Favourite Foote Photos: David Larsen

As an avid cyclist I am drawn to “bicycle race c. 1912” [page 42]. I cannot help but notice, as well, other bikes in other Foote photos…

The bicycle has been present in Winnipeg almost since the beginning. The Winnipeg cycling club was established in 1884, the same year as the Winnipeg Rowing Club, and was one of many organized amateur athletic clubs.

Oscar John Gottfred (far left) competing in a race, c. 1912.

At that time the bicycle was unlike the ones we know today. They were ‘tall bikes’—with a large front wheel, they resembled five-foot-tall tricycles and had no braking system—and were ridden almost exclusively by men. We know from G.B. Norcliffe’s cultural history, Cycling to Modernity (University of Toronto Press, 2001), that bicycles and cycling captivated the imagination of Canadians during the last decades of the 19th century.

Among the many changes to the bike during this period of wide popularity was the development of the ‘safety bike.’ Much more like today’s bikes—they had two equally-sized wheels and hand-brake—the safety bike was also a gendered bike, with different frame configurations for men and women. Among its many gifts, the bicycle apparently made “at least a modest contribution to the emancipation of middle class women.”

However by the century’s end the bicycle had reached the masses and what had been an upper and middle class vehicle of leisure, adventure, fitness and perhaps even transportation, had lost some of its cachet. People of means and influence had become enthralled with the automobile. By 1912 Henry Ford’s Model T had been rolling off Dearborn assembly lines for four years and Winnipeg had more than 2000 registered automobiles. Interestingly, few of those automobiles were Fords, with the majority being more expensive luxury cars. Nevertheless, a shift was occurring and after World War I the car would be ubiquitous. The bicycle race in Foote’s photo appears to be well attended, but on Labour Day that same year 10,000 Winnipeggers attended the ninth annual Winnipeg Auto Club races.

The streets in Foote’s photos from the 1920’s are, at times, clogged with cars. But the bike can still be seen as a vehicle of active transportation in the photo of the window washers [pg 72], or that of the Worker’s Parliament meeting during the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919 [pg 61]. As evidence of leisure use, consider the Bob O Links miniature golf course photo from the 1930’s [pg 107; note too the horse-drawn carriage in the background] and, of course, the group photo of female cyclists taken at the legislature [page 148]. Considering the difficulties of keeping bikes running despite war rationing of basics like rubber this group’s ride was likely no small feat…

In both absolute and relative terms we may see more bikes on the street now than at any time in Winnipeg’s past. The city took shape, especially after the Second World War, to serve the needs of the automobile, but the bicycle has always been present. After the Second World War, city planning reflected the use of the automobile. Neighbourhoods expanded.

But the city that Foote photographed from 1905-1950, which is on a smaller, more intimate scale and includes the downtown, West End, Wolseley, West Broadway, and Osborne neighbourhoods, still exists.

Luckily, we Winnipeggers can still enjoy this ‘inner city.’ We can walk and bike in that city and still get somewhere in fifteen minutes, which is the classic measure of a working city. A city that in scale at least, if not in terms of etiquette and fundamental safety (bike lanes anyone?), makes sense for today’s cyclists.

—David Larsen

* * *

David Larsen is UMP's Sales and Marketing Supervisor. He rides when he can and drives when he has to...

* * *

If you liked the return of the Favourite Foote Photos, there are more to come in the weeks ahead by U of S Native Studies scholar Adam Gaudry, the Winnipeg Free Press' Melissa Tait, Getty photographer Marianne Helm.

This is all to celebrate Imagining Winnipeg's nomination for the On the Same Page programme. 

Vote now and vote often!

Favourite Foote Photos: Orest T. Martynowych

On 18 January 1906 more than one hundred worshipers congregated in Winnipeg’s most unusual church, “Bishop” Seraphim’s “tin can cathedral,” which had appeared at the corner of King Street and Stella Avenue in the North End sixteen months earlier.

Most of those who crowded into the bizarre edifice were Ukrainian (or Ruthenian as they still identified themselves) Greek Catholic and Greek Orthodox believers who had recently emigrated from the Austrian crownlands of Galicia and Bukovyna.

It was the feast of Epiphany and like all Eastern Christians they had come to commemorate Jesus’s baptism in the Jordan River. After the liturgy, Seraphim, several priests, and the congregation were photographed in front of the building. Then they marched with crosses and banners east along Stella Avenue to Main Street, north to Selkirk Avenue, and east to the frozen banks of the Red River where an eight-foot high cross was carved out of the ice and water blessed and distributed to the faithful. The unusual spectacle, which attracted curiosity seekers already familiar with Seraphim’s cathedral, was chronicled by the local press.

One of many vagabond priests who came to North America without authorization prior to the Great War, Seraphim was born Stefan Ustvolsky in 1858 near Arkhangelsk, Russia. A graduate of the St. Petersburg theological academy, he had been defrocked in 1883 and only readmitted into the service of the Russian Orthodox Church as a monk in 1901. In the fall of 1902, after visiting Mount Athos, Jerusalem, and Damascus, Ustvolsky appeared in New York City purporting to have been consecrated a missionary bishop for North America.

Unable to attract a following in the United States, where he had been welcomed and then dismissed by Ukrainian Greek Catholics embroiled in bitter disputes with Irish Roman Catholic bishops, Ustvolsky made his way to Winnipeg in early 1903. At the time, there were no Ukrainian Greek Catholic or Greek Orthodox priests in the city, and even devout Ukrainian Greek Catholics resented Roman Catholic Archbishop Adélard Langevin’s efforts to place them under the jurisdiction of his church and clergy. Seraphim responded by ordaining cantors, deacons, teachers and others for a small fee into the priesthood of what he called the “All-Russian Patriarchal Orthodox Church,” popularly known as the Seraphimite church. A charismatic preacher, his decision to ordain poor and humble men like those whom Christ had selected as Apostles also helped win adherents. Because Church Slavonic was the liturgical language in the Eastern rite Catholic and Orthodox Churches of Austria and Russia, many immigrants were not inclined to draw distinctions between their churches and Seraphim’s.

By the fall of 1903, Seraphim had thousands of followers in the three Prairie provinces and a small chapel on the east side of Winnipeg’s McGregor Street between Manitoba and Pritchard Avenues served as the movement’s headquarters.

