is Maynard’s status as an English-born, white, middle-class woman. In colonial Canada, English immigrants, because of language and religion, had more upward mobility compared to settlers from elsewhere. Richard Maynard’s earnings in the goldfields, which provided the funds to support her entrepreneurial venture, signalled a social status that would have boosted her reputation within the community. Within the walls of her studio, Maynard must have also earned her reputation as a thoughtful and caring photographer, gentle enough to have great success photographing children and welcoming enough to have people from all walks of life pass through her studio.

Maynard was always careful to present herself as a respectable wife. When she re-opened her studio at its new location in 1892 on Pandora Avenue it was purpose-built, with the private domestic rooms of her home adjoining the photography studio on the second floor. While her studio had a distinct presence within the community, when it came to anything connected to the business, she was always “Mrs. R. Maynard.” Everything, from her own dress to the textiles, furniture, props, and backdrops found inside of the studio would have projected the taste and reputation of a respectable Victorian woman.

As Richard began his own photographic career, the couple maintained the era’s ideas of what was suitable for men and women, at least outwardly. While Hannah maintained her studio practice in a space that was physically connected to the family home, Richard’s photographic pursuits took place elsewhere. To be certain, they both likely had a preference for their respective subjects, and together their practices sometimes blurred any perceived boundaries.

Hannah’s business became a hub of photographic activity in the region, no doubt in part due to the stability and longevity of her enterprise. Even by 1878, she was identified by the Seattle Weekly Pacific Tribune as “the leading photographer of Victoria” and was held up as an exemplar of “what women can do when there is necessity or ambition or the incentive.”  Maynard understood the connections between the new medium of photography, tourism, and settlement, and their entrepreneurial potential. Through her studio she sold the images of British Columbia’s natural wonders that Richard had taken as part of his government work and at times purchased the negatives of other photographers to satisfy this market.

Developing a Photographic Community

While Hannah Maynard was lucky in not having significant competition from other photography studios in Victoria, it left her without a robust professional network to connect to and learn from. If she wanted a community that could satiate her curiosity about photographic technique and fulfill her desire to share her work with others, it was up to her to find it. And she did, in the pages of the St. Louis and Canadian Photographer.

Originally titled the St. Louis Practical Photographer, the periodical was founded by the Missouri-based pioneering photographer John H. Fitzgibbon (1819–1882). The first issue was published in 1877, and by 1879 Maynard had become an active contributor. In August of that year, the periodical notes that “Mrs. Maynard has kindly forwarded, all the way from Victoria, B.C., some very excellent cabinet pictures…. We are pleased to see such good work from such a distant point.”  A month later, she sent in another series, which was also highly praised: “Again they come, all the way from Alaska and Victoria, B.C., the most interesting views we have ever seen from those far off regions. Mrs. Maynard is one of the most industrious and persevering ladies we have in our business,… a regular go-ahead, even beating our Yankee girls two to one in photography.”  She sent them another series in 1881, of which they wrote: “Stereoscope, seems to be her Forte, and they are excellent specimens. We can almost imagine we have visited that distant land, by the striking and illustrated pictures we occasionally receive from there.”

With the death of Fitzgibbon in 1882, his wife, Louisa (1823–1898), took over as publisher, renaming the magazine the St. Louis Photographer. In 1887, Canadian subscribers were sent a special trial issue of Canadian Photographer. The demand for the journal must have been significant as by 1888 the periodical was finally renamed the St. Louis and Canadian Photographer. Maynard was a tried-and-true contributor throughout the publication’s iterations. Not only were her photographs mentioned, but they were also on occasion reproduced in full-page spreads, accompanied by poems of praise written by the editors. So close was Maynard’s relationship with the St. Louis and Canadian Photographer that the magazine even published a statement of mourning on the death of her daughter Lillian.

