May 21, 2026
Mapping Toronto’s 19th Century Studio Photography
An upcoming photography-focused edition of Open Door Wednesdays will be curated by TMU grad students
John Harrington Noverre, Unknown Sitter [Portrait of a Seated Girl Posed with a Cabinet Card Album], ca. 1873. Carte-de-visite, albumen print, Overall: 10.2 x 6.2 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario. Gift of Mary F. Williamson, 2009. Image © AGO. 2009/180.17c.
Once a month, the AGO welcomes visitors into The Marvin Gelber Print and Drawing Centre for Open Door Wednesdays. It’s a chance to enjoy a behind-the-scenes look at the AGO’s world-class print room and view a curated selection of works from its vast Prints, Drawings and Photography vault.
On Wednesday, May 27, a special edition of Open Door Wednesdays, Mapping Toronto’s 19th-Century Studio Photography will explore the rise of portrait photography studios in Toronto in the mid-to-late 1800s..
Drawing on a group of family albums in the AGO collection of the Bywater, Peterkin and Williamson families, assembled from the 1860s to the 1920s, this presentation traces the development of studio photography in Toronto during this period. Beyond preserving intimate family histories, these albums reveal the rapid expansion of the city’s commercial photography industry. The popularity of photographic portraits was bolstered in the 1850s by the introduction of the carte-de-visite format, a small portrait mounted to cardstock roughly the size of a business card. The studio stamps and elaborate designs on the cardstock act as a kind of historical directory of the city.
Mapping Toronto’s 19th Century Studio Photography invites visitors to consider the way studio portraiture both reflected and shaped ideas of identity, class and personal aspiration, while also recognizing the remarkable continuity of its visual conventions throughout the twentieth century. In addition to select examples of family albums and cartes-de-visites, works by Robert Burley, Michael Disfarmer, Violet Keene Perinchief, and James Van Der Zee will be on view.
This presentation is curated by graduate students Olivia Boccia, Conor Gray, Madison Hall, Jules Keenan, Marisa Kelly, Kelsey Myler, Shaw Quan, Valencia Sipes, and Tasha Yokoyama-Ramsay from the Film + Photography Preservation and Collections Management program (F+PPCM) at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), with guidance from instructor Sara Knelman and Sophie Hackett, Curator, Photography and Tal-Or Ben-Choreen, Curatorial Coordinator, Photography.
Foyer spoke to TMU F+PPCM student and current AGO Photography Department intern Madison Hall to learn more about her graduate research and her time working with the AGO’s photography collection in preparation for Open Door Wednesdays.
Foyer: Can you briefly describe the focus of your graduate research in the Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management program?
Hall: The focus of my graduate research in the F+PPCM program has primarily centred around the politics of cataloguing and documentation. I am very interested in how available cataloguing fields, language, level of detail, and personal bias or ignorance have the capability of changing how an object is interpreted, how it is used, and how easily it can be accessed by researchers. I have been centring my research around The Montgomery Collection of Caribbean Photographs, specifically images originating from the former territories of the British West Indies that capture staged images of labour, and how different cataloguing methodologies have the capability of reinforcing or deconstructing colonial ideology and visuality. I ultimately hope to consolidate outdated, colonial verbiage with a set of post-colonial cataloguing standards that will create an accessible, historically accurate, respectful, and intellectually valuable set of records.
What was it like to explore the AGO archives and select works for the upcoming Open Door Wednesdays event? Can you share a few highlights of your experience?
It has been fascinating selecting the works for the upcoming Open Door Wednesdays event, specifically working on the section that looks at studio photography conventions beyond upper-class, white, 19th-century Toronto. The key elements of formal dress, elegant, painted backgrounds, and rigid poses and expression tend to remain the same, but these conventions, when used among working-class or racialized communities, transform their meaning from an opulent display of social status, wealth, and connection to a visual representation of dignity, preservation, and familial pride. I was especially excited to see some of James Van Der Zee’s prints and such a high number of cartes-de-visite in the flesh after discussing these works so thoroughly in several of my classes.
Don’t miss Open Door Wednesdays: Mapping Toronto’s 19th-Century Studio Photography, happening Wednesday, May 27, from 1 pm to 8 pm in The Marvin Gelber Print and Drawing Centre on Level 1 of the AGO. Entrance is free for all visitors with admission.
![Unknown photographer, Chillin on the beach, Santa Monica [Couple on beach blanket]](/sites/default/files/styles/image_small/public/2023-04/RSZ%20WMM.jpg?itok=nUdDiiKr)
