Introduction to the McCall Catalogue
By Ariane Isler-de Jongh, Lynne Marks and Jocelyn Statia
The McCall collection of photographs, preserved at the Elphinstone Pioneer Museum in Gibson, British Columbia, is a remarkable record of life in this Sunshine Coast community between approximately 1920 and 1940. It illustrates the people and their activities around the harbour, the schools and the social gatherings, as well as logging in the back country. Most of all it features the beautiful landscapes pictured on postcards which were bought by residents and tourists and sent away as mementos advertising the variety of viewpoints along the coast. This collection is also a testimony to the life and work of a woman who had enough courage and creativity to lead the life of an entrepreneur in a field where few women would be able to support a family.
Helen McCall was born in Toronto on February 7, 1899, to Mercy Ellen Wilkensen and was later adopted and raised by Emma and George Barnard, her aunt and uncle. Her schooling was rather unusual as she first attended a French private school, then had one year of public school before the family moved to Thornborough Ranch in Howe Sound. From then on she was home schooled by her parents. In her late teens, during the last years of the first World War, she apprenticed at a photography studio in Vancouver, most probably with Robert F. L. Brown, proprietor of the Progress Studio at 2377 5th Avenue West. In 1920, Brown was associated with W. F. Lennox, listed in 1917 as proprietor of the Kitchener Photo Studio, and they established themselves at 343 West Pender. It is with them that Helen McCall kept doing business during the 1920s and 30s, entrusting them with special works like enlargements and perhaps getting her photographic materials through them. The name of Silver Finish Snap Shots, to which Mrs. Olsen, Helen’s daughter, refers in her interview, was temporarily adopted by R. F. L. Brown between 1931 and 1934, but later listings reverted to Brown and Co., Photo Finishers.
In 1920, Helen married Hector McCall and they settled in Gibson. They had a daughter, Elinor, and later a son, Arthur, born in 1926. Hector McCall had been a logger, but he was wounded during the war and could not return to this heavy work. Instead, he became a "donkey engineer", operating a small steam engine used for logging. His income might not have been enough to sustain his family and, possibly as a result of this, Helen began to put to use her training as a photographer after the birth of their son. When the marriage ended in 1933, she remained in Gibson where she seems to have been well-established in the community and was able to support her family through her work while keeping house and raising her children. Helen McCall married Will Gould of Burnaby in 1942 and lived with him on his chicken farm until they moved to a new house he had built for her in Dollarton. In 1955, she developed ill health and died of liver cancer in May, 1957.
While Helen McCall’s life in many ways reflected the lives of women of her period, in other ways her life experiences diverged dramatically from the norm. By marrying and having children, she followed expected patterns, looking for fulfillment as a wife and mother. The middle-class ideal of the time assumed that women would be supported by their husbands, but in many poorer families wives had to find some way to supplement their husband’s income. Occupations available to women were extremely limited in this period and the more appealing "women’s jobs", as nurses, secretaries and teachers, were generally available only to single women. Most married women who sought to bring additional income into the family operated boarding houses or took in sewing, appropriately feminine jobs that could be combined with looking after home and family. Very few women became professional photographers in this period. Photography, which was associated with scientific processes, was not seen as appropriately feminine. Women were encouraged by the photography industry to buy cameras, press the button and take pictures of their families, and then have the film developed commercially. Getting involved themselves in the messy chemical and mechanical processes of photography was quite another story.
The few women who challenged these norms and took up this non-traditional career were a small minority among professional photographers in Canada in the early twentieth century. As a divorced woman Helen McCall found herself part of an even smaller minority. Family stability was seen as central to the social order in this period. As a result, divorce was very much frowned upon, and was extremely difficult to obtain, although it was slightly more accessible in BC than elsewhere in Canada. Like most other divorced women, and the many more deserted and widowed women left to support themselves, Helen McCall tried to find a job that was compatible with continuing to care for her children. She was fortunate in that she was already working in an occupation that, though non-traditional, allowed her to work out of her home. As well, while McCall had to work hard to make a living for her family, by working in a male-dominated profession she was able to make a more reasonable living than was possible in more traditional, and more poorly paid women’s jobs.
While her work as a photographer generally allowed her to combine home and work responsibilities the job did at times require her to leave home to take business trips to Vancouver to purchase supplies. When her son Arthur was young he would often accompany her on such trips. Her daughter, Elinor, recalls assisting her mother in the business and at home and remembers missing her whenever she had to go away on business trips. At the same time, McCall’s daughter is emphatic that her mother always had time for her, assisting her with school work and other concerns.
Elinor Olsen’s wish to emphasize to the interviewer that McCall was indeed a good mother might have been linked to the concerns at the time about working mothers. There was considerable hostility to employed women, particularly mothers, who were seen to be abandoning their maternal roles by working. This hostility was particularly acute during the Depression, a time of high unemployment when popular opinion felt that available jobs should be reserved for men. The fact that McCall was self-employed may have reduced such hostility. Being self-employed would have had other advantages. Certainly McCall worked long hours to support her family. However, at least she was able to define her own working hours and conditions of work, rather than being subject to an employer. At the same time she was subject to the limitations of the domestic technology available to most rural British Columbians in this period.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Helen McCall’s career is the physical conditions in which she operated. At a time when photographic studios in both Europe and most big cities in North America were already quite sophisticated, McCall ran hers from her own house with no electricity or running water. For portraits, she used natural lighting and installed a backdrop made from several yards of cheesecloth on her porch, resulting in soft, modulated lighting. On other occasions, she would photograph her sitter indoors placing him or her between two corner windows and likely using a white reflector in the front. She does not seem to have used a magnesium flash, but her daughter remembers her occasionally using the kerosene lamp for family pictures. Other than this, most of her work was done outside using natural light.
