Mattie Gunterman (b. Ida Madeline Warner, 1872, La Crosse, Wisconsin–1945, Beaton, British Columbia)

Women in rafters and man with brooms by Mattie Gunterman (1872–1945) suggests domestic labour gone awry and presents an unusual, humorous portrayal of early settler life in the West. Born Ida Madeline Warner, Gunterman first learned photography from her uncle at his studio in the small logging town of La Crosse, Wisconsin. As a teenager, she set off for Seattle, where she found work as a cleaner and met her husband, Will Gunterman, a candymaker from a large working-class family. By 1897, she had acquired a simple box camera and began to take playful, often staged, pictures of her family, travels, and daily life.  The following year, the Guntermans set off on foot for the Kootenay area of British Columbia, where they settled permanently, working as cooks in mining camps and raising their young son. Gunterman seems to have taken her camera everywhere she went, providing an enthusiastic and unusual chronicle of settler and camp life.

Soon after her arrival in Canada, Gunterman significantly upgraded her camera to a new Kodak 4 x 5 model that could take pictures on either glass plates or celluloid film, both of which she developed in a makeshift darkroom in their cabin. About half of Gunterman’s surviving photographs are self-portraits (like Mattie Gunterman posed by a tree stump, 1899) or include her (as in Mattie on hot stove, 1902), and were made possible by deploying a foot-operated shutter release cable she had fashioned.

The sorts of romantic images of Western landscapes created by many other photographers during this period are few and far between in Gunterman’s unique record. A fire in her home destroyed many of her photographs, but not the three hundred glass plate negatives put away in the darkroom shed. These were then stored in her son’s attic until 1961. When the building of a new dam threatened to flood dozens of small mining towns, an archivist travelled from Vancouver hoping to salvage any remaining historical records, and locals directed him to Gunterman’s attic.  As a result, the Mattie Gunterman Collection was saved and is now housed at the Vancouver Public Library.