Nanitch: Early Photographs of British Columbia from the Langmann Collection
2016
A co-publication with the University of British Columbia Library, in conjunction with an exhibition at Presentation House Gallery, from March 30 to June 26, 2016, Nanitch: Early Photographs of British Columbia from the Langmann Collection offers the first interpretation of an important archive of over 18,000 rarely seen photographs recently donated to UBC Library by Vancouver's Langmann family. The publication covers a sixty-year period from the 1860s to the early 1920s, and reveals dramatic changes in the province, as well as in how and why photographs were made. The publication includes colour reproductions, five interpretive essays, and short biographies of photographers working in British Columbia at that time. The essays consider how the official activities of nineteenth-century working photographers using large-format, wet-plate cameras evolved with the introduction of amateur cameras and the mass distribution of promotional photography, as well as how colonial settler histories are revealed in the documentary photographs. The images include hand-coloured albumen prints, stereocards, cartes de visite, and postcards. Nanitch—meaning "to look" in Chinook Jargon—brings to light new interpretations of the early history of British Columbia and the significant role of the camera in colonization. Questioning colonialist narratives of progress, the exhibition and publication emphasize the contradictions of settlement through early photographs of government land surveys, family portraits, industrial ventures, commerce, political events, and Indigenous peoples and their displacement. A focus is on rare albums of photographs, ranging from the first nineteenth-century government expeditions in the province to the turn-of-the-century, utopic community of Walhachin, which promoted land to entice settlers. Key photographers working in British Columbia at that time are highlighted, including Frederick Dally, Charles Horetzky, Charles Mcmunn, Hannah and Richard Maynard, Ben W. Leeson, and Edward Curtis.
WorldCat
WorldCat
Identifier
L0092Call Number
TR6.C32V35 2016Extent
91 pages : illustrations ; softcover 17 cmLanguage
ISBN
9780920293980Place of Publication
North Vancouver, BCPublication Type
PrintPublisher
The Polygon GalleryCollection
grunt gallery LibraryCopyright 2016 Presentation House Gallery and the authors.