‘Waiting to see themselves this way’
Emotional response from students shows how big a deal AGO collection is
Conversation is perhaps my greatest weakness and talking about photography, in particular, pretty much always has me at hello.
And so, yuh gyul was happy like pappy earlier this month to be given the chance for a oneon-one with the AGO’s associate curator of photography, Julie Crooks about the Montgomery Collection of Caribbean Photographs. This was conversation one.
Acquired by the Art Gallery of Ontario just over a year ago, the Montgomery Collection consists of more than 3,500 historical images from 34 Caribbean countries and comprises nearly every photographic format available during the years 1840 to 1940, including prints, postcards, daguerreotypes, lantern slides, albums and stereographs.
It took New York-based collector Patrick Montgomery a decade to amass what’s thought to be one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of its kind, and Crooks just a year to raise the $300,000 she needed to purchase the lot. The money came from a group of 27 donors, the majority of whom are from Toronto’s Black and Caribbean communities, and — full disclosure — includes a contribution from me, made in remembrance of my mother, Francilla Charles.
Crooks has been working on cataloguing and researching the collection since then and, a week before our conversation, some of us donors were gathered online for a get-to-know-you chat and an update on her efforts. This was conversation two.
During this second conversation, Crooks briefed us on the itinerary for the Study Days for the Montgomery Collection, a two-day online symposium to which Caribbean scholars and artists had been invited for knowledge sharing and discussion.
Seventy-five of us Zoomed in from Canada, the Caribbean, the U.S. and Britain for these Study Days, which took place on July 9 and 10. Stay with me now, this was conversation three.
These three conversations in two weeks told me things I didn’t know and things I already knew. These three conversations in two weeks is why I’m writing this column for you now.
And normally, this is the part of the column where I start quoting scholarly research to back up my ideas objectively, as I continue building my argument toward my main point. I do this because you deserve it as my readers.
But like most Black people, I’m tired. Experiencing and processing the emotional demands of the past few months has been exhausting. I don’t want to have to argue this month the same thing that in some ways I try to argue every month, that when it comes to social justice and equity, photographs matter.
Instead, I want to tell you about these conversations, and about how they were subjectively filled with overwhelming emotion at the existence of this collection of photographs and its presence here in Toronto, where our diaspora runs deep.
I want to tell you that when speaking with Julie, being able to salute both our personal and professional relationships felt comforting and freeing, because too often we are discouraged from bringing our whole selves to work.
We spoke as photography colleagues, yes, but we also spoke as Black Caribbean women whose friendship and shared Barbadian ancestry makes the Montgomery Collection our family history, too.
I want to tell you that when speaking with the donors, each one of us introduced ourselves to each other for the first time, and each one of us movingly expressed the magnitude of what it means to have these photographs available to share with our communities here in the city.
Our conversation happened to fall on what would have been my mother’s 75th birthday, and so there were both laughter and tears, because while we were all gratified and ecstatic that this was finally happening, we were also somewhat bereft over how long this has taken.
I want to tell you that when speaking with the photography scholars during the Study Days, the Zoom chat was filled with endless comments conveying sheer excitement and fervour at the images themselves, as well as at the ideas and analysis that unfolded from the various presenters over the two days.
Melanie J. Newton’s discussion on the morning of the second day might have been the peak feels moment, though. An associate professor at the University of Toronto, Newton described the experience of taking the students from her Introduction to Caribbean Studies course to see some of the collection at the AGO in November 2019.
None of her students had ever been to the AGO before and they went from being shy upon arrival in the lobby to animatedly discussing the photographs in the reading room. Recounting the scene, Newton summarized the impact of seeing these images on these young people of Caribbean birth/ancestry: “They had been waiting to see themselves in this way.”
I want to end by telling you about the photograph shown here. Taken in 1890 by Felix Morin, a French photographer who settled in Trinidad, it is one of the photographs that has been shared publicly from the collection so far and it’s featured on the website listing for my conversation with Crooks.
Titled “Coolie Woman, Trinidad,” the photograph depicts an Indo-Caribbean woman, opulently dressed and ornately bejeweled. She holds our gaze as her image asks us to question the offensive language in her caption, our assumptions about gender and race and who is authentically Caribbean, and as York University professor Andil Gosine points out around sexuality, “the gaps and mistakes in the archives” that may prevent us from seeing “the messiness of colonization more clearly.”
This is the work that the Montgomery Collection is already doing and the work that is yet to be done. In a city where the Caribbean presence is felt in its people and its food and its slang and its music, this collection has something to offer us all. I hope you feel that way, too, when you see it.
She holds our gaze as her image asks us to question the offensive language in her caption and who is authentically Caribbean
Watch the conversation between Michèle Pearson Clarke and Julie Crooks at ago.ca/events. The Montgomery Collection will be featured at an exhibition at the AGO in 2021.
Michèle Pearson Clarke is Toronto’s photo laureate. Follow her on Instagram @tophotolaureate.