The rapid growth of Seraphim’s church in 1903-04 stirred the established churches into action. In November 1903 Ukrainian Greek Catholics sent two Basilian Fathers to Winnipeg. By early 1905, with Archbishop Langevin’s financial aid, they had erected St. Nicholas church on the northwest corner of McGregor Street and Stella Avenue, and that fall, they established a parochial school. In 1904 and 1905, Archbishop Tikhon Beliavin, primate of the Russian Orthodox mission in North America, visited Winnipeg and helped Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian immigrants to establish the Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox congregation on the northeast corner of McKenzie Street and Manitoba Avenue. The most devastating blow to Seraphim came in the fall and winter of 1904-05 when his most able priests defected and announced the formation of the Independent Greek Church (1904-13), a hybrid institution launched with the support of local Presbyterians that temporarily retained the Eastern liturgy while introducing Protestant teachings. When the defectors gained control of the chapel on McGregor Street, Seraphim began to build his “cathedral” using tobacco tins, discarded windows, bricks and lumber, and pipes, barbed wire, bed frames, and stair rails from a nearby scrap yard.

The photograph was taken just as Seraphim’s moment in the sun was coming to an end. He had already been exposed as an imposter by the Russian Orthodox hierarchy and no Eastern Orthodox patriarch recognized his canonicity. Ukrainian Greek Catholic and Russian Orthodox missionaries were arriving to look after the spiritual needs of Eastern rite Christians. Above all, Seraphim’s fondness for alcohol, his confrontations with street urchins bent on demolishing his “cathedral,” and the questionable behaviour of some of his priests, deprived him of what little credibility he still possessed. As the number of his followers dwindled, he tried to sell his cathedral in May 1907. In February 1908 he left Winnipeg for the last time, apparently bound for California from where he may have returned to Russia.

— Orest T. Martynowych

* * *

Orest T. Martynowych is a historian at the Centre for Ukrainian Canadian Studies, University of Manitoba. He is the author of The Showman and the Ukrainian Cause: Folk Dance, Film, and the Life of Vasile Avramenko, which will be published in October 2014.


* * *

If you liked the return of the Favourite Foote Photos, there are more to come in the weeks ahead by U of S Native Studies scholar Adam Gaudry, the Winnipeg Free Press' Melissa Tait, UMP's Sales and Marketing Supervisor David Larsen, Getty photographer Marianne Helm, and U of M Indigenous Services Librarian Camille Callison.

This is all to celebrate Imagining Winnipeg's nomination for the On the Same Page programme. 

Vote now and vote often!

A year (and a bit) of L.B. Foote

A little more than a year ago, our press launched this blog dedicated to the photography of L.B. Foote. Over the last 14 months, guided, corralled, and inspired by the irreplaceable Ariel Gordon, nearly three dozen contributors have written about Foote and his photos. We’ve had contributions from journalists, visual artists, historians, archivists, musicians, film makers, collectors, and of course photographers, all riffing off whatever Foote inspired in them.

Over the year, as we worked with Esyllt Jones on her book Imagining Winnipeg, these different voices became a kind of running commentary on the book. I want to thank all of the blog writers for their contributions — it’s been a delight to discover what new side road or even back alley each of you would take us down. Now, as a new year begins, it is time for us to bring this regular blog to an end as well.

How to explain the persistent appeal of Foote’s photographs to so many different people? Photographers admire his art, and I think many also respect his stamina – it’s hard work being a freelance photographer, always on move to the next job. I suspect historians and archivists are fans because they don’t often have such beautifully composed and arresting photographs to work with. And for the rest of us, I think, it has something to do with what Guy Maddin calls Foote’s “peculiar and ennobling eye.” How is it possible that one photographer could record in one place such an abundance of the odd, the majestic, the ridiculous, and the painful?

To be honest, nostalgia of a sort also plays a part in our fascination with the world Foote chronicles. Those of us who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s (and were lucky enough to be introduced to Foote by the likes of Bob Lower and Doug Smith) discovered in Foote’s photographs the big, bustling prairie metropolis whose traces and ghosts we could still glimpse. His was the city for which those magnificently overblown public and commercial buildings were built, like the Legislature building and the banks with Roman columns. Foote’s city seemed to be a “live wire city,” its streets jammed with people, like the crowd watching Houdini or the 1919 strikers, in which a dynamic downtown was the hub of civic life. It seemed like a vanished place worth missing. At the same time, Foote’s photos also made that Winnipeg a place hard to take seriously — how else to react to his many portraits of the city’s powerful decked out in beanies, fezzes, and grass skirts, or dining at the bottom of sewers? Even through the filter of this nostalgia, though, there are still many parts of Foote’s world that remain far too familiar in the city we live in today, especially his images of inequality and smugness.

Since we’re coming to the end of the regular Lost Foote Photos blog, it seems appropriate to end with a photo of the Foote family also celebrating the end of a year—in this case New Year’s Day dinner 1940 (reproduced on page 149 of Imagining Winnipeg).

Here the Footes are gathered for a festive dinner, in the same cramped dining room that L.B.’s son Eric and his jazz band hammed it up in thirteen years earlier (page 109). Eric (with glasses) is now a husband and father, and his wife and two little daughters are at the table, along with Mary Foote, L.B.’s wife. We think the man with the moustache may be L.B.’s other son, who had moved to Detroit in the 1930s and was perhaps home for a visit.

I like all of the little traces of everyday life in this photo. Although the Christmas tree is gone, there are still paper holiday ornaments throughout the room — the tin foil stars twirling down from the light fixture are an especially nice touch. The sheet music on the piano includes what seems to be a simple arrangement of Christmas music on the piano (perhaps for one of the granddaughters to play?). If you look closely, you’ll see that the other music on the piano is “When You Wish Upon a Star” from Walt Disney’s great Pinocchio, which is curious because that film won’t be released until a month after this photo is taken. At the centre of the table is a smallish fowl – its hard to tell if it’s a turkey, chicken, or goose — and not too far away seems to be a bottle of HP sauce, that once ubiquitous part of many WASP meals. There’s no sign of wine or beer or other alcoholic libations, so presumably this was a teetotal household (it looks to me, though, that the older, visiting son at the end of the table looks like he could use a drink about now). Those of us who still live in drafty old Winnipeg frame houses like the Foote home on Gertrude Avenue will appreciate the heavy curtains around the window and covering the doorway — anything to keep those Manitoba winter winds out.

All and all, this seems like a modest but comfortable household, with nothing remarkable going on. And yet that this was likely not an easy time for the Foote household. Thanks to Mary Horodyski’s recent discovery in theCity of Winnipeg archives we know that just a few years before Foote was desperate for work. In early 1933, he had lost his long-time downtown studio to fire. We don’t know what exactly was lost in that fire, but it must have included much of what he needed to make a living. As Mary found, nearly two years later Foote wrote to the city waterworks department, asking (actually pleading) for work. This was the photographer who had famously photographed royalty and visiting celebrities just a few years before, but who now had to come cap in hand to ask for the chance to photograph a municipal construction site.

