Much of what we know about the look of Victorian Canada we owe to William Notman, the enterprising Scot who spent decades photographing the boom town that was Montreal. His studio established an empire of image-making that extended into Western Canada and the Eastern United States. Notman photos from along Canadian Pacific's western rail lines were used to promote tourism and settlement, and helped create an "imaginative geography" for those who never got west of Toronto.
According to a new exhibition at Montreal's McCord Museum, Notman was also an innovator who anticipated social and technological changes. The show tries to establish a Victorian prehistory for Montreal's robust industry of digital imagery and positions Notman as a precursor of those who have made Softimage and Moment Factory leaders in visual make-believe.
Make-believe was important to Notman, though he got his first big break documenting the real-life construction of the Victoria Bridge in 1858.
Photography, he believed, captured detail the eye might miss, but needed help portraying what only the imagination could see.
Miss Evans and Friends, 1887.
William Notman & Son
His studio on Bleury Street turned out many straight-forward portraits of the anglophone elite, using small glass negatives whose fine detail holds even when blown up to life-size. But the Notman studio was also a theatre space in which Montrealers could play dress-up, or appear to tame the elements while remaining indoors.
Several photos in the McCord show men in drag, comically in some cases, more seriously in the cross-dressing tour de force of A Gent for Mrs. Austin (1889). Portrait shots for a costume ball include a Molson scion and his sister posing as medieval Norse adventurers, and a Mr. Reynolds dressed as an imaginary Indian.
Studio trickery was needed for a photo of two warmly dressed men racing down a slope on a sled that was actually propped on an armchair. The chair was brushed out on the glass negative, the dark gouache registering as a snowy hillside in the final print.
This was virtual reality Victorian style, says curator Hélène Samson. So were the stereographic images Notman made by the hundreds, which achieved a 3D effect by pairing slightly different views in a special viewing device. Notman also made composite photos from many separate studio portraits, arranged into a collage of people gathering for a dance or a snowshoe trek that never happened. He kept painters on his staff for this kind of make-believe, which, as Samson points out, anticipated Adobe Photoshop by a century.
Notman fled Glasgow in 1856 at age 30 to escape fraud charges related to a family textile business. But once in Montreal he carefully built good connections and reputation. He networked by getting in on the cultural projects of the elite, including the Art Association of Montreal (now the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts), which held its first meeting in his studio.
Photography in the mid-19th century was seen by many as a strictly documentary medium. Notman indulged that view for the lucrative Victoria Bridge project, the fruits of which he bound into a lavish book and sent to Queen Victoria. But he also argued that photography was an art, in part because it raised the perceived value of his services. He was still in competition with portrait painters, one of whom – Vincent van Gogh – fumed in 1885 against photography's inability to show the kind of truth that comes "straight from the painter's soul."
Notman often used studio trickery to compose fake photos or composites, putting him out of tune with photographic mainstream of his time.
Notman took portraits almost like a nature photographer, looking for ways to catch his subjects revealing something essential about themselves. In that sense he was a forerunner of master portraitists such as Yousuf Karsh. Finding that extra something in the studio was also a way to distinguish his product from what anyone could get with the Kodak snapshot cameras that hit the market in 1888.
But Notman's fondness for retouching and composites put him out of tune with the serious photographic mainstream of his time. The Photographic Society of London banned retouched images from its annual exhibitions after 1863. The growing consensus was that photography as an art would have to stand or fall on its abilities to record the real. It's only now, when Photoshop and Instagram filters reign supreme, that Notman looks like a forerunner of the golden age of photo manipulation.
The McCord exhibition accepts Notman's artistic claims at face value. But you have only to look at his composites to see how fragile the claim is. The faces look as lively as death masks, embalmed into a fake scene that emulates the feeblest academic painting. Notman's clients seem to have loved these composites, but they're worthless as art.
Being an artist also means giving yourself the freedom to experiment, and to dream through your medium. There's no evidence Notman ever did that, except to give shape to the dreams of others. He was a skilled craftsman who knew opportunity when he saw it. Many of his innovative projects, including the first Canadian use of a half-tone print in a periodical, were actually astute exploitations of techniques invented by others.
He was also rigorous about keeping image records, and preserving his delicate negatives. Perhaps without meaning to, he anticipated the curiosity of later generations about how places and people looked when Canada was new. That's the real thrill of the McCord show, which is drawn from the museum's cache of some 450,000 Notman images. It's a deluxe tour of a vanished society, whose tastes, beliefs and fantasies still underlie our own.
Notman: A Visionary Photographer, continues at the McCord Museum in Montreal through March 26.