By Kelann Currie-Williams
In the thirty-three years between slavery’s abolition in the British Empire and the signing of the British North America Act (later renamed the Constitution Act in 1982), at least six major photographic processes had been introduced and fervently embraced in what would become the settler-colonial state of Canada. Much of the work on the photographic history of Black life in Canada during the mid to late nineteenth century has focused on Upper Canada/Ontario and Lower Canada/Quebec as seen in the work of Julie Crooks, Cheryl Thompson, Emilie Boone, Rachel Lobo, and Sandra Evoughlian.[1] Ontario has been the primary focus of this historical research on early photography’s connections to transatlantic slavery due to its geographic importance in the history of the Underground Railroad. In their migration to freedom in the “Promised Land”—what would come to be known as Canada— nearly 15,000 fugitive slaves primarily settled in the many terminuses set up in southwestern Ontario.[2] As Crooks and Lobo have each respectively charted in their work on Black Ontario photographic histories, the narratives of escape from bondage to freedom in Canada for enslaved African-Americans can be visualized through the archival photographs (in the forms of tintypes, cabinet cards, and other albumen prints) that remain of this period.[3]