BAD LAND

Snapshots from the Canadian Prairies

In the winter time when we can't farm

Me and Junny-Mae sit arm in arm

By a big ole fire and honeymoon

A little bit south of Saskatoon

Sonny James; “A Little bit South of Saskatoon”

’Horse Power’, Tendall’s Ranch, S. Sask.

Milestone, Saskatchewan, a town of twenty two streets just north of the Montana border; maybe not the centre of the prairies but when the world is this flat and featureless there is no centre. Looking down on Milestone with Google Maps we see a small triangle on Highway 39, surrounded by a chequerboard of precisely measured out squares of wheat fields, so exact in their dimensions to be heartbreaking. Is there anywhere more desolate to live on this planet than Saskatchewan’s prairies? There are towns in Australia more geographically isolated but the terrain is not so relentlessly unchanging, and they don’t have the long winters that used to drive people indoors for months at a time.

Tendall Ranch, Saskatchewan

These photos come from a single, loose collection, centred around the Tendall family ranch at Milestone but some also taken in Ontario and Quebec. They can be broken onto three, with the earliest, including the first three, taken in Milestone around 1915, two more from Ontario in the 1920s and the rest back at the Tendall ranch in the 1930s. The photographer wasn’t a Tendall. Local records show a Tindall family around Milestone but information on the family is somewhat sparse. There are no Tendalls or Tindalls in the Milestone Cemetery although there are several Tindalls buried in Weyburn, a town further down Highway 39. More about the family later.

Somewhere in S. Saskatchewan. A young friend of Roy Carson Circa 1915 (Fishing trip – see poles on car).

By 1915 it may have been historically too late to be considered a pioneer on the prairies but whatever comforts technology had brought were at best meagre. The Model T wasn’t so much a car yet as an idea of what one could be after basic problems were figured out. People old enough to have travelled in stagecoaches didn’t see a great deal of improvement so far as comfort was concerned. In 1908 the Provincial government established the Department of Telephones with the intention of connecting all the towns on the prairies. The telephone would have alleviated isolation, especially in the winter.

Eva Carson at Rockliffe, Ont.

In January and February the temperature on the prairies can hit -40 and stay there for weeks on end – or as someone put it recently; from November to May. In Canada it isn’t the temperature but the wind chill to watch out for. Winds blowing down from the Arctic have nothing but some low hills and a few trees in their way. The cold that defines the prairies more than the flatness does. A couple of years ago one news service cheerfully reported that it was colder on the prairies than it was on Mars. Rockville, on Lake Manitou in Ontario was tropical in comparison. 

Eva Carson

And here is Eva in the summer, possibly still at Rockville although there are a few small lakes in the vicinity of Milestone.  

Old Carson homestead. Roy Carson’s horses, C1921.

Whoever took this photo didn’t spend much time around horses. In his or her eye a foal was a cute baby animal, not an economic asset. Strange that we have sheep and cattle farmers but we say ‘horse breeders’ not horse farmers. Maybe it’s because that sounds like we are rearing them for knackery yards and glue pots when we like to think we have more noble plans for them.

Mortimer’s car, taken at Masson, Que, just opposite Cumberland, Ont. (Mortimer Cummings, oldest brother of Alberta).   

The Ottawa River marks a border between Quebec and Ontario. Today Masson is part of Gatineau, a quick skip over the bridge from Ottawa. A hasty bit of research indicates an Alberta Cummings born in Ontario 1879, marrying a Thomas Pollock in 1899, and a Mortimer Cummings marrying Victoria Byham in 1896, though with the paywall in the way we can’t say they were related. There is always a small mystery as to who these captions are written for: the person putting the album together or others intending to look at it. 

Fred Tendall at Milestone, Sask. Roy Carson worked for him circa 1915.

Back to Milestone, and to Fred Tendall. Roy Carson (obviously related to Eva) may be one of the people in the third photograph above. This photo was taken approximately twenty years later. Sometimes a journey returning to another’s past is a kind of pilgrimage of honour, and sometimes it’s because the person whose past it is recommends stopping by the old homestead. Despite what Hollywood wanted us to believe, no rancher dressed like this for work, unless the business ran a dude ranch on the side. Those curiosities of excess urbanisation had their heyday in the 1930s, when this photo was taken and when city folk would pay good money to get back to nature – or the closest thing to it. 

