Precarious Foote-ings

"It was really a pleasure to attend the Imagining Winnipeg launch a few weeks ago at McNally's!

One of my surprise takeaways from the book launch was a new appreciation for the variety of perspectives from which Foote's body of work can be viewed, analysed and interpreted – from such overarching quandaries as what Esyllt Jones dubs the "mystery of his intent," to personal connections to memories and histories, through to John Paskievich's unveiling of Foote's evolution to the "fortuitous and dynamic arrangement of triangles" (in the photo of the young Queen Elizabeth).

As a collector of historic images, let me add to this mix – with yet another line of inquiry. Beyond the images themselves, I am often intrigued by attempting to imagine where, in taking a particular photo, the photographer might have positioned themselves. I don't think it readily occurs to many of us, but early photographers were often quite the aerialists. From the photos in Imagining Winnipeg, here are a few examples:

Page 1 – Looking out over a skating rink on the Red River.
Where was Foote when he took this picture? How was he able to take this photo from such a high elevation? My guess is he was atop the large wooden toboggan slide that was constructed every year next to this ice rink. In the image, can you see those smoke stacks in the distance? I have another photo postcard image, by an earlier photographer, that I believe was actually taken from atop one of those chimneys.

Page 2 – Overview of the construction of the new Legislative Buildings.
This picture was most likely taken from the top of the bell tower of the old Broadway Methodist Church (since burned and dismantled) on the South East corner of Broadway & Kennedy.

Page 58 – Peace Day celebration at Portage & Main. This one was likely taken from a second storey window of the building that stood on the SW corner of Portage & Main (current site of the Trizec Building).

Page 70 – Veterans’ march at City Hall.
This one is particularly intriguing. The shot is taken looking up the portion of Market Street that used to exist on the West side of Main Street – land now occupied by the current City Hall. Foote took this shot from the East side of Main. The side of the building that shows on the right of the photo was the south wall of a building that once stood at the North East corner of Main & Market. It was four stories high and, from images I’ve seen of it, there were no balconies or fire escapes evident on that building's south side. My best guess is that Foote took this west-looking shot from a high (4th storey?) south-facing window.

Well, by now you get the picture (no pun intended). I'm just pointing out that L.B. Foote, like other photographers of his day, didn't always keep both feet firmly planted on the ground."

- Rob McInnes, Postcard Accumulator and Purveyor

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Another beautiful little postcard from Rob McInnes! 

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


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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.

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).

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

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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 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


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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: 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


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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.

Favourite Foote Photos: Dale Barbour

I was drawn to this picture because the crowd is so delightfully relaxed. So often in beach pictures from the turn of the century, it seems as if the people have stepped out for an evening at the opera. They wear dresses or suits and ties. The men always have a hat. They clearly saw a journey to the lakeside as a special event; it was far more often a place to promenade than it was a place to swim. Proper decorum reigned supreme.

But promenading seems like the last thing on the minds of this group; though the figures walking the boardwalk behind them suggest that there was still much promenading to be had. Some people are dressed in suits, but others are decked out in bathing suits and showing a healthy amount of skin. Most of them have doffed their hats, some have even thrown on a casual robe and there’s a young man with a cigarettes hanging out of his mouth.

To me, this picture captures a moment of transition at Winnipeg Beach when the upper-middle class character of the beach, a character that Foote has captured with other pictures of cabins and regattas, was giving way to a more mixed class experience and when the boundaries between how and when men and women could get together were starting to shift. Snapped in 1912, this picture captures the dawn of the free wheeling Winnipeg Beach that people would know in the 1920s and into the early 1950s.

But this seems to me to be still a moment of transition. Men and women are scattered together on the beach in comfortable camaraderie. And yet, very few of them are holding hands. They are together and yet apart. Indeed, our most demonstrative couple is a pair of women at the front of the picture—one smiles for the camera as the other drapes an arm on her shoulder. But there does appear to be a woman in a white dress with her hand wrapped around a man in a hat just behind them. (Or is the woman in the white dress really a man in white robe? Further playing with our view of the picture.)

Finally, where is Foote in all of this? I desperately want to believe that the man on the left side of the picture is really Foote; that he was so enthralled with the scene in front of him that he couldn’t resist including himself within it. I’m wrong, of course; the man in the photo is too old to be Foote, who was not yet 40 in 1912. Still, I’ll choose to believe that after he snapped the picture, Foote waded into the crowd; unable to resist enjoying his own day at the beach.

- Dale Barbour


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Dale Barbour grew up on a farm in Balmoral, Manitoba and made a few trips of his own to Winnipeg Beach as a youth. A former journalist, he is currently completing a PhD in history at the University of Toronto. His first book, Winnipeg Beach: Leisure and Courtship in a Resort Town, 1900-1967 (UMP, 2011), was recently nominated for the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award and the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award at the Manitoba Book Awards. It was also nominated in the Local History category in the MHS' Margaret McWilliams Awards.

Favourite Foote Photos: Steven Stothers

I've lived in Winnipeg all my life, and like all of us, I've come across a few of Foote's photos in random places around the city such as the Forks, Union Station, and the Hotel Fort Garry.

I became involved in 2008 in the restoration of Streetcar 356, and also in the history of Winnipeg's streetcars. I knew about Foote's famous 1919 streetcar strike photo and started wondering how many other pictures might be available at the Manitoba Archives and the history of the man himself.

I made a trip to the archives in early 2010 for streetcar research and I made sure to spend some time going through the Foote collection. However, once I started going through his photos, I realized I needed a couple of days to go through them all. The ones on display in public places were clearly just a very small sample of the quality and quantity of his work. I was amazed and intrigued.