It is in her laboratory work that she displayed the greatest inventiveness. With no electricity for developing or printing, at a time when photographic material was already quite sensitive, she devised a method of using the kerosene lamp in a reliable and efficient manner. In the wall separating her dark room (a converted bedroom) and the living-room, she constructed an opening that could be closed by a sliding board. On the living-room side, a shelf was set in front of the opening and the kerosene lamp was placed on this. Mrs. Olsen recalls clearly how important it was that the gas (naphtha) be carefully filtered through three layers of chamois to avoid sputtering and ensure a regular and reliable light. Printing was executed by placing the negative and paper in a glass frame and opening the sliding door for just the right number of seconds (Mrs. Olsen remembers her mother counting them).
Developing was done under a red light, which indicates that McCall used an ordinary gas lamp with a red filter, or perhaps a red filter on a window. Washing, for the negatives and particularly for the positives, must have presented a problem. Most practitioners of the period spent hours washing films and prints in cold running water, changing it regularly until the hyposulfite was completely eliminated. The quality of the still extant photographs testify to the care Helen McCall put into her work. As far as her daughter remembers, Helen McCall had three cameras: a large Kodak which she used "to take postcards", "a small Brownie with bellows" and a press camera. The memory of the "dark veil" ("something [put] over her head") is quite typical. A sturdy tripod would complete the equipment.
Helen McCall’s business can be divided into three categories. First she provided commercial service to local amateur photographers and to vacationers. She developed and printed films according to a routine well described by her daughter. Films left for McCall were developed by the following day, often making for a grueling late night schedule. The income from developing and printing films, though certainly small, must have justified a most uninteresting job, made quite strenuous by the physical conditions of her dark room, especially in the summer heat.
The second category would involve recording local economic life as well as community life, school activities, theatrical productions, regattas, weddings and portraits. If we admit that this type of photographic image is produced with an intention, its reading entails a study of social and economic activity in the context of the place and time of the image record. Logging was central to the economic life in and around Gibson’s as it was to much of B.C. and McCall’s photos provide us with some fascinating visual evidence of the nature of logging work at this time.
Agriculture was also important in those areas of B.C. with available arable land, and McCall’s photos give evidence of local agricultural practices, while her photos of seaplanes and ships point to the importance of transportation links to an isolated community like Gibson’s.
At a time before TV, and when many people didn’t have radios, organized community activities were much more central to local social life than they are today. As McCall’s pictures reveal, even a tiny community such as Gibson’s had a number of voluntary organizations. Women’s organizations were often centrally involved in organizing local social life and the Women’s Institute and Women’s Auxiliaries played a major role here. The vitality of local community activities is reflected in many of McCall’s photos, such as those of fancy dress and maypole dances and costume parades.
Local amateur sports also served to bring the community together,
and although such sports were usually played by men, a fascinating
picture of a co-ed softball game reveals that this was not always
the case.
Despite the fact that she is remembered as being rather shy, McCall evidently was actively concerned with the social life surrounding her and her children. Her camera acted as both her tool and her "protection" against immediate confrontation from which her shyness made her recoil. On the other hand, she must have had a genuine sense of how to communicate with people. This is attested to by the attention shown her by everybody, even in large groups and especially by the liveliness of small groups of children.
The many pictures of children, particularly in school activities, reflected McCall’s own involvement as a mother in local school activities. They were also a shrewd business move, as McCall hoped that doting parents would provide willing customers for her school photographs. McCall was also an active member of local women’s organizations and is included in many of the pictures she took of these organizations. There is no evidence to suggest that her unorthodox lifestyle, as a divorced woman working in a non-traditional occupation, led to damaging gossip that might have isolated her from community life. In fact, local community members appear to have been very proud of their lady photographer, informing visiting photographers that they needed to meet Gibson’s own resident photographer.
The third category of McCall’s work covers the wealth of landscape postcards which depict the beauties of the Sunshine Coast. With her long years of practice in the field, she developed a knowledge of which types of views would please the public, both visitors and the local population. She produced works accordingly, choosing her viewpoints and looking for good compositions. These postcards sold well, with at least some being treasured as part of personal collections up to the present day. When browsing through them all, one comes across some striking examples of the delight she took when she happened upon an unexpected view. These were the personal rewards of the toil of carrying her heavy equipment up steep hills or rowing across the bays to an advantageous viewpoint. Those few exceptional examples are the testimony of an "eye" which was not dulled by routine work and of a woman who would retain, through these difficult years, enough enthusiasm to seize the opportunity of a heavy electrical storm to go out and photograph the lightning flashes, or stop at a brook to catch the light effects on the water, or place her camera in the centre of a road to lead one’s imagination into the far distance to be discovered.
This overview of the McCall collection illustrates the multiple aspects of studies based on visual material as documents - social history, geographical survey, industrial and agricultural developments, maritime and air traffic - as well as an appreciation of photography as a means of communication, while keeping in view the perception of the occasional aesthetic value of some of the works. It also introduces us to the woman behind the camera, a woman who despite the many barriers facing women of her time, was able to use her training in a largely masculine profession to support herself and her children. Helen McCall worked long hard hours under difficult conditions running a photography business out of her home, but unlike most women of her time she was able to combine working in a profession she enjoyed with caring for her children. In doing so she has left us an important record both of her community and of a piece of B.C.’s past.
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