This New Year’s Day dinner comes less than five years after that letter. Foote did get the contract to shoot the water treatment building. But the photos he took after that are of increasingly smaller and more modest. He’s no longer asked to record the homes and formal dinners of the city’s rich and powerful. By the late 1930s, his photographs are more likely in smaller middle-class homes or apartments, much like his own. When he photographs businesses, they are now small as well, like a hatchery on Logan Avenue (page 145). On New Year’s Day in 1940, L.B. Foote would have been 67 years old. He would have gone through all types of travails, including all of the usual indignities of someone who works freelance. And he would have to keep working well into his seventies — in the 1950s he would persuade the Free Press to carry an irregular column highlighting some of his “olden days” photos.

L.B. Foote didn’t take many photos of his family. In the over 2,000 photos at the Manitoba Archives, there are no more than a dozen Foote family photos. These include the wonderful shot of the Footes swimming atthe original YMCA on Portage Avenue (in what later became the Birks Building) and a mysterious one of the Foote family camping on a southern California beach around 1912 (what were they doing there?).

Because he took so few photographs of his family, it does make you wonder why he decided to record this particular family dinner at this particular time? Its hard to think that this might have been a time to celebrate — age and finances being what they were, not to mention with the Second World War just beginning in the background. But despite all that we can conjecture about his circumstances that day, Foote still has that slightly cocky half-smile that shows up in his other self-portraits. In spite of everything, he’s still willing to document his family and their progress into a new year, and seems to be doing it with some élan.


We are likely never going to know very much about the man behind the camera in these thousands of photos, but that spirit and that face—energetic, optimistic, with a twist of either irony or mischief—seems to persist each time we catch a glimpse of him. And it’s that spirit, I think, that keeps us coming back to his fascinating and baffling treasure trove of photographs.

- David Carr

* * *
David Carr is the director of the University of Manitoba Press.

Favourite Foote Photos: PJ Burton

My father was born in 1927 into the sepia and grey-toned world that Foote's photos captured like a bug in a mason jar. So many interesting things going on in there. It was a small commercial miracle, notewothy and slightly impossible. In the forties, mini-entrepreneurs stalked the streets of every city of any size and offered to "take your picture", then hand you a fancy calling card announcing where the results could be purchased. Say, at a near by department store where you may become inclined to browse. Well, not everyone had cameras and the alchemy that is photography gave one existential pause.

"I was over there, but now I'm here, yet I can see myself as I have recently been." Or, more astonishingly, I can see them as they were; a handy portable piece of witchcraft on paper where even the deceased live in permanent evidence of what we did that day.

My grandfather was born in 1892 and fully inhabited the world Foote knew. He was a full-share partner in the development of that world. They were kids in Brandon which, at the time, had a population of maybe seven or eight thousand primarily Britishers who took pride in their sense of organization, and for the most part, always wore a specific kind of hat. He went off to war in one, he and my great uncle, lying about their age (they were only 16) but that didn't prevent him from being capture by the Germans and spending many months in an unexpectedly accommodating P.O.W. camp. There were amenities: musical instruments and some guy from a nearby village who, like Foote, would take the band's photo so you could send it home to the missus.

So Foote and the people like him, had a new gadget of fascination and anything was a reasonable target from the mundane to the most cunning of stunts. Some of Foote's works clearly predates "Everyone say 'cheese'" and its subjects appear to just mildly tolerate the invasive box while others are clearly posed, amused and ready to have even more great fun!

My father's great chum in Brandon was a lad named John Robertson. Together, they would run around the back lanes and streets of the west side of Brandon. Don't expect that they were up to mischief; they were just running around unfettered by the constraints of the mantle of responsibility that came with being an older boy of, say, fifteen. Since they were only nine and ten the worldly cosmos of encroaching maturity had yet to grab them by the coveralls and shake the dreamy dust of boyhood out of them. So, they just ran around and did things. They did, however, have pigeons and would get together to discuss different breeds and their qualities. One quality my father found particularly disturbing was that they tasted pretty good and grandmother (his mum) would occasionally prepare squab. Knowing each of his feathered charges personally, my father railled against the black fates that he was unable to control and the unfairness of it all let alone the barbaric horror of having to eat his friend.

But this idyllic garden can never last and just assuredly as spring will melt into summer, both John and George were growing up. It was time to get a hat.

But look at the hats! Look at Foote's photo of, say, the Winnipeg General Strike. By golly, you don't get that many men together in their sharp fedoras, slouches and bowlers without a serious commitment to common purpose. Don't tell me they didn't mean business. And just look at the hats!

- PJ Burton

* * *

PJ Burton was born in Winnipeg in 1952 and received his teaching degree at the University of Alberta in 1979. During a brief stopover in Edmonton, he appeared on SCTV as a drummer in an Earl Camembert sketch, and again in Mel's Rock Pile. When he moved back to Winnipeg in 1980, he formed the band The Smarties. Soon after he put together Winnipeg's legendary showband The Chocolate Bunnies From Hell. He currently teaches at West Kildonan Collegiate and performs regularly with his band.

Favourite Foote Photos: Mary Horodyski

I first came across Foote about twenty-five years ago in the basement of the Manitoba Archives.

I was an undergraduate history student searching for evidence of women’s role in the Winnipeg General Strike.

It seemed strange to me that women had made up one-quarter of the workforce in 1919 yet had never made it into any of the history books about the strike.

Foote’s photographs helped me prove that women attended public meetings and were on the street alongside the male strikers.

After this first Foote encounter, and over the next quarter century, Foote became intertwined with the city in my mind. Iconic, like the Golden Boy or the Arlington Bridge. So I felt surprised this summer to come across a letter from Foote – I had practically forgotten he was human, so mixed into the cement and metal of the city had he become.

I found the letter at the City of Winnipeg Archives where I had been working on the records surrounding the building of the aqueduct from Shoal Lake (how we still get our water, by the way, almost a hundred years later).

The letter is dated July 23, 1935 and in it Foote offers his photography services to the Greater Winnipeg Sanitary District. He needs the work, he says, because a “fire cleaned me out” and “my taxes are long overdue.” In fact, he says, “I am finding it very difficult to get along.” At the time of his letter, Foote would have been 62 years old—a pretty cruddy time, if you ask me, to be stuck hustling for money.

Esyllt Jones, in her Imagining Winnipeg essay, tells us that in 1948, when Foote was 75, both his legs were broken in a car accident.