This photograph leaped out at me, with the gleaming streetlights shining on the streetcar railtracks and no cars or people around. This was when Memorial Boulevard was called "the mall," and the Winnipeg Art Gallery was in the distant future. Streetcar wires are visible above the tracks, the Bay with its window awnings retracted on the left, there's a small island in the middle, and a house is on the far right.

I'm sure the streetcar rails are still under the pavement waiting to be uncovered again.

Foote must have planned this and waited for the perfect night to get this photo, and I would love to know what time this was actually taken, maybe 2 or 3am?

- Steven Stothers


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Steven Stothers is a sales director for a local software company. He is a life-long Winnipegger with a passion for the history of the city. Steven is co-chair of the restoration of Streetcar 356 project with Heritage Winnipeg, a photographer, and self-published a book in 2005, Somewhere in France, the Letters of John Cannon Stothers.

Favourite Foote Photos: Janis Thiessen

How to choose only one favourite from the Foote collection? For those of us who love both history and this city, doing so is a challenge indeed.

This well-known photo of workers copper sheathing the roof of the Hotel Fort Garry circa 1915 has been one of my favourites for a long time. (I use it on my website’s homepage and as my Facebook profile photo.)

The skilled labour that is so often taken for granted is here visible, captured in a moment that might have similarly occurred four years earlier in the construction of the Union Station depicted in the photo’s background, and five years later at the Legislature a few blocks away.

Like the photos of the Winnipeg General Strike that Foote would later take, this picture of workers pausing to pose in the midst of their labour provokes questions about the nature of labour relations. Would such workers ever have had the opportunity to have a drink in the hotel’s beautifully ornate Palm Room to celebrate the end of a successful job? Did those who brokered business deals in the Palm Room ever contemplate the hands and minds that built their surroundings?

Winnipeg stretches away to the east in the photo’s background, and the working men atop the hotel’s roof look as though they are, at least temporarily, the ‘kings of the castle.’ Whatever challenges their working conditions, their relations with their employers, and their economic circumstances may have presented, Foote’s camera here elevates these workers to positions of honour. Foote has captured a moment in time that reminds us that our city was built – in more than just a literal sense – by workers like these.

- Janis Thiessen


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Janis Thiessen is an assistant professor of history at the University of Winnipeg. Her first book, Manufacturing Mennonites: Work and Religion in Post-War Manitoba, will be available from University of Toronto Press in June of this year.

Favourite Foote Photos: Jim Blanchard

This is one of my favourite Foote photos. It catches a group of newspaper employees in what I suppose is the newsroom of The Telegram newspaper in their building which still sits at the corner of Albert and McDermot.

The men are posing a little for Foote, maybe joking with him as someone from the rival daily. The big fellow on the left side of the table seems to be saying something that some of them think is funny.

Some of the others are simply working. Their tools are paper pads and pencils, paste bottles and scissors, the latter on a chain so that everyone can share the same pair. There is phone in the left foreground but other than that there are no signs of modern equipment.

Out of this room came, day after day, a fine newspaper with pages full of well-written, detailed reporting on what was going on in the city and out in the world. The quality of the writing was very high and if you browse through The Telegram - paper copies of The Telegram are still available at the Millennium Library - you'll find very few errors in spelling or grammar.

Many of the men in the picture may have been junior employees, like copy boys, who crowded in to get into the picture. But there are definitely a few ink-stained wretches here, men who look like they have been at it for quite a few years.

It's a lively, happy sort of picture that captures something of who these men really were and that's why I like it.

- Jim Blanchard


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Jim Blanchard is the Head of Reference Services at Elizabeth Dafoe Library at the University of Manitoba. He is the author of two award-winning UMP titles, Winnipeg 19120 (2005) and Winnipeg's Great War: A City Comes of Age (2010). (Both titles included Foote photos.)

Favourite Foote Photos: Gordon Goldsborough

On the day after Dominion Day, 1922, seven men gathered in the kitchen at 109 Henry Avenue, a couple of blocks from Winnipeg’s CPR Station.

Among them were 39 year-old Wasyl Spachynski and 49 year-old George Antoniuk.

Tensions were strained between the two men, apparently because Antoniuk railed at Spachynski’s claim to be the “boss of Henry Avenue."

Following a short, heated quarrel, Antoniuk took out a pocket knife and stabbed Spachynski in the neck, severing his jugular vein.

Police called to the scene found Antoniuk standing outside, spattered in blood, and Spachynski on the floor inside.

Rushed to the Winnipeg General Hospital, Spachynski died within five minutes.

It is not well known that, in addition to his work taking portraits and documenting special events, Lewis Foote also worked as a police photographer.

Among the collections at the Archives of Manitoba are grisly photos of corpses and crime scenes, most of which have been taken out of active circulation to dissuade “looky loos."

I like this photo — taken by Foote soon after the crime — because, unlike a lot of his photos, it is unposed and raw, showing us what the kitchen of a low-income household in 1922 Winnipeg looked like.

Aside from the blood stains, rags, and abandoned cigarette pack on the floor, it seems lovingly well-tended, with plates and containers neatly arranged on the cupboard, a towel drying on a line, pots sitting on the small wood stove, and frilly curtains in the window.

Justice for the murdered Spachynski was swift. On 17 November 1922, a jury found Antoniuk guilty of manslaughter and he was sentenced to five years in prison.

Today, the scene of the crime is long gone, the building having fallen during construction of the Disraeli Freeway.

- Gordon Goldsborough

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Gordon Goldsborough is Webmaster, Secretary, and a Past-President of the Manitoba Historical Society, and an editor of Manitoba History journal. He is presently working on an interactive map of historic sites around Manitoba, and is co-authoring a forthcoming book on the environmental history of Delta Marsh. He is also an aquatic ecologist in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Manitoba.