Picturing Toronto: Photography and the Making of a Modern City 9780228013808

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P i c t u r i ng To ro n t o

mcgill-queen’s/beaverbrook canadian foundation studies in art history Martha Langford and Sandra Paikowsky, series editors Recognizing the need for a better understanding of Canada’s artistic culture both at home and abroad, the Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation, through its generous support, makes possible the publication of innovative books that advance our understanding of Canadian art and Canada’s visual and material culture. This series supports and stimulates such scholarship through the publication of original and rigorous peer-reviewed books that make significant contributions to the subject. We welcome submissions from Canadian and international scholars for book-length projects on historical and contemporary Canadian art and visual and material culture, including Native and Inuit art, architecture, photography, craft, design, and museum studies. Studies by Canadian scholars on non-Canadian themes will also be considered.

The Practice of Her Profession Florence Carlyle, Canadian Painter in the Age of Impressionism Susan Butlin Bringing Art to Life A Biography of Alan Jarvis Andrew Horrall Picturing the Land Narrating Territories in Canadian Landscape Art, 1500 to 1950 Marylin J. McKay The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada Edited by Carol Payne and Andrea Kunard Newfoundland Modern Architecture in the Smallwood Years, 1949–1972 Robert Mellin

The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas The Natural History of the New World, Histoire Naturelle des Indes Occidentales Edited and with an Introduction by FrançoisMarc Gagnon, Translation by Nancy Senior, Modernization by Réal Ouellet Museum Pieces Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums Ruth B. Phillips The Allied Arts Architecture and Craft in Postwar Canada Sandra Alfoldy Rethinking Professionalism Essays on Women and Art in Canada, 1850–1970 Edited by Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson

The Official Picture The National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division and the Image of Canada, 1941–1971 Carol Payne Paul-Émile Borduas A Critical Biography François-Marc Gagnon Translated by Peter Feldstein On Architecture Melvin Charney: A Critical Anthology Edited by Louis Martin Making Toronto Modern Architecture and Design, 1895–1975 Christopher Armstrong Negotiations in a Vacant Lot Studying the Visual in Canada Edited by Lynda Jessup, Erin Morton, and Kirsty Robertson

Visibly Canadian Imaging Collective Identities in the Canadas, 1820–1910 Karen Stanworth Breaking and Entering The Contemporary House Cut, Spliced, and Haunted Edited by Bridget Elliott Family Ties Living History in Canadian House Museums Andrea Terry Picturing Toronto Photography and the Making of a Modern City Sarah Bassnett

SARAH BASSNETT

P I C T U R I NG T O R O N T O Photography and the Making of a Modern City

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2016 isbn 978-0-7735-4671-4 Legal deposit first quarter 2016 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the J.B. Smallman Publication Fund, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Western University.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Bassnett, Sarah, 1970–, author Picturing Toronto : photography and the making of a modern city / Sarah Bassnett. (McGill-Queen's/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7735-4671-4 (bound) 1. Goss, Arthur S. (Arthur Scott), 1881–1940. 2. Photographers – Ontario – Toronto – History – 20th century. 3. Photography – Ontario – Toronto – History – 20th century. 4. Photography – Social aspects – Ontario – Toronto – History – 20th century. 5. Photography – Political aspects – Ontario – Toronto – History – 20th century. 6. City planning – Ontario – Toronto – History – 20th century – Case studies. 7. Toronto (Ont.) – History – 20th century – Pictorial works. I. Goss, Arthur S. (Arthur Scott), 1881–1940. Photographs. Selections. II. Title. III. Series: McGill-Queen’s/ Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history fc3097.4.b38 2016

971.3'54104

c2015-907579-3

This book was designed and typeset by studio oneonone in Adobe Garamond 10.8/14

In memory of Peter James Bassnett

Contents

Acknowledgments | xi Introduction | 