So, my favourite Foote photo, now that I’ve learned a bit more about his life, and gotten a bit older myself, is the very last photo in Imagining Winnipeg: tough Mr. Foote, standing upright on the corner of Portage and Main, 77 years old, cane dangling from his overcoat pocket, and with his camera raised.

- Mary Horodyski

* * *

Mary Horodyski is in the middle of her third degree in history – an M.A. in Archival Studies at the University of Manitoba. She also has an M.A. in History from Concordia University and a B.A. in History from the University of Manitoba. In between (and sometimes during) history degrees, she works as a writer and researcher. She recently completed her archival internship at the City of Winnipeg Archives. Her Manitoba History article on women and the Winnipeg General Strike can be found here.

Footepaths, part 2: Take me home, Mr Foote

To archivists, the lost Foote photos present a paradox. The L.B. Foote fonds – fonds being the term archivists use to denote a collection of archival documents – is held by the Archives of Manitoba. The Foote fonds was acquired from L.B. Foote’s heirs after the death of the man himself. These records were acquired because of the importance of L.B. Foote in the history of the province. But, as I suggested in an earlier post, it is what is missing from the fonds – the lost Foote photos – that demonstrate the importance of the fonds.

In preserving records, archivists are careful to note down their provenance. It is the provenance, or origin, of a record that connects it to a larger group of records. Archivists preserve provenance through archival description, the text that describes the records held by the archives. Traditional archival provenance, however, preserves only one view of provenance: that of the material creator of the records. The provenance of the Foote fonds, for example, might state that the records came to the Archives of Manitoba from Foote's studio via his heirs.

But should Foote be considered the sole creator of these photos? It is true that his eye framed the photographs and his shop produced the prints, that it is his name in his writing that appears in the corners of the photos. But it was the city of Winnipeg that gave Foote the architectural and social subjects for his photos. Foote's photographs of landmark buildings and era-defining historical events, like his photos of the famous, the not-so-famous and candid photos of everyday life, were taken as opportunity afforded. It took the entire city of Winnipeg to create the Foote photographs. In this sense, we are all heirs of Foote, and we are all bequeathing our Foote photographs to the archives.

My friend Tom Nesmith, who also teaches archival studies at the University of Manitoba, pioneered this notion and calls it societal provenance. Archives do not describe the societal provenance of their records. To find that, you must go to Flickr.

The Foote photos found on Flickr have not been posted by archivists, but by Winnipeg citizens concerned with the history of their city. Most of the Foote photos on Flickr are scans of photos held by the Archives of Manitoba. Once posted, some acquire layers of comments and description, as people debate exact locations and compare the city that was with the city that is.

The photo selected for this blogpost is a simple photo of Foote's residence. But follow the link to the Flickr page and read the comments, detailing a conversation spread over eight months that identifies the location and a later, more famous neighbour (Marshall McLuhan!), while disparaging the subsequent development of the site ("the house is gone, now a wading pool next to the school. blah. sucks.").

What is the provenance of this photo? By one light its provenance is the Foote fonds, held by the Archives of Manitoba. But seen “In_The_Right_Light” (which just happens to be the Flickr commenter’s tag) the provenance of the photo is the city itself, the city that provided the material context in which this house, built in this style with these materials, was built on that particular piece of land. And then torn down. And then developed into a park with a wading pool.

It took L.B. Foote's eye to frame this photo, his shop to print it. It took the Archives of Manitoba to preserve this photo for future generations. It took an industrious Flickr user to post it onto the social network. It took other Flickr users to recognize the location and research the history of the site. It took Flickr to provide the virtual space in which all of these forces could come together to express the photo's societal provenance.

- Greg Bak


* * *
Greg Bak is assistant professor of History at University of Manitoba, teaching in the Master’s Program in Archival Studies. Previous to July, 2011 he worked as a digital archivist and manager at Library and Archives Canada. His research interests include Aboriginal archives, digital recordkeeping, digital culture and the use of digital archives as tools for social justice.

Favourite Footes at the WFP News Café

Please join UMP at an event focused on Winnipeg’s photographers and filmmakers!

When: Wednesday, October 10, 7:00 pm
Where: Winnipeg Free Press News Café (237 McDermot Avenue)
Cost: FREE

Favourite Footes features Erna Buffie, Colin Corneau, Bob Lower, Ian McCausland, and John Paskievich talking about their favourite Foote photos, accompanied by a slideshow of images from Imagining Winnipeg: History Through the Photographs of L.B. Foote.

The Winnipeg Free Press is also sending photo editor Mike Aporius and photographer Mike Deal to share photos from the WFP’s archives.

Light refreshments will be served.

* * *

About Imagining Winnipeg
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 turmoil 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.

About L.B. Foote
Born in Newfoundland, Lewis Benjamin Foote arrived in Winnipeg in 1902, where he bought a house on Gertrude Avenue and began a career as a professional photographer. For more than 50 years, Foote’s photographs chronicled the development of the city. He was an active photographer until 1947 and died ten years later.

Favourite Foote Photo: Monique Woroniak

"Winnipeg is hard," is my answer when asked about this place. A difficult place to survive for some and, for most, a place that never quite delivers ease. Its endless contradictions, hits, misses and near-misses, make it a hard place to know. In the end, for many of us, it's also a place we find impossible to let go of.

Not unlike many Winnipeggers, I've lived with the photographs of Foote all my adult life and for many of my minor years too. They found their way to me through textbooks, loudly whispering reminders of my ancestors' immigration; as distractions in coat check lines on walls lining the way to gilded bathrooms at the Fort Garry Hotel; and, of course, they arrived along with any mention - anywhere - of 1919 and its strike.

But there were more, of course; even from only viewing a few sets you knew there had to be. Through the project undertaken by the publication of Imagining Winnipeg we've had our suspicions confirmed about the totality of Foote's work: that it's vast, complicated - even contradictory - and full of stories we've yet to discover. In this way, his work and our discovery of it, runs parallel to Winnipeg and what's been presented to us as the city's story.

It's a narrative we've been told/sold but that we know isn't true (couldn't possibly be true): that of linear progress from a genesis out of near nothing, to growth, boom, then stagnation and some holding of its own. A story with patches constructed and given labels like "Indians," settlers, (some) women's suffrage, Labour, Capital, a story of certain families and certain others. A story of the slow maturing of such a patchwork, each square in its place, only ever interacting at their edges.

As a city community we've let this story lay for some time, but lately it's felt like we're ready to hear more. (Indigenous peoples, for example, are moving more than ever to recover and grow their part in the narrative. ) But where to start? With their depictions of both owning and working classes, of women in many and varied roles, of leisure and work, and even of race beyond white, Foote's photographs must inevitably be one place to set out from. Taken together they fold the patchwork over on itself, and over again, reminding us of connections and interactions long ignored.

