Rare Merit is a beautifully illustrated and astute examination of women photographers in Canada as it took shape in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Throughout, the camera was both a witness to the colonialism, capitalism, and gendered and racialized social organization, and a protagonist. And women across the country, whether residents or visitors, captured people and places that were entirely new to the lens. This book shows how they did so, and the meaning their work carries.

Colleen Skidmore surveys the professional lives and photographs of nearly eighty women – studio portraitists, travel documentarians, photojournalists, fine artists, hobbyists, and photographic printers – from Lucy Maude Montgomery on Prince Edward Island to Élise Livernois in Quebec City, and from Margaret Bourke-White in the Arctic to Hannah Maynard on Vancouver Island.

Why women? Why not women? Presenting the exceptional range and impact of their work, Rare Merit proves that women’s practices and images – knowingly omitted from founding narratives of photographic history – were diverse, compelling, widespread, and influential.

Colleen Skidmore is a photography historian and Professor at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton. Her research focuses on women’s photographic practices and archives of women in photography in North America from 1860 to 1920. She is the editor of This Wild Spirit: Women in the Rocky Mountains of Canada (UAP).

Colleen Skidmore's profile page

• Short-listed, WILLA Literary Award, Scholarly Non-Fiction
• Joint winner, AUPresses Book, Jacket, and Journal Show: Scholarly Illustrated

"Fletcher’s story opens Rare Merit and skillfully articulates Skidmore’s main thesis: women’s histories are central to the medium, and women played a significant role in the development of Canadian photography."

Technology and Culture, vol. 64. no. 4