Perhaps because photography was still a relatively new medium, or perhaps because its practitioners, both professional and amateur, were scattered across an exceedingly expansive continent, forums such as the St. Louis and Canadian Photographer were vital. Women who photographed were particularly hard-pressed to find professional and creative communities. Maynard likely found a kindred spirit in Louisa Fitzgibbon, who not only published the periodical but was also a studio photographer.

Maynard also developed a photographic community through publications closer to home. She consistently placed advertisements in the local Daily British Colonist and Victoria Daily Times. These advertisements make it clear that Maynard operated a studio that utilized the most leading photographic processes and that she was competent “to take all kinds of photographs in all the latest improvements,” as one ad in an 1874 issue of the Daily British Colonist touted.  Her studio also sold directly to the public all the tools, supplies, and chemicals needed to make one’s own photographs. Maynard contributed to a broader photographic community extending beyond Canada’s borders, and was quick to both capitalize on and consolidate her position within an expanding market for professional photography.

Photographic Tricks

Hannah Maynard had exceptional skill with the camera as well as with the technical aspects of the developing and printing processes. Collage, montage, multiple exposure, and composite photography were often used by professional photographers in a very practical way, but she also used them to create optical tricks and illusions in the service of elaborate and carefully composed photographic scenes called tableaux vivants.

While photography was widely regarded for its descriptive capabilities in the service of progress, preservation, and documentation, the myriad manipulations that could be performed in the photographic process led to a blurring of fact and fantasy. Photography’s use to create realistic illusions is almost as old as the medium itself. Photographers and the public were equally excited by the ways that photography could be used to trick people and the entertainment—both humorous and macabre—those tricks could provide.

Photographs were relatively inexpensive to produce and purchase. People were eager to have themselves photographed in increasingly playful ways, and photographers were keen to develop tricks and special techniques they could market. Some practitioners, such as “spirit photographer” William H. Mumler (1832–1884) in the United States, claimed that they could capture spirits with their photographs. Real or not, the effects created by double exposure enthralled sitters. Others specialized in darkly humorous scenes, producing cabinet cards for clients using combination printing to make it look as if their heads or limbs had been cut off.

In 1896, Walter E. Woodbury produced one of the first publications on trick photography, titled Photographic Amusements: Including a Description of a Number of Novel Effects Obtainable with the Camera. Woodbury’s book would have been a revelation for most amateur photographers; however, many professionals such as William Notman (1826–1891) and Hannah Maynard had long been using techniques like multiple exposure and composite photography in ways that were more practical in intent than mere trickery.

In Hannah Maynard and her grandson, Maynard McDonald, c.1893–97, Maynard utilizes techniques of multiple exposure, composite photography, and photo-sculpture all at once. Two Hannahs and her grandson, shown both as himself and as a living bust, surrounded by photographs of her deceased daughters, present the viewer with a playful and dynamic conversation in which the living and the dead, the animate and inanimate, as well as one’s own self, come face to face. The St. Louis and Canadian Photographer remarked about Maynard’s grandson and her innovative photographic practice that “he enjoys immensely to watch Mrs. Maynard at work in her studio, taking a great interest in all the different details of photography, and with the insatiable curiosity of children, asking numerous questions, by which no doubt, he will be greatly benefitted should he decide to follow in Mrs. Maynard’s footsteps.”

Maynard’s sophisticated use of photographic techniques can be linked to photographic tricks by looking at how she utilizes humour and narrative through them. Her multiple exposures were not intended to shock like a headless portrait but would certainly have been impressive. Seeing five Hannahs nearly seamlessly occupying the same space, for instance, is a breathtaking and creative use of the techniques of trick photography. In addition to using photo-sculpture, composite photography, multiple exposure, and collage, Maynard also experimented with three-dimensional, low-relief photographs in which she could create raised surfaces in an image using blotting paper and a knife and then filling the hollow section of the lifted print paper with a type of papier mâché. In her Portrait of a young woman, n.d., the fabric of the sitter’s dress has been given an additional dimension using this technique.

