Awards
- Joint winner of AUPresses Book, Jacket, and Journal Show: Scholarly Illustrated 2023 (United States)
- Short-listed for WILLA Literary Award, Scholarly Non-Fiction 2023
Overview
Rare Merit is a beautifully illustrated and astute examination of women photographers in Canada as it took shape in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Throughout, the camera was both a witness to the colonialism, capitalism, and gendered and racialized social organization, and a protagonist. And women across the country, whether residents or visitors, captured people and places that were entirely new to the lens. This book shows how they did so, and the meaning their work carries. Colleen Skidmore surveys the professional lives and photographs of nearly eighty women – studio portraitists, travel documentarians, photojournalists, fine artists, hobbyists, and photographic printers – from Lucy Maude Montgomery on Prince Edward Island to Élise Livernois in Quebec City, and from Margaret Bourke-White in the Arctic to Hannah Maynard on Vancouver Island. Why women? Why not women? Presenting the exceptional range and impact of their work, Rare Merit proves that women's practices and images – knowingly omitted from founding narratives of photographic history – were diverse, compelling, widespread, and influential.
Full Product Details
Author: Colleen Skidmore
Publisher: University of British Columbia Press
Imprint: University of British Columbia Press
Weight: 1.060kg
ISBN: 9780774867054
ISBN 10: 0774867051
Pages: 368
Publication Date: 01 June 2022
Audience:
General/trade
,
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
General
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
"""Fletcher’s story opens Rare Merit and skillfully articulates Skidmore’s main thesis: women’s histories are central to the medium, and women played a significant role in the development of Canadian photography."" -- Siobhan Angus * Technology and Culture, vol. 64. no. 4 *"
Author Information
Colleen Skidmore is a professor emerita at the University of Alberta. She is the author of Searching for Mary Schäffer: Women Wilderness Photography and This Wild Spirit: Women in the Rocky Mountains of Canada, which was adapted as a CBC Radio Alberta series and an exhibition. Her interdisciplinary research on early photography has appeared in journals as wide ranging as History of Photography, Social History/Histoire sociale, Journal of Canadian Art History, and Journal of Canadian Studies. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia.
