Literacy Through Photography

The McCord Museum of Canadian History, justly famous for the Notman Photographic Archives, is also the custodian of a remarkable collection of photographic albums, spanning one hundred years, and all manner of amateur activity. Recently, this collection was the inspiration for two literacy projects that ran concurrently at the Carrefour d'education populaire de Pointe St-Charles and at the Pointe Adult Centre for Education (P.A.C.E.) in Montréal. The programme was conducted as community outreach, with the essential support of the McCord's collection management and education staff, notably Suzanne Morin end Jean-Luc Murray. Vivian Wiseman of P.A.C.E. co-animated the project at the centre, and also introduced the concept to the Carrefour where Johanne Bouffard integrated it into her fall programme. Both projects were completed to the satisfaction of learners and organizers. In this short report, I want to concentrate on what happened at the Carrefour, and why that project seemed particularly successful.

The Carrefour has been conducting its workshops in reading and writing for over 30 years. The centre, appropriately situated on Centre Street, is a bustling place of learning and conviviality where learners and visitors like myself immediately are made to feel at home. At the same time, the workshops are conducted with focus and close personal attention. Under Bouffard's impressive leadership, the notion of a 'workshop' takes on real meaning because the learners are so mutually supportive and so keen on their collective task. The workshop that I attended was the basic literacy group, later joined by a few at the intermediate level. These were all adult learners; the youngest was in his early twenties and the oldest, a relative beginner, was 68. Some members had been part of the programme the year before, while others were just coming in. The group's way of assimilating new learners - an incorporation of abilities, disabilities, and goals - was generously extended to me.

The project materials were laser copies of ten McCord albums, disposable cameras, and a scrapbook-type album. The quality of the facsimiles was very good; the photographs were legible and the pages had been assembled to preserve the sequence and intimate scale of the original work. There was a different album for each participant who was encouraged through the process to adopt it as his or her own.

We began the workshop with a story about finding a photographic album and trying to decipher its meaning. Our example was a real snapshot album from the thirties, an anonymous and fragmented piece saved from the trash on a dusky street. That album was not from the McCord, though my story applies indirectly to most amateur albums held in public collections. These objects are mysterious. If the McCord is typical - and I believe it is - albums are often acquired with very little documentation, whether picked up at auction or received from the compiler's estate. I should add, however, that there is really no conceivable way of fully documenting these objects. Private photographic albums are created in anticipation of presentation and reception. That conversation ends when the album is transferred to a public collection, and it can only be revived by performative interpretation.

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