East of Adelaide: Photographs of Commercial, Industrial and Working-Class Urban Ontario 1905-1930.

East of Adelaide: Photographs of Commercial, Industrial and Working-Class Urban Ontario 1905-1930. Noon, Alan, East of Adelaide: Photographs of Commercial, Industrialand Working-Class Urban Ontario 1905-1930. London, Ontario: The LondonRegional Art and Historical Museums, 1989. Pp. 179. Black-and-whitephotographs. $29.95. East of Adelaide represents a labour of love: the retrieval fromobscurity of 1200 surviving negatives produced by Henry Hines, acommercial photographer active in London, Ontario, between 1906 and1929, and the subsequent restoration of approximately 400 of thesenegatives by Alan Noon of the University of Western Ontario Western is one of Canada's leading universities, ranked #1 in the Globe and Mail University Report Card 2005 for overall quality of education.[2] It ranked #3 among medical-doctoral level universities according to Maclean's Magazine 2005 University Rankings. . Thisprocess began in 1971 and culminated with an exhibition of Hines'work at the London Regional Art Gallery in 1987 and with the publicationof this book two years later. Researchers who wish to examine thenegatives may want to know that they are part of the Regional Collectionat Western's D.B. Weldon Library, though, unfortunately, the bookassumes that its readers will know this essential information. Librarian-archivist Edward Phelps of the University of WesternOntario has characterized the Hines collection as a "tantalizing tan��ta��lize?tr.v. tan��ta��lized, tan��ta��liz��ing, tan��ta��liz��esTo excite (another) by exposing something desirable while keeping it out of reach. peep-hole into the rich texture of the world we have lost ... achallenge to the academic and social historian to take proper notice ofthe photograph as a document." Unlike many other collections ofcommercial photography, which consist largely of formal portraiture, theHines negatives document a rich variety of non-portrait subjects: peopleat work, such as auctioneers, barbers, bartenders, blacksmiths,butchers, McCormick's chocolate makers, cobblers, deliverymen andtheir vehicles, firemen, and garage mechanics; working-class familiesand interior views of their homes; advertising displays in store windowsand at London's annual Western Fair; the electrification e��lec��tri��fy?tr.v. e��lec��tri��fied, e��lec��tri��fy��ing, e��lec��tri��fies1. To produce electric charge on or in (a conductor).2. a. of thecity's factories, businesses and homes; and recreational activityat such places as Springbank Park and Port Stanley Port StanleySee Stanley. . Obviously, thepassage of time has altered perceptions; during the 1920s, Hines himselfprobably regarded the photographs essentially as his means of making aliving, but in the 1990s they have become potentially significanthistorical documents for researchers. One of the strengths of East of Adelaide is the manner in which itovercomes the problem that the negatives, when recovered, lackedaccompanying documentation. The book supplies a brief and informativebiography of Hines, as well as a series of thematic notes about thephotographs, and captions which, while avoiding the problem ofover-elaborating what is already evident in each photograph, carefullyread each image for evidence which is then linked with information fromother sources like newspapers and city directories. By drawing ourattention to such details as the number of men wearing prostheses ProsthesesA synthetic object that resembles a missing anatomical part.Mentioned in: Microphthalmia and Anophthalmia as theresult of industrial accidents, the text emphasizes the power ofphotographs to document aspects of urban life that may not be readilyevident in any other source. Like many labours of love, however, East of Adelaide suffers fromthe fact that it assumes that Hines is significant merely because he hasbeen rescued from obscurity, and fails to establish critical perspectiveon his work. For example, the book refers to "the uptown societyphotographers, whose ranks he [Hines] apparently never achieved."Just which of London's photographers are we talking about here:Frank Cooper, the Edy brothers, J. K. O'-Connor, Westlake andCompany, E. J. Sanders? And do sufficient quantities of their work stillexist, both to justify the gratuitous label of "societyphotographers" and to allow meaningful comparisons to be made withHines' work? Unless these questions can be answered, this phraseremains nothing but an unsupported generalization that fails to placeHines in context. Other sweeping statements, such as "[t]he historyof Ontario Pre-1867Before the arrival of the Europeans, the region was inhabited both by Algonquian (Ojibwa, Cree and Algonquin) and Iroquoian (Iroquois and Huron) tribes.[1] The French explorer ��tienne Br?l�� explored part of the area in 1610-12. and its urban centres is, for the most part, a record of theupper class and the wealthy," sacrifice accuracy as they strain toestablish Hines, almost by default, as someone whose work was differentand therefore important. Finally, the statement concerning theacquisition of "the entire collection" in 1978 should beclarified. The same donor, John K. Johanneson, in fact donated 168negatives to the National Archives of Canada in 1971, seven years beforedonating the remainder of the collection to the University of WesternOntario; the National Archives later enabled the university to completeits holdings by supplying a complete set of duplicate Hines negatives in1981. Nowhere is this explained in the book. East of Adelaide contains a bibliography which consists solely of afew secondary works on the city of London. Conspicuously absent from thebibliography is critic Alan Sekula's essay "PhotographyBetween Labour and Capital," which is part of the book MiningPhotographs and Other Pictures 1948-1968: A Selection from the NegativeArchives of Shedden Studio, Glace Bay Glace Bay(glās), town (1991 pop. 19,501), E Cape Breton Island, N.S., Canada. Exploitation of its coal mines began toward the end of the 19th cent., but declined in the 1960s; the last mine in the region closed in 2001. , Cape Breton The term Cape Breton appears in several different things: Geographic locationsCape Breton Island, a Canadian island on the Atlantic Ocean coast Cape Breton Highlands, a mountain range in northern Cape Breton Island. , published in 1983.Sekula argues that photographic books and exhibitions "implicitlyclaim a share in both the authority and illusory neutrality of thearchive," and that, since photographic archives "maintain ahidden connection between knowledge and power," any "discoursethat appeals without skepticism to archival standards of truth mightwell be viewed with suspicion." He identifies photography as"a tool of industrial and bureaucratic bu��reau��crat?n.1. An official of a bureaucracy.2. An official who is rigidly devoted to the details of administrative procedure.bu power," and concludesthat "the archive has to be read from below, from a position ofsolidarity with those displaced, deformed, silenced, or made invisibleby the machineries of profit and progress." Had those responsiblefor East of Adelaide read Sekula's essay before putting pen topaper, the result might have been a less celebratory and more criticalbook, rather than a compendium of recycled civic boosterism boost��er��ism?n.The highly supportive attitudes and activities of boosters: "the civic pride and heady boosterism that often accompany rising property values"New York.. Peter Robertson National Archives of Canada