Nineteenth-Century Canadian Photographically Illustrated Books Online: Examining and Sharing a Research Collection as Data
Abstract
This thesis investigates the artistic, economic, and social history of original photographs as book illustrations in Canada, from their first appearance in Samuel McLaughlin’s monthly periodical, The Photographic Portfolio: A Monthly View of Canadian Scenes and Scenery (Quebec: S. McLaughlin, 1858-1860), through the waning years of the nineteenth century when halftones and other forms of photomechanical prints surpassed them as more commercially viable options. The accompanying digital collection at Nineteenth-Century Canadian Photographically Illustrated Books (https://canadianphotographicallyillustratedbooks.com) brings to light hundreds of photographs found in books which survive in public collections today, primarily in Ontario and Quebec, and documents the often surprising differences between book copies as well as relationships to other nineteenth-century media.
Thesis chapters present case studies of McLaughlin’s Portfolio and James MacPherson LeMoine’s Maple Leaves: Canadian History and Quebec Scenery (Quebec: Hunter, Rose & Co., 1865) which explore, in turn, how authors and publishers used photographs and how readers engaged with them. The first chapter looks at the disconnect between the fraught economics of book production and the emerging popular discourse around photographically illustrated books as affordable and desirable artistic goods. By exploring the commercial challenges of publishing in a small, local market, I demonstrate that photographic books were probably far from profitable ventures. Their value was rather in their ability to fulfill the popular interest in illustration, supplying a developing local industry with assuredly high-quality goods. The second chapter explores the previously unknown trend of extra-illustrating with photographs in Canadian books, bringing to light a practice that has not received much attention in the history of photography generally and which offers a new mechanism for understanding the audience for photographic illustration as participants in meaning-making.
A critical component of the thesis is the digital collection, which makes available the data that allowed for unique discoveries about the Canadian market for photographically illustrated books, such as the presence of extra-illustrators in the creation of Maple Leaves. The thesis concludes with a reflection on how to present humanities research collections as reusable research data by considering emerging practices from the cultural heritage sector around ‘collections as data.’