Mr and Mrs Tendall, Milestone Sask – Roy Carson worked for these people sometime between 13-1918.

 Interesting the way Roy Carson is always referred to by his full name, suggesting the photographer does not know him (though Eva Carson is a friend). In A History of the Marshall and Related Families, written by Wallace Marshall in 1922, we read That William Tindall, was a Nebraska farmer who had eight children, including Fred, who married Lilliam Brumsay and moved to Milestone. The thing in the bottom right is a dog.

Milestone Sask

It was odd to discover there are art historians and heritage researchers devoting their lives to the study of grain elevators. What could be more emblematic of the dullness that reputedly marks Canadian culture?  Head out to the flatlands, witness the proliferation of silos and you realize these are really what windmills are to the Dutch or what the gas station is to an Arizonan; the defining architecture. There is something else. We have this response wired in to our consciousnesses so that when we see a big structure built by other humans we instinctively gravitate towards it.   

Milestone Sask.

The setting of these photos reminds me of Jonathan Raban’s travelogue and historical investigation Bad Land; an American Romance. Set on the North Dakota and Montana prairies south of the border, the trigger for Raban’s inquiry are old photographs of homesteaders. The story they lead into (but don’t reveal) is an upturning of one of the great American myths.

Milestone Sask.

That myth is that European man sets out to tame the land and does so, fearlessly and with determination. In Raban’s account things are a little less obvious. It isn’t the land but economics that defeat many of the farmers. A sodbuster can break the soil and plant a seed but there’s not much he can do when decisions made in Washingtoncauses the grain market to collapse. 

Fred Tendall, friend of Roy Carson; the best cowpuncher in the west.

Like all good photo collections, these photos don’t tell a story so much as nod to one hidden in the empty spaces between images. In this case it is one that stretches over three decades and a thousand miles but centres, unwittingly perhaps, on Fred Tindall, rancher in one of the most quietly inhospitable places on earth.

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BAD LAND

WRITTEN IN THE STARS

Glamour, Text, Collecting and Rotary postcards
“The Press is perhaps a good deal to blame for the prominence of the “star” actor, and, even more damaging, the prominence of the “picture-postcard” actress who is the mainstay of the pernicious twaddle that passes for musical comedy.”

Dublin Daily Express, August 31 1910

If dates are your thing then the history of the Rotary Photographic Company is obscure, or even murky. Some very credible sources say the firm was established in 1899 while others, equally respectable, put it at 1901. Likewise some say its end came in 1921 but newspaper reports have it on record applying for bankruptcy in April 1916. Of course, everybody could be right, depending on the definition of ‘established’ (a company can change its name and its identity while the owners remain constant) and ‘folded’ (as in either ‘matters were in the hands of lawyers’ or ‘it actually died’). As for the owner, J. Menger, not only are his birth and death details unknown but his first name is often followed by a question mark. That said, the only interesting thing about the facts is that we don’t have them. All we really need to know about the Rotary Photographic Company is that between 1901 and World War 1 it led the pack among British postcard publishers when it came to design, and this at a time when nearly 200 million postcards were bought each year. Bankruptcy must have seemed like a distant and unlikely threat.

  Rotary was known for several themes (landscape not among them) but it based its reputation on real photographic postcards of actresses. An article in the Leeds Mercury in August 1903 has a spokesperson from the company talk about the demand for postcards of musclemen and “masculine musicians” though the “matinee girls” are what the customers really want. Millions were produced, and millions still gather dust in English flea markets. It’s understandable that people quickly weary of sorting through piles of images of the Dare sisters but scattered among the ordinary are postcards that display a vivid sense of graphic design, all the better for being photographs. Here in a play on a postcard of postcards, Phyllis Dare shows off some of the cards she appears on. Some decades later, post-modernists would take the idea of self-referentializing tres seriously but for Rotary’s designers it was just the standard grist.

  The lettering is faintly macabre, but worse than that it is inelegant. Anyone familiar with the work of French studios like Reutlinger would know something of the same idea was being worked across the Channel though with a more sophisticated sense of style. In Paris the stars of the theatre were sold as beautiful creatures too chic to share space with ordinary proles, but in England they were always of the people. The women in Reutlinger postcards rarely smiled while the English actresses always did, and not just smile but look positively delighted to be with the customer. Airs were things they put on in private.

