Notman: A Visionary Photographer

Throughout his life in Canada, William Notman (1826-1891) showed remarkable confidence in the future, starting with the decision to set up as a professional photographer immediately after his arrival in Montreal in 1856. It was a bold move, since photography was then an evolving technology with an as yet embryonic market. Nevertheless, Notman divined the potential of the new medium and the promise it held in the realms of art, communications and business. In many respects, his firm anticipated the ideas and practices of twentieth-century photography.

By the time the business was moving into its second decade, Notman had developed an artistic conception of photography, reflected in his hiring of artists as collaborators but also in his habit of exhibiting paintings alongside photographs on the studio’s walls.

He quickly realized that as a form of self-representation the photographic portrait would become a powerful tool in the construction of individual and collective identities. The dissemination of photography was another of Notman’s early goals, realized through his publications and the development of photomechanical reproduction techniques.

Adept at networking, he built partnerships that would favour both the geographic expansion of his business and the creation of a visual culture, particularly in the new field of tourism. The image we have of nineteenth-century Canada’s land and people is to a large degree the one that Notman constructed, in collaboration with the over fifty photographers who worked for him.

By taking a modern approach to the management of his Montreal studio, which involved rationalized work methods and the systematic recording and archiving of its production, Notman created a brand that would remain a symbol of excellence well beyond his own lifetime.

In the prescience of his achievements, Notman was truly visionary. But he also possessed certain fundamental qualities seen often in individuals who leave a mark on their era and their field: a highly imaginative intelligence, and a fascination with the world—accompanied, in his case, by remarkable social skills.

For such a person, Montreal was fertile ground. In 1856 the city was undergoing major economic and demographic expansion: it was a metropolis that combined all the conditions necessary for financial and commercial development, on the brink of an unprecedented industrial boom.

The Grand Trunk Railway company, which had been providing transport links between the towns of Canada East since 1850, had embarked on construction of the Victoria Bridge (1854-1859). This structure would become a major factor in international commerce, since it created an efficient year-round connection between Montreal and the Atlantic port of Portland, in Maine. Montreal also benefited from the rapid communication networks installed by the Montreal Telegraph Company, founded in 1847, which connected it to such cities as Detroit, Portland and Ottawa.

By the end of the 1840s, the industrial zone concentrated around the Lachine Canal had become the most important manufacturing hub in the whole of British North America, and Montreal would remain a centre of rapid economic growth until the end of the nineteenth century. In addition, the vast territory of the Canadian West was ripe for the exploration and settling that would result from a project still in its infancy—the Confederation of Canada, which would come to fruition in 1867.

In this thriving colony, which welcomed incomers from the British Isles, William Notman quickly established social contacts among Montreal’s most influential circles. His first introductions to the city’s bourgeois and business milieus came through his landlord, Alexander Ramsay (1810?-1867), and his employers, Ogilvy, Lewis & Co.

The former was a prosperous construction materials merchant who had rented accommodation to Notman and his wife, Alice Merry Woodwark (1832-1906), when she joined her husband in Montreal in November 1856. William had been hired by the dry-goods and fabric firm of Ogilvy, Lewis & Co., possibly as a clerk, immediately after his arrival the previous August. His employers provided him with a loan that enabled him to open a photographic studio that winter, while guaranteeing that his job would remain open should the venture fail.

Notman also established connections in church circles. It was in collaboration with the Anglican bishop Francis Fulford (1803-1868), moreover, that in 1860 Notman helped found the Art Association of Montreal, forerunner of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

His network of contacts extended from the start into the United States, for the material needed to open the studio was purchased from T. E. Anthony, New York’s leading camera and photographic equipment supplier.

There is little doubt that this sphere of influence, which gave him access to a select clientele, helped Notman make a name for himself among Montreal photographers. In 1859-1860 there were at least seventeen commercial photographers with studios in the neighbourhood of Place d’Armes, in the heart of Montreal. By 1875-1876, when Notman’s business was booming,6 the number of photographers working in the city had more than doubled: there were at least forty, six of whom had learned their trade with Notman’s firm. At the time of William Notman’s death in 1891, there were at least ninety-six photography studios in Montreal.

Nowadays, Notman is considerably more famous than any of his Canadian contemporaries. This enduring reputation can be explained in part by the system that was used to classify and index the production of the Montreal studio: all the photographs are numbered, and their dates and subjects can be established. Though Notman’s methodical approach was essentially pragmatic, motivated by the desire to make a profit—he was, after all, a businessman—it ensures today the immeasurable historical value of his oeuvre.

Following the acquisition of Notman’s photographic archives by McGill University in 1956, researchers gradually began discovering and revealing the full richness of this documentary resource.

A good deal of our knowledge about the life and work of William Notman comes from research conducted by Stanley Triggs, who served from 1965 to 1993 as the first official curator of the Notman collection at the McCord Museum. His books and other publications—particularly Portrait of a Period: A Collection of Notman Photographs, 1856-19159 and William Notman: The Stamp of a Studio—remain essential references for anyone interested in the photographer. Other publications by Triggs focus on particular aspects of Notman’s work. The World of William Notman, for example, co-authored with Roger Hall and Gordon Dodds, examines the firm’s activities outside Montreal, particularly in the United States. Stanley Triggs’s last publication, The Composite Photographs of William Notman, deals exclusively with a creative technique that contributed towards Notman’s international renown.

The Museum is custodian of the legacy left by the photographer and his studio. The Notman Photographic Archives consists of approximately 200,000 glass negatives, 400,000 prints mounted in record books and ledgers produced by the Montreal studio.

William Notman, in synergy with his time, his milieu, his family and other men and women, he created a name of distinction and a body of work that has left an indelible stamp on our collective memory. If we are to serve future generations, it is vital that we continue to study the oeuvre in all its aspects and to explore even more deeply this vast and remarkable photographic corpus.

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The full version of by Hélène Samson was published in Notman, A Visionary Photographer, edited by Hélène Samson and Suzanne Sauvage.

Selected bibliography

The Archives have also been the subject of numerous articles, theses, books and films on the histories of photography, art and visual culture.

Consult the selected bibliography