Photography and the Colonial Gaze

Photography was quickly absorbed into the scientific and colonial ambitions of the nineteenth century. Hannah and Richard Maynard participated in these activities. Richard’s photographs of land and people made while travelling throughout British Columbia were used in the service of colonial information gathering and record-keeping. They were also used to support the deeply racist colonial efforts of assimilation through the Indian Act, the banning of the Potlatch ceremony, and the establishment of industrial and residential schools.

Hannah was no less an actor in these processes. Her studio acted as a hub for photographers producing work for the Canadian government such as Frederick Dally (1838–1914), Carlo Gentile (1835–1893), and her husband. Much of their work involved photographing land as part of the settler-colonial project, but it also involved producing ethnographic portraits of Kwakwaka’wakw people on their territory and in more formal portrait settings. Maynard’s studio offered a site for these photographs to be taken, printed, and circulated as part of government commissions and sold to a broader public in Canada and internationally who were eager to view remote places and the people that inhabit them. In the early 1900s, Maynard supplied a series of ethnographic photographs of Indigenous people and their land produced by herself and her husband in fulfillment of a request made to her by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Maynard made her own photographs of Indigenous sitters as well. As with most of her portraits, she carefully staged her studio with painted backdrops, flooring, rugs, furniture, and props to enliven her sitters and even to share something about their interests and livelihoods. In this series of portraits of Indigenous sitters, she took similar care, but one that served to reinforce the settler gaze toward a colonial subject. The gaze has often been used in studies of art and visual culture to understand dynamics of power, where the one looking holds the privilege of the gaze and the power to define the terms of the relationship between viewer and subject.

Unlike the portraits Maynard produced of Chinese or Black settlers in Victoria, the Indigenous sitters in the series are unnamed. Instead of posed in chairs, almost all the photographs have their subjects sitting on the floor, often with bundles of wood or baskets of berries. These were not personal portraits, but rather reference works commissioned by governments to visually categorize these people and aid in the creation of harmful assimilation policies.

The starkest indication of this is the way backgrounds have been physically scratched off the glass plate negatives in order to isolate the subject of the photograph. Individuality, identity, kinship, and lands are stripped away from the person as they are visually removed from any context. Consider the 1865–66 photograph made of a woman referred to as “Haida Mary,” who is often suggested to have been Maynard’s “washerwoman.” She carries a large sack, likely laundry, and is draped in a Hudson’s Bay Company blanket. She is photographed facing the camera directly, without additional props or a backdrop.

However, Maynard made a separate print in which the portrait has been combined with an entirely different photograph made by Richard of the Haida village of Kayang from his travels there in 1884. Scholar Margaret B. Blackman remarks about the combination of the two photographs of completely unrelated subjects that, “this combined pair of images is interesting because it suggests that, for the photographer, ‘good’ images of native people in properly ‘native’ settings could be created by combining two very different types of photographs into a single image.”

The photograph is a manufactured document based on settler-colonial perceptions of Indigenous people. As such, it served to reinforce paternalistic attitudes and with those, the actions of government agencies such as the Department of Indian Affairs. In addition to government uses, this and other images in this series of ethnographic photographs were sold to an eager public.

Grief and the Camera

Within a handful of years Maynard suffered a series of devastating personal losses. The first was when her daughter Laura Lillian (Lillie) passed away from typhus in 1883 at the age of sixteen. In 1892, Adelaide, the wife of her son Albert, died. Adelaide’s death was followed by the drowning of Maynard’s daughter Emma in 1893.

Maynard’s grief is visible in the ways that she preserved and celebrated the lives of her daughters and daughter-in-law through photography. In almost all the Maynard family group photographs done in the studio or in the adjoining household rooms, three of Maynard’s large portraits of Lillie, Adelaide, and Emma are given a central place. In a stereoscope portrait made around 1895, within a few years of their deaths, Richard sits in the centre, with grandson Maynard McDonald over his shoulder, and Hannah to the right of the image in the middle row. Among the figures in the back row are the couple’s children Zela (second from left), George (fifth), and Albert (seventh). At the front are their many grandchildren. Above them are the framed portraits of Lillie, Adelaide, and Emma. These three portraits also appeared in those photographs in which she created fantastical scenes with her grandson, Maynard. The playful nature of the photographs with him suggests an ongoing relationship with the deceased and a comfort with the idea of death.