These postcards were constructed exactly the way the Reutlinger cards were. The three portraits would have been taken at different sessions; in fact Rotary wouldn’t have cared who was in the image just so long as there was an existing photo of her. They might have used the lettering and background on dozens of cards differing only in the actresses appearing on them. The difference was that Reutlinger was a studio while Rotary was a publisher. Mr Menger may never have set foot in a darkroom. 

 “”Do introduce your little friends,” smiling upon the rather awkward group, as Camel said afterwards, “just like a postcard actress”.”

This rather awkward line is from an inexplicably forgotten story called Bride from Bloomsbury by Anthony Upperton, published in the Dundee Courier on July 29 1925. It turned up after the age of the postcard actress; it, and she, had more or less passed into history by the end of WW1 but we get the idea. The postcard actress was a sweet and pretty creature though she was expected to have less personality than some six-legged inhabitants of the space behind the furniture. 

 In 1906 actress Florence Smithson took Rotary to court to prevent the company from publishing photos of her taken by A. E. Chandler of Exeter. The reasons why she didn’t want the photos used might have something to do with her not being paid any rights. We don’t know how the case turned out – the press quickly lost interest in following it – but if it was a rights issue then effectively she had none. Chandler may have paid her for the privilege of taking her portrait; that was common practice among the minor studios but once he had secured the images – prints and negatives – were his. When the Rapid Photo Company came up with the design for this card, it could have asked photographers like Chandler for any portraits. Only if Ms Smithson was appearing in a popular play would the company have snapped up her portrait. Even a major star like Sarah Bernhardt, at the bottom right, wasn’t likely to get a cent from this postcard even if it sold in the thousands. Behind these cheerful scenes lay some ruthless negotiating. 

Here’s a card from the rival Philco Company, interesting because it tells us as much about collecting as it does about how postcards were made. Like Rotary, Philco didn’t take any portraits but paid for existing ones. By setting the faces in a puzzle it was encouraging people to collect a whole set, here of the missing word series. Another card in the collection is identical to this save the message in the middle. 

 And here is a card copyrighted by Ralph Dunn, a photographer working out of 63 Barbican. Notice how the same portrait of Gertie Millar is used in the Philco card. It’s possible that Dunn took the original then sold rights to Philco but it is just as likely both bought rights from a third party. If that was the case, Dunn was making a claim on the idea of having Ms Millar jump out of a Christmas cracker. 

 

 Here’s another of Dunn’s postcards. He liked the surreal effects of photo-montage. Despite his claims to copyright, Dunn has liberally borrowed from Reutlinger, especially in this image. We ought not feel too much outrage given Reutlinger took a liberal attitude to borrowing himself. Mr Dunn was also taken by the idea of actresses popping out of things; as no doubt were many like-minded elderly gents.

 

 If the messages on the backs of these cards are any guide, the most serious collectors of postcards were young women. In the Flossie card below one young lady asks another specifically how her collection is coming along. But back to Lucy. The moon, the stars, the beautiful actresses making up the name: we are in the land of dreamy dreams, a pre-Freudian world where all things and all thoughts need only be beautiful. 

 

The idea of cramming the typography with portraits of actresses may not have originated with Rotary but it became something of a signature. Two things are happening here. The first is that the viewer is quietly impressed with the trickery; it’s like watching a magic show knowing all along you’re being played with. The second is that the collectors inevitably try to identify the actresses, which is another way of saying they intellectually engage with the images. 

No one is called Flossie anymore; even cats won’t answer to the name. 

Our final card is a tribute to an unaccredited designer’s eye and an example of why this era was destined to be brief. While the idea is not original there are dozens of individual photographic images sure to make some assistant’s week a nightmare while a recipient was bound to spend hours gazing at every detail. Excellent, on both counts, but at the same time we can see an aesthetic straddling the last dull edge of the Victorian age and the cleaner, sharper post-war modernism with some discomfort.

