“Framing Identity: Social Practices of Photography in Canada (1880-1920)” by Susan Close

Reading Susan Close’s Framing Identity: Social Practices of Photography in Canada (1880–1920) took me back to the mid-1980s, my art school days. It was there that I first encountered the work of Griselda Pollock, a radical, young, British art historian who described art— historical, contemporary, canonized and marginalized—as a dynamic, meaning-making social practice that actually constructed identity and mediated real-life social relations. In doing so, Pollock called into question art history’s methods, suppositions, terms, categories and values, all of which were implicated in the devaluation of work produced by women artists and other marginalized people. I vividly recall how liberating it was to realize that art history textbooks offered nothing more or less than an interpretation of a category of representation called “art”; albeit an interpretation sustained by a formidable Eurocentric, gendered and class-biased legacy.

Close’s book is informed by this ever-expanding body of revisionist feminist art history even as her research contributes to it. Fortified by Pollock’s work as well as that of Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Kaja Silverman and Mieke Bal (to name just a few of her comrades), Close shows us and tells us how turnof- the-century Canadian women used photography to literally and figuratively frame identities, identities that didn’t always jibe with prevalent concepts of womanhood and motherhood. In other words, access to an emerging, ambiguously categorized means of cultural production enabled some women—primarily the privileged, the creative and the most determined— to “talk back.”

Close’s meticulous (dare I say, painstakingly obsessive) investigation relies on a close and imaginative reading of individual images and biographies as well as a thorough analysis of the intriguing social, political, geographic, cultural and ideological contexts in which turn-of-the-century women photographers laboured. Because Close is a practising artist who works in the medium of photography (as well as an academic), she also brings considerable technical information to her analysis, as well as a courageously self-critical, first-person account of the kind of decision making that goes into conceptualizing, producing, selecting and exhibiting photographic images.

The practices of Mattie Gunterman (1872–1945), Geraldine Moodie (1854–1945), Ruby Gordon Peterkin (1887–1961) and Etta Sparks (1879–1917) were singled out for an in-depth look, largely because they represent four of the earliest recorded Canadian women photographers for whom significant bodies of work are available. None of them regarded themselves as artists.

In Mattie Gunterman we meet a working-class woman who used her camera and the family photo album to narrate her transformation into a strong, capable pioneer and community participant. She represented herself as leading her husband and son—on foot with cumbersome, turn-of-the-century photographic equipment in tow—from urban west-coast America to the wilderness of interior British Columbia, a spectacular and unfamiliar, unbuilt environment in which Gunterman would eventually feel at home. Her photographs are evocatively theatrical and sophisticated in their composition, readily lending themselves to the elaborate, semiotically inspired interpretations that Close enjoys creating. Many of Gunterman’s unusual family portraits and images of cross-dressing (masquerade parties were common community events) could pass for contemporary artworks.

Geraldine Moodie, Toronto-born and upper middle class, established a widely recognized professional practice as a studio photographer while raising six children (though one can imagine that her privilege accorded her sufficient hired help). As the wife of an RCMP officer stationed in remote communities including the Canadian Arctic, Moodie was in a unique position (for a Victorian woman) to photograph some of the Inuit residents she met, in particular, women and children. Armed with guidelines developed by Mieke Bal, Close unflinchingly grapples with the daunting post-colonial conundrums posed by Moodie’s problematic, career-enhancing photographs of “exotic others.”

Ontario-born Peterkin and Sparks were unmarried, professional career women—army nurses stationed abroad during the First World War. Both created photo albums in which they variously pictured themselves as noble, duty- proud professionals, recreating off-duty tourists and women at ease in the convivial company of their female colleagues. Close proposes that for both Peterkin and Sparks, mediating their experience with a camera served to ground them in a dangerous, gruelling and foreign environment; it also provided a means of constructing a reassuring narrative for the benefit of loved ones back home.

Obviously, the primary value of Framing Identity (which initially served as Close’s PhD thesis) lies in the rigorous, feminist, revisionist contribution it makes to our understanding of women’s photographic practices. Fortunately, Close also welcomes the curious non-specialist reader by including an introduction that offers a detailed and accessible overview of the body of scholarship and theory that spawned her thinking. As well, the generous use of explanatory footnotes and asides ensures that terms like “photo-secession,” “codes of production” and “daguerreotype” are clearly defined. Which is to say that Framing Identity would make an excellent university textbook.

However, for me, some of Framing Identity’s most significant contributions are implicit and waiting to be found. For example, by way of her methodical and respectful analytic approach, Close both performs and lays bare the infinite care, perseverance and patience required to produce knowledge, especially knowledge aimed at destabilizing long-held assumptions. At times, this lends an awkward quality to her prose, a quality that some writers might have chosen to eliminate. However, by retaining, rather than obscuring, a sense of intellectual, textual and ethical struggle, Close reminds us that intellectual work is a form of labour dependent on expansive periods of unfettered research and thinking time—as well as an individual passion. In a culture obsessed with speed, quick fixes and instant gratification, this message can’t be performed and repeated often enough.

In drawing attention to, and teasing out, the significance of ordinary, turn-of-the-century representational practices, Framing Identity also prompts us to speculate on the contributions of comparable contemporary practitioners. Who might be the Guntermans, Moodies, Peterkins and Sparkses of the 21st century? How do currently marginalized individuals and groups employ YouTube, graffiti, zines, scrapbooking and other widely accessible media to construct empowering identities? How do consumer culture and the discourses of contemporary art support and/or challenge their efforts? ■

Framing Identity: Social Practices of Photography in Canada (1880– 1920), Susan Close, Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2007, paperback, 208 pp, $29.95.

Sigrid Dahle is an itinerant curator and art writer based in Winnipeg.