In the wake of loss, Maynard turned to Spiritualism, a movement that proposed that an individual’s spirit persisted after death and that it was possible to contact them, via a medium or ceremony. The movement was informal, with no set doctrine or consistent organization. It was also extremely popular throughout North America in the nineteenth century, if also controversial. The British Columbia Society of Spiritualists of Canada was formed in 1891. Maynard was an active member, even listing Spiritualism as her religion in the 1891 census, and scholars have suggested that she attended a séance to commune with her daughters. In fact, her involvement began closer to Lillie’s death, well before the organization was formalized. There is a series of four photographs of a picnic held by local Spiritualists at Cordova Bay in 1886 where we can see Maynard sitting with the group.

It is possible that Maynard processed her personal loss by combining Spiritualism with photography. Nineteenth-century studio photographers who practised “spirit photography,” like William H. Mumler or William Hope (1863–1933), convinced patrons that their photographs could capture the likenesses of deceased relatives and used double exposure to produced portraits in which ghosts and spirits appeared to be present with the sitter. But Maynard’s Spiritualist pursuits are not to be confused with these deceptions. By including images of the dead in scenes of life in her photography, she effectively brought those subjects back into the world of the living. She also created works that looked in the opposite direction: for example, having her young grandson confront himself in sculptural form—a reminder of the brevity of life and the permanence of the image.

A Legacy Recovered

It was not until the 1980s that scholarly interest in Hannah Maynard’s career began to emerge. In part, this was the result of growing attention to photography’s cultural and artistic significance, an approach led in Canada by the writings of Ralph Greenhill in the 1960s.  It was also the result of a focus among feminist scholars on centring the works of women artists to break apart male-dominated histories of art.

The first major publication on Maynard’s work that offered some history about the photographer and reflections on her practices was Claire Weissman Wilks’s monograph The Magic Box: The Eccentric Genius of Hannah Maynard, published in 1980.  Shortly thereafter, Laura Jones included Maynard’s work in a 1983 exhibition titled Rediscovery: Canadian Women Photographers 1841–1941, held at the London Regional Art Gallery (now Museum London) in Ontario.

Initially, Maynard’s extraordinary technical abilities and her playful use of the medium attracted the greatest interest. However, as details emerged about her studio and her personal life, many writings on Maynard focused on the macabre aspects of the tableau vivant photographs produced after the death of her daughters. Scholars have taken discussions of these works in many directions, including comparisons to Surrealist photography and to studies of morbidity and spiritualism.  More recently, in the writing of Jennifer Salahub, Maynard’s work has figured in discussions around the professionalization of women in the nineteenth century and possible connections between photography and textile practices such as quilting.  Maynard featured prominently, too, in Colleen Skidmore’s comprehensive texts on women photographers in Canada, where her photographs and studio practice are brought into conversation with those of other women in her historical milieu.

Maynard’s work has been increasingly examined in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and calls for decolonial approaches to Canadian history. Margaret B. Blackman’s groundbreaking study from the 1980s, and Carol Williams’s 2011 analysis of Maynard’s ethnographic photographs have demonstrated how photographs of Indigenous people made at professional photography studios were used in ways that perpetuated the subjugation of Indigenous people under colonial administration.  Likewise, Maynard’s photography has been studied for the ways it perpetuates and reinforces colonialism in Canada. Photography was an important tool in colonial record-keeping methods that enabled the emerging Canadian nation to visually lay claim to place and person. Photographs made by both Hannah and Richard Maynard participated in this.

What emerges when all these aspects are brought into conversation is a portrait of a truly astounding and complicated woman, whose photographs provide both a prolific window into the past but also a critical insight into the practice of photography itself.