ABSTRACT
A working-class immigrant from Bude in Cornwall, Maynard managed a highly successful photographic studio in the remote settlement of Victoria on the Western coast of Canada. To begin with, she specialised in portraits of the townsfolk, but then began experimenting with montages featuring hundreds of children’s faces, which she marketed and sold to women all over North America. In the 1880s Canada’s colonial government was in the business of hiring only male photographers to document infrastructural developments in British Columbia and its indigenous peoples. Maynard broke with convention by making photographs of the landscape around Victoria, and by working as a police photographer. She also made photographs of the indigenous Haida most of whom had been moved to a reservation. However, her most original work came in the early 1890s when she experimented with trick photography. This saw her drawing on a repertoire of unusual techniques similar to those used in spirit photography, to produce a series of bizarre and unsettling images of herself in the company of dead family members and the white statuette figures of children that she called ‘photo sculptures’.
