HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHY

Cultural Diversity and Museums Publications

Historical Photography at Gore Bay Museum

David Goa, Program Coordinator

 
We learn much from visiting colleagues and seeing how they shape their museum, and - albeit monetarily - how the museum shapes local society. In fine museum work, the hand of hospitality draws the past into the present and deepens the self-understanding of the local community. The project undertaken by the Gore Bay Museum on Manitoulin Island (Ont.) has been provocative both for the quality of its work and for the way the museum serves as a centre of hospitality.
The Wismer Photographic collection, a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century collection of glass plates, anchors the work of Nicole Rouel Weppler and Ron Silvers at the museum. Through the collection, Nicole and Ron have been exploring a number of issues I would like to raise for the consideration of colleagues working with photographic materials.

The atmosphere of the photograph

Ron Silvers has moved beyond simply paying attention to the photograph for the sake of its subject. He has worked to recover the techniques and materials used by the historic photographer and to print the glass plates as they were originally printed. The atmosphere is central to both the subject an to the knowledge the photograph bears witness to as a cultural document. A respect for the original technique and materials is essential to our understanding of the photographer's art and the sensibilities of the day. We need to be careful, as with so many things in our time, not to reduce the historic photograph to simple information when its capacity is so much greater.

Presence as the photographer's art

For those of us in museums who use photography as a means of documentation, there is another lesson to be learned from the study of the Wismer collection. There is a kind of relaxed confidence in the subjects of these photographs that shows the photographer's relationship to them. This, Silvers suggests, is the result of the photographer's presence and regard for the subject - a kind of chaste intimacy free of voyeurism.
Silvers, a photographer and scholar, has brought to the study if the Wismer collection the insight he gained from three summers he spent travelling through the countryside of the Tibetan Plateau among the people of Ladakh. His visual essay A Pause on the Path is a wonderful work, where word and image speak together to help us understand gaze, atmosphere and the very particular relationship of the photographer to other beings.
This is the project of the Gore Bay Museum, which is located in a former jail next to the Island's courthouse. As for Nicole Weppler's work at the museum, her remarkable sense of hospitality has transformed the jail - with its memories of pain and sorrow - into a place of refuge, healing and beauty. A regard for quality, for the art of presence and for the challenges facing all of us living in a world of saturated images has animated the remarkable Gore Bay Museum in its work of opening up pathways to self-understanding and the enjoyment of the local world.

Related Articles:

Photography, Sympatheia, and Canada's Visual Heritage — Ronald Silvers
A Museum Vision — Nicole Rouel Weppler and Ronald Silvers

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