SNEAK PEEK: Foote cover!

Hey all, we're busily launching this spring's titles and working on next fall's titles, but I've got two pieces of Foote-related news to share: first, the cover, designed by Steven Rosenberg of Winnipeg's Doowah Design.

We've used a detail from one of Foote's most famous photos, entitled "1912-13 Copper Sheathing of the Roof of the Hotel Fort Garry" (Manitoba Archives, Foote 1535 Q554).

The book's design harkens to that of UMP's two other photo books, All Our Changes: Images from the Sixties Generation, Photographs by Gerry Kopelow (U of M Press, 2009) and The North End: Photographs by John Paskievich (U of M Press, 2007), also designed by Rosenberg.

We've also arrived at a book description, which I've cribbed from our fall 2012 catalogue. (All eighteen boxes of which arrived at UMP yesterday...)

"In an expanding and socially fractious early twentieth-century Winnipeg, Lewis Benjamin Foote (1873-1957) rose to become the city’s pre-eminent commercial photographer. Documenting everything from royal visits to deep poverty, from the building of the landmark Fort Garry Hotel to
the riots of the 1919 General Strike, Foote’s photographs have come to be iconic representations of early Winnipeg life. They have been used to illustrate everything from academic histories to posters for rock concerts; they have influenced the work of visual artists, writers, and musicians;
and they have represented Winnipeg to the world.

But in Imagining Winnipeg, historian Esyllt W. Jones takes us beyond the iconic to reveal the complex artist behind the lens and the conflicting ways in which his photographs have been used to give credence to diverse and sometimes irreconcilable views of Winnipeg’s past. Incorporating 150 stunning photographs from the more than 2,000 images in the Archives of Manitoba Foote Collection, Imagining Winnipeg challenges our understanding of visual history and the city we thought we knew."

Yay! Fun!

Ariel Gordon
UMP Promotions/Editorial Assistant