There is a photograph included in Imagining Winnipeg captioned "Memorial Boulevard looking south from Portage Avenue at night, 1927." There is no snow on the ground but it looks cold - autumn, maybe - and street car tracks, highlighted by the glowing spheres of lamp posts, intersect and then run parallel to disappear into a dark horizon. The Hudson Bay Company looms at left and pallet platforms rest empty to the right. There is no one in sight.

It's a patchwork of images folded over on itself. The Hudson Bay building calls to mind encounters of Indigenous peoples, fur traders and settlers, the streetcar tracks state progress, and the empty platform suggests a city once, but no longer, on the move. The ground looks unforgiving.

It is hard, but, like Winnipeg, beautiful in a way you can't let go.

- Monique Woroniak


* * *
Monique Woroniak is a life-long Winnipegger and lover of its histories. A public librarian working primarily with urban Indigenous peoples, she is a past member of the Management Committee of the Dalnavert Museum. She is currently working on a collection of poetry inspired by historical Winnipeg postcards and the stories they tell.

Footepaths, part 1: The promiscuous dissemination of L.B. Foote

L.B. Foote was promiscuous. Book his services, pay his fee, and he would shoot your wedding, funeral, board meeting, honourary banquet or any other event. Foote’s photographs are part of the stories of countless families. People may not recognize his name but nonetheless treasure photographs that were framed by his eye and produced by his shop.

My favourite Foote photo comes with a story. Shortly after I moved to Winnipeg in the summer of 2011, Ian Park approached me and showed me a photograph that had come to him through his family’s papers. This photo is featured elsewhere on this blog, and shows the retirement party of Ian's great-grandfather.

Ian showed me the photo because he knew that I was the new professor of archival studies, just arrived from the national archives in Ottawa. Ian hoped that I would be able to advise him of where the photo might find an appropriate home.

I came up blank. Archivists are used to dealing with records by the boxful, not individual photos. As I looked at the photo, I cast about for a way for Ian to find a collection to which his photo could be added.

Ian’s request started me thinking about the nature of commercial photography and its representation in archives. After the death of L.B. Foote, the Archives of Manitoba received from his heirs the L.B. Foote fonds – fonds being the archival term for a collection of records. But what photographs would a commercial photographer have in his possession at his death? Of the thousands of photos taken by L.B. Foote many, like the photo from Ian’s family records, would have been permanently dispersed from the Foote studio.

To say that the term “fonds” means “a collection of records” obscures a key nuance. To archivists, a fonds is not simply any random collection of documents handed over to an archives. It is, rather, all of the records created or accumulated during the life of a person or organization. The Archives of Manitoba holds many Foote photos, but the existence of many, many “lost Foote photos” is evidence that it does not, in the strictest archival sense, hold the Foote fonds.

But then, no institution could. Surely it would be a sign of the failure of a commercial photographer, not to mention his irrelevance, if an archives upon his death could take possession of all the photographs he had ever taken. An admired, successful and in-demand photographer like Foote could not possibly bequeath to an archive the full count of photographs that he had taken and sold in his lifetime.

Foote's studio was like an orphanage, each photo a child who might be adopted. The photos that came to the Archives of Manitoba at the end of Foote's career were the sad ones, never adopted. The "lost" photos, like Ian's, were the lucky ones that made it out. They never were lost. They went home.

Foote’s importance as a photographer, then, is not measured by the known Foote photos. It is measured by the lost Foote photos. It is measured by all of the photos identified in this blog, and by the countless photos that remain in attics and cellars, jumbled in among family papers and business papers. It is measured by the countless more photos that have been or will be destroyed through accidents and neglect or with full deliberation. Paradoxically, it is the dispersal of the Foote fonds that makes the Foote fonds worth preserving.

- Greg Bak

* * *
Greg Bak is assistant professor of History at University of Manitoba, teaching in the Master’s Program in Archival Studies. Previous to July, 2011 he worked as a digital archivist and manager at Library and Archives Canada. His research interests include Aboriginal archives, digital recordkeeping, digital culture and the use of digital archives as tools for social justice.

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

* * *

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).

Favourite Foote Photo: Chris Thomas

Leisure leisure leisure leisure.

We all want it. Its allure gets us through the cold, grinding winters of Winnipeg with its promise of happiness, escape, good company or simply peace of mind. I can think of nothing better than hopping into a car and hitting the highway in search of a beach, that pervasive symbol of leisure that now dominates the global tourism industry. That is assuming, of course, that I have the means to get to the beach, the time off in order to do so and presumably somewhere to reside if I intend to stay for more than twelve hours. Yes, leisure was and continues to be a particularly class segregated component of urban life.


Grand Beach was one of the early recreation destinations to materialize in the immediate radius of early twentieth century Winnipeg. L.B. Foote captures a group of people enjoying a leisurely moment on the beach in his photo from 1914, which reinforces the image of leisure as relaxation, company and the unobstructed pursuit of happiness.

It appears to be tea time in the photo – that unmistakable British soft-spot. But if you look closely, the cups they are using appear to have chips in their paint, probably because they were metal, the forerunner to disposable plastic or Styrofoam. We can only assume then that it was merely a top up of water. This duality is also evident in the subjects of the photograph, in what it shows and what it represents. It shows a group of mostly young women enjoying a day at Grand Beach, with a Bill Murray look-a-like peering at the group from the background and some children playing further back, among others who elude the focus of Foote’s camera and exist only as blurs.

Taken in 1914, the photo captures those who could afford to depart the city in order to pursue leisure, while those who could not remain invisible, stuck at work, stuck at home – stuck in Winnipeg. This was an era that featured a growing middle class, restless and eager to breach their urban boundaries and enjoy the immensity of the Canadian landscape.

Of course the photo has been staged, indicated by the arrangement of its subjects, who are mostly looking at the camera. What is more interesting, however, is that some are not. One woman in particular, situated in the bottom left of the photo, displays a quite intriguing expression as she looks up to someone off-screen, just to Foote’s left. She is wearing a hat that is unlike any of the others, seems to have a wedding ring on, and wears an ambiguous expression that approaches but does not quite reach skepticism. The other figure who immediately catches the eye is the only person in the group standing. The middle-aged man is in the act of pouring water. Unlike many of the others, he does not convey a sense of relaxation: he looks occupied, perhaps even somewhat begrudging of Foote and his camera, and the break in action. But then he may just have been captured at a bad time, it is impossible to know.