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WRITTEN IN THE STARS

ON HINDSIGHT

Artistic cabinet card back stamps

“I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.”
Andy Warhol

 These days, when the word ‘art’ can mean pretty much what you want it to, some of us might feel nostalgic for the 19^th century, when the word had a very precise definition. Or so we like to think. It turns out our great, great or merely great grandparents were just as vague on the subject. To them, ‘art’ didn’t necessarily carry a value judgment; it could refer to pictures in general, which is to say any pictures regardless of their quality. An artist was someone who made pictures. Of course they had artists – people of questionable morals and hygiene who couldn’t keep a proper job – but if a sign painter called himself an artist no one was going to correct him. In Nashua, New Hampshire, Joseph Gauthier advertised himself as an art photographer and to emphasize his credentials had the landscape on the easel. The mountain could be Mt Adams or Washington in New Hampshire, but it could as easily be a generic mountain. You’ll notice the palette and the brush at the bottom of the canvas. The logic suggests the painting is being completed while we watch.

 

 Thomas Donovan of Brighton and Boak and Sons of Malton and Driffield are just two other English studios that used this same back stamp. A glance at the bottom left shows it was produced by the printing firm Marion of Paris. The woman is supposed to be a figure from the Italian Renaissance but, given the period this was produced, we could also think of her as pre-Raphaelite. Note the ivy, a plant that has had numerous symbolic meanings throughout English history, some erotic and others more cerebral. What of the snake unwinding upon the vase? The first thought is that it is a nod to Genesis, but why? 

 

 There is little immediate information on the Curtis Art Gallery, most likely located in upstate New York, but we can imagine the kind of art that hung on its walls. Apart from views of Niagara Falls, we could expect a few mildly pictorialist scenes among the Currier & Ives type prints and a few still lifes. The clue is in the Japanese fan sticking out of the vase in the bottom right. C1880s the inclusion of Japanese elements in any kind of pictorial design was a nod to art: not the high art the Renaissance as in the first backstamp but an indication that the producer had a rarified and sensitive outlook. This was an era when drinking Japanese tea out of small bowls was a mark of wealth and sophistication.

 

 The acknowledgement to Japan is more explicit here in the umbrella. Again it is also a design by Marion, now of London as well as Paris. You’ll notice that, like Spence Lees and Curtis, J Maclardy offers services as a portrait painter. On the backs of CDVs sighted on Ebay, MacLardy says he or she also paints on ivory. That would be miniature ivory portraits. Although at this time (1880s) the idea of the artist as a member of the avant garde was being recognized, it would be churlish to argue that Maclardy was not an artist.

 

 P. Drew is Alfred Palmer Drew. The Cabinet Card Gallery has some information on him, including the tragic destruction of his studio in 1896. For now we are only interested in the rather excellent back stamp. Although it doesn’t carry a printer’s name it is hard to believe that Drew would go to the expense of producing this on his own. An earlier post discussed the putti (as the cherubs are properly called) and their unclear symbolism. Here as usual there’s a suggestion they are up to mischief. Note how the one at the top is about to pull the sheet from the easel, so revealing the painting underneath, but the camera nearby indicates it will actually be a photograph. You’ll also notice that the little thug at the bottom has upset a frame and allowed a photo to fall out, so presumably advertising the fact that customers can have their portraits framed as well.

 

 Two more putti, common enough on back stamps so we need not pay too much attention except that the one at the top wears an apron with the sun as a crest, telling us he or she an emissary from the sun or is the agent ultimately creating the photograph. The photo is from Bulgaria but the stamp was produced by Bernhard Vachs (?) of Vienna. There’s an evocation of Greek mythology here; of the putti caught up in a shroud discarded by Demeter, goddess of fertility, or even her daughter Persephone, associated with Spring.

 

This elegant design also has allusions to Greece and also the Orient, but it is the two ships that catch our eye. Smith’s Falls is on the Rideau River but these ships are on a somewhat larger body of water, the closest to the town being Lake Ontario, which is some distance away.  It’s proof if we want it that the back stamp need not bear any relation to the photographer’s business or philosophy. John Moore either consulted a catalogue or he found an ad in a photographic magazine, but when he saw this design he liked it at once.

 

Finally, we come to Paul Darby, whose claim to fame, such as it is, was that he photographed James Joyce at his graduation in 1902. We don’t know whether Darby was Irish, French or British but we can see that by century’s turn he has embraced the design and typography of Art Nouveau; well who wouldn’t. to be an artistic photographer was as much about being wise to contemporary fashion as it was about being up with ideas in painting and sculpture. The idea of purity, of suffering for art had caught on around Montmartre but over on the Boulevard de Strasbourg hunger and struggle were the last things anyone would admit to.

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ON HINDSIGHT