Favourite Foote Photo: Esyllt W. Jones

My favourite image in the book is a photograph I write about in the introduction.

It appears on page 32 of the book.

It is a woman in Aboriginal dress, her hair in braids, smoking a pipe.

 Many of Foote’s images are technically almost perfect. This one is partly hazy and has a ghost-like blur on one side, and a little girl in a white party dress.

The woman is a mystery to me, and I like that.

I don’t think history should be about definitive answers.

Sometimes the questions are far more interesting.

- Esyllt W. Jones

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Esyllt W. Jones is a history professor at University of Manitoba. She is the author of Imagining Winnipeg: History through the Photographs of L.B. Foote as well as the award-winning Influenza 1918: Death, Disease and Struggle in Winnipeg (UTP, 2007).