I have spent the majority of every summer just ten minutes north of Grand Beach in Victoria Beach. Yes, the name is suggestive; and yes, it does live up to its waspy name. It was connected to its larger, more prominent southern neighbour by way of the CNR line that travelled north from Winnipeg, stopping along the way at East Selkirk, Libau and up along the east shores of Lake Winnipeg. The train winds its way into this photo in the top left corner, appearing startlingly close to the mighty freshwater lake. In the context of this era, the train served as a symbol of mobility and class intersection because it was increasingly affordable to the middle class. The train represents a more accessible form of transportation, one that enabled travel among those who otherwise could not have afforded to travel, due to either time or financial constraints. It also permitted people to travel to areas such as Grand Beach, that a generation ago had been isolated and remote. Grand Beach developed by way of attracting the middle and upper classes of booming Winnipeg, offering an appealing escape from the toils and stresses of urban life, and the train was the means by which visitors travelled to it for over fifty years. This is not to say that transportation by train was completely egalitarian, considering they were not allowed to run on Sundays until 1923, the day of the week which coincidentally was many workers’ only day off. It is difficult to determine the class of the group depicted in the photograph with any degree of certainty, but it is unlikely that they were recent immigrants or poor. Perhaps this ambiguity reveals as much about the medium of photography as it does the economic status of Foote’s subjects.

Those familiar with the layout of Grand Beach will immediately recognize the location of this photo as being the primary entrance to what has since evolved into the most capacious and popular beach in Manitoba. Early infrastructure is apparent in the photo, including a rather sketchy looking dock, a track that has since been removed, and the iconic canoe, laying idle, awaiting adventure. Foote also photographed Grand Beach a decade later. Those later images captured the growth of the resort both in terms of its infrastructure and its number of users. In the age of the digital camera it’s easy to forget that early 20th century photographs were rarely taken for free or by a stray family member. While Foote may be capturing leisure, make no mistake that while doing so he is himself at work.

Yes, the depiction of leisure captured by this Foote photograph reflects those who were able to experience what was then an exotic and novel escape. In 1914 Winnipeg there were no guaranteed two day weekends, monthly statutory holidays or accrued pain vacation time, and thus not all were capable of leaving the city in search of leisure. I am thankful that this has changed, to an extent, as I consider myself extremely lucky to have been able to experience my summers at Victoria Beach. That being said, I understand that this photo, while it capture a moment in the lifestyle of the privileged, should serve to remind us who is not enjoying an afternoon on the beach, and perhaps even provoke us to ponder why.

 - Chris Thomas

* * *  
Chris Thomas is entering his fourth year at the University of Manitoba, pursuing an honours degree in history. He is currently working as a research assistant for two professors, Esyllt Jones on her forthcoming book on Canadian medicare, and Paul Earl on his book chronicling a hundred years of the Canadian grain trade.

Further to Laura Lamont's Favourite Foote Photo

Earlier this week, Laura Lamont wrote about a Foote photo that features a banquet in St. Boniface sewer.

(This photo, incidentally, will be included in Imagining Winnipeg, with the caption "Banquet to celebrate completion of underground reservoir at St. Boniface Waterworks, 552 Plinguet Street, 1912. N3012.")
 
In her post, Laura says:

"There’s an odd custom of holding banquets in subterranean structures going back to 1827 with Marc Brunel’s candelabra-lit supper in the Thames Tunnel to prove how safe it was, and continuing on to a 1994 luncheon in the Channel Tunnel attended by the Queen."

There aren't any photographs of the 1827 banquet online, but I thought I'd share this painting of the event by George Jones, entitled The Banquet in the Thames Tunnel.

According to Wikipedia, Jones was a British painter and Keeper of the Royal Academy. He was most famous for his paintings of military subjects.

Favourite Foote Photo: Laura Lamont

In this 1912 photograph by L.B. Foote, about fifty men are assembled around a long table. They’ve finished dinner and have begun on a very English dessert course of fruit, cheese, and crackers; of the many bottles on the table, some are surely port.

The guests, some sporting doughty moustaches, are wearing their best suits. Where the jury-rigged gaslights don’t shine, the vaulted room disappears into shadow except on the left, where one solitary man looks to be neither guest nor waiter.

Did he put up the scaffolding for the dangling lamps, wrap the steadying cords around the pillars? Hands on hips, he looks like he wants this evening to be over with, to take down the wooden supports, to put away his ladder and go home to bed.

Why did Foote keep him in the frame? The photographer could have asked him to step aside, or to move to the back wall, obscured by the worthies.

It’s as if Foote is telescoping his vision seven years into the future to the Winnipeg General Strike, when the workers would move into the foreground to be recorded by Foote for their own sake.

However, this is no exclusive ballroom or gentlemen’s clubroom: it’s the new, 1-million gallon underground reservoir of the St. Boniface Waterworks on Plinguet Street.

There’s an odd custom of holding banquets in subterranean structures going back to 1827 with Marc Brunel’s candelabra-lit supper in the Thames Tunnel to prove how safe it was, and continuing on to a 1994 luncheon in the Channel Tunnel attended by the Queen.

It was a way of celebrating achievements sometimes forgotten once the guests were above ground again; indeed, though impressive at the time, the St. Boniface reservoir was overtaken in importance in 1919 by the Shoal Lake aqueduct.

While the aqueduct is still working, the reservoir has been filled in. I’m not sure what the man on the left would think of having stayed out late for that.

- Laura Lamont

* * *

Laura Lamont has published work in Descant and the Turkish Review, and can get lost for hours while wandering through digital archives.

Unknown men #6-15

Unknown man #13

One of the things I most appreciate about photography is the documentary sense of the everyday, the unexpected, and the unplanned it’s given us.

Posed photos and portraits give us a “frozen” image controlled by the artist (and often by the subject as well). But a photograph of a city street taken by a photographer who was literally ‘prowling’ looking for an interesting shot can give you an immediate sense of “ordinary” people in that place and time (think of the photos of John Paskievich, just to name one of many). My own images (perhaps largely fictional?) of cities like Paris or New York have been created by street photos of people going about their business largely unaware of the photographer.

L.B. Foote spent over 50 years taking pictures of Winnipeggers, but he took almost none of these kind of ‘random’ shots of street scenes. He was likely just too busy making a living, hustling from one commercial job to another. Most of his street shots are of a formal events like a parade, with a shot he had clearly thought through in advance, and was probably going to sell to newspapers or a wire service. While Foote is our great guide to the visual past of Winnipeg, he does so largely without spontaneous images of “everyday” life.

There is, however, a strange group of photos in the Manitoba Archives’ Foote Collection that comes close to this for me. They are a set of 14 nearly full-length portraits of unidentified men, taken outside probably taken around 1914. Each photo includes its own unique number on a chalkboard, often held by an arm coming from just off frame (probably the next person in line). Judging from the buildings in the background, this may be in the field between the old University of Manitoba Broadway campus and the Legislative Building, where Memorial Park now is.

We have no information about why Foote took these photographs or who these men are. The numbers suggest that he was taking these for a group portrait that he would later cut, edit, and re-assemble. Maybe this was a club? Several of the men seem to have medals or military ribbons in their lapels, so perhaps it was a soldier’s reunion.

These are certainly not spontaneous shots, although they are more or less on the street. In a strange way, though, they are a kind of ‘man in the street’ gallery, a grab bag of Winnipeg male citizenry, c. 1914. We have men of all ages, dressed in all manner of clothes, and with all sorts of expressions, from the grim to the frozen to the downright goofy (check out number 12 with his big grin and bowler hat). Although they are certainly dressed for some sort of occasion, this is definitely not the Board of Trade in tuxedos. It feels like these fourteen men have been yanked out of crowd, almost randomly, and told to stand still for a minute.

My favorite is number 13. Who in world is this fellow, standing at a defiant angle to the camera? With his impressive mustache, cocky look, and the jaunty tilt of his cap, if he’s not a man about town, he’s certainly someone who knows his way around a bustling city. While the other men stand stiffly, almost at attention, he seems like he’s just stopped for a minute (just enough to put his cigarette down), almost as if he’s still in motion. And to finish things off, instead of a medal in his lapel, he seems to be wearing a dandy’s boutonniere. This looks like someone who would be as much at place strolling down a metropolitan boulevard, a Parisian flaneur, as he seems to be posing for Foote’s camera.

- David Carr


* * *
David Carr is the director of the University of Manitoba Press.

Further to Caitlyn Carson's Favourite Foote Photo

Last week, education student Caitlyn Carson wrote about a Foote photo entitled Mr. and Mrs. Andre Nault, Diamond Anniversary Party, St. Vital, Manitoba, 19 October 1910.

For those of you who might be interested, Foote also shot a group photo at that same event.

This photo will be included in Imagining Winnipeg. It will be the fourth photo.

The caption (I can't get captions off my brain...) for the photo is currently:

 "The diamond wedding anniversary party for André Nault, a cousin of Louis Riel and a member of Riel's Provisional Government, and his wife Anastasie, St. Vital, 1910. N2397."

Favourite Foote Photos: Caitlyn Carson

Some suggest that Lewis Benjamin Foote was a commercial photographer and just that. Yes, a man has to make a living. But I largely disagree with this assertion. What the lens captured was Foote’s vision and perspective and this photograph is one example.

Modest and simple; not much else can be said about this particular Foote photograph. Yet, inexplicably, I was attracted to this image above all others. Perhaps it was the setting, rustic and outdoorsy. But as I thought about it more and more, my attention kept on being drawn to the faces of the individuals in the picture. I found myself wondering; “What is it about this man and woman that Foote captures in such an endearing manner?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Andre Nault, Diamond Anniversary Party, St. Vital, Manitoba, 19 October 1910” reads the caption. So our man and woman were husband and wife! Perhaps the positioning already suggested that, but evidence-to-support is always a good thing when it comes to history. This piece of information, provided by the caption, may suggest an answer for the endearing quality of this Foote photograph; a husband and wife, having spent many years together, celebrating the accumulation of ___ years of accomplishment. Makes sense, such accomplishment is generally respected and revered. But wait…how many years exactly is a diamond anniversary?

Thanks to Queen Victoria and her Diamond Jubilee, this question wasn’t easily answered. Pre-1897 a diamond anniversary would have been 75 years. However, when Queen Victoria reached 60 years of accession to the throne, she decided to term the monumental achievement her Diamond Jubilee. Ergo, some discretion would exist in the classification of a diamond anniversary circa that time period. Since Mr. and Mrs. Nault’s anniversary was only 13 years later, it is hard to discern exactly how many years they were celebrating. Neither 60 nor 75 years seems farfetched. To support this, a clipping titled “Wedding Anniversaries” from The Brandon Daily Sun dated December 10, 1909 lists “Seventy-fifth year – Diamond.” (There is no listing for a sixtieth year.)

Yes, we are on a bit of a side track. However, 60 and 75 years prior, although overlapping, can produce very different histories depending. In aims to end this chase, I typed the caption of this photograph into the Google search engine. A returned search reads, “NAULT, ANDRÉ, buffalo hunter, farmer, and captain of the Métis.”

Hmm. Next time I’ll just start with the names! The returned search, quoted above, is from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online. It continues by detailing Nault’s participation in the Métis community, although he himself was of French-Canadian descent. Key in Métis activism since his late teens, Nault participated as a leader in the Métis Resistance of 1869-1870, and actually commanded the firing squad that executed Thomas Scott. Of course, this was done under the guidance of his first cousin, Louis Riel. For one year, Nault was imprisoned on account of Scott’s murder, but was eventually acquitted.

Perhaps there were some visual clues to André’s significance in L. B. Foote’s photograph. Across the background of the photograph, we see horizontal lines dominate the page...except for behind Mr. Nault. There, we see vertical lines positioned across the background façade, against the grain, if you will. Furthermore, the angle from which Foote took the photograph seems to accentuate the tools to the left of the photograph. Lanterns, materials, an old shovel and metal machinery seat compose this part of the photograph. It is interesting that both Foote and/or his customers chose not to exclude this area from the photograph. To me it suggests an industrious character, proud of hard work, perseverance, and overcoming hardship. Is this symbolism possibly representative of André Nault’s accomplishments in the Métis community, farm life on River Lot 12 or his relationship with his wife?

With the help of Google Translate (everything was in French,) I discovered some information about André Nault’s wife, Anastasie. Daughter of an Acadian fur trader, Joseph Landry, she was one of twelve children; her mother was Geneviève Lalonde. It is interesting to note that Anastasie along with five of her siblings married into the same two families, the Nault and Bruneau families (both prominent Métis and French-Canadian families).

Back to a question posed earlier. How many years were Mr. and Mrs. Nault celebrating? Sixty years, as it turns out. André Nault and Anastasie Landry were married January 11, 1850. (Though the celebration in the photograph took place nine months after their actual 60th anniversary....)

Knowing how long they’d been married doesn’t contribute much to our understanding of these two people now. But these pieces of information are a starting point for analysis. We now know that these two people were part of the crucial activism that led to the founding of the province of Manitoba.

What was life like during that time for them? In this photograph, André Nault’s facial expression is steadfast, while Anastasie Nault’s is pensive. Which might suggest something of their personalities and relationship, shaped by sixty years of marriage, fourteen children and one rebellion.

I believe that Foote recognized the character of his customers. His interpretation and portrayal of their personalities and relationship not only provides us with information about the subjects, but it exposes Foote himself. A photographer captures intangibles but his perception of these qualities is largely subjective. Accentuating certain aspects of a frame is not only artistic, it’s his job.

Once his lens met his eye, Foote opened a gateway to Winnipeg’s local history…as he saw it.

- Caitlyn Carson


* * *
Caitlyn Carson is pursuing a Bachelor of Education at the University of Manitoba, with a major in history. She looks forward to sharing Winnipeg's heritage (including Foote's photography!) with her students.

Favourite Foote Photos: Shawna Dempsey

I think I remember the night the Leland Hotel burned down.

Or at least the morning after.

But all of the fires, all of the buildings lost, run together in my mind.

In Winnipeg things vanish so quickly.

A building is demolished and then it is hard to remember exactly what it looked like.

Its edges, in memory, are blurry.

Still, we persist in naming locations by their ghost-names. "Where shall we meet?" Perhaps at William and King, which will always be "Where the Leland was" or Higgins and Main, "Where the Savoy was" or across from the CPR, "Where the Royal Alex was."

It is nice to be reminded these places actually existed through photos such as this one, rather than being mere figments of a collective dream.

- Shawna Dempsey


* * *
Shawna Dempsey is a performance artist, curator, and Co-Director of Mentoring Artists for Women's Art.

Favourite Foote Photos: Adele Perry

I find Foote’s photographs both very familiar and very strange. They are familiar in large part because of how frequently they have been used in the histories of Canada that I teach and study. The one of the young women pumping gas during the Winnipeg General Strike, trying not to laugh. The one of the poor people sitting on a bed in front of drying laundry in their north-end home. These are just some of the Foote images that historians have chosen to illustrate their books and lectures. For good reason: Foote’s images are vivid and compelling.

What is unfamiliar to me about Foote’s photographs is the city that he represents. I have lived in Winnipeg for over a decade, and in many ways, the Winnipeg I live in and the one photographed by Foote are often so different as to be regularly unrecognizable. Foote’s Winnipeg is startlingly white. Its feminists appear in black-face. Indigenous people appear rarely and in highly ritualized and stereotypical sorts of ways. There are lots of British flags and a fair number of kilts. The city in Foote’s photographs is very formal. Even when people are overturning streetcars in protest they are well-turned out, the men in ties, the women in handsome interwar suits, and everyone in hats. Sometimes I recognize the buildings or the street-corners in Foote’s photos, but my moments of unfamiliarity – where is that? – are more frequent. Winnipeg has been torn down, fallen apart, weathered by the ice and the grit and the floods, and been both rebuilt and not in ways that mean that the city in the 1920s cannot always be easily connected with the city of the present.

But amongst all this unfamiliarity there is this: the metal fare-box on the streetcar photographed by Foote in 1929. The streetcar itself is gleaming and prosperous. It signals a time and a place where public transit was valued and resourced. Winnipeg’s current public transit system looks very different and means something very different. Decades of decisions have resourced the private car and the kinds of roads and buildings that go with them. Everything in Winnipeg Begins in a Car, quipped one writer, and he was not far off. Efforts to imagine a Winnipeg again organized around public transit, bicycles and walking are happening but this is not an easy task.

But if Foote’s 1929 streetcar is unfamiliar, its fare-box is not. Winnipeg buses still use those exact fare boxes, their metal now softly worn. These fare-boxes are slated to be replaced in 2013, but for at least another year, they can stand as a reminder of the connection between Foote’s Winnipeg and mine. Winnipeg is full of things like this, odd curious objects and institutions that have survived when so much has changed. Much of what is depicted in Foote’s photographs I would be happy to consign to the past: its homogeneity, its embrace of imperial symbols and politics, its easy racism. But some of Foote’s city I would like to reinvent. I have to admit that I would be thrilled if those handsome women’s suits came back into fashion. I would keep the radicalism and protest that Foote so importantly documented. I would be happy to see a return of those streetcars, or at least the commitment to a life not dependent on the private car that they represent. Foote’s photographs prompt us to think about the connections between the past and the present, and where both might figure in the future we want to see.

 - Adele Perry


* * *
Adele Perry teaches at the University of Manitoba, where she is Canada Research Chair in Western Canadian Social History (Tier II). She contributed an essay to UMP's Finding a Way to the Heart: Feminist Writings on Aboriginal and Women's History in Canada, released this spring, and will co-edit Place and Replace: Essays on Western Canada, due out in February 2013.

Gone Swimming!

On the end of March, Dale Barbour wrote a post about one of Foote’s many photos of the beaches and resorts north of Winnipeg on Lake Manitoba. Dale talked about a shot of Winnipeg Beach from 1914.

It was a crowded scene, with people in old-fashioned bathing suits filling the beach and spilling out into the water. Despite what must have been a very hot day, looking out at us from a corner of the photo is an older man dressed in a dark, three-piece suit. Dale speculated that this might be L.B. Foote himself, sneaking into the frame.

That photo is from 1912 when Foote was under forty – certainly not a sedate, elderly gent who stands back from all the action.

To prove my theory, I thought I’d share a photo of what Foote actually looked like in a bathing suit. Taken circa 1915, a few years after Dale's beach photo, it features Foote at one of Winnipeg’s newer public baths, swimming and splashing around with his wife and two sons and some other family or friends. He is clearly a vigorous and lively fellow – not to mention someone who seems to enjoy the water.

Foote was a tall, lanky fellow with a crooked grin. In the bulky suits that men of all classes seemed to wear in those days, he could have been mistaken for someone who spent his life behind a desk. But he must have actually been an incredibly active and physical man. You can see it a bit in this swimming photo, but his energy and daring is implied throughout many of his photos well until the end of the1920s. Over and over again, he is finding some high perch to take his shots from. I imagine that often he would just clamor up ladder (probably rickety) that might be handy or balance himself on an angle off the nearest available roof. One of my favorites is the photo on the cover of Imagining Winnipeg, taken from the top of the very slanted roof of the Fort Gary Hotel. Foote is up there somehow with the workers on the hotel’s new copper roof, 14 stories off the ground, with his bulky camera. And then a few years later he somehow follows the surging crowds of the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike from spot to spot, again finding a high vantage whenever he can to get a better look.

Despite the thousands of photos he left, we really know so little about Foote or who he was. But the physical energy and the youthful daring that went into so many of his photos – plus that mischievous but shy smile – give us a hint.

- David Carr


* * *
David Carr is the director of the University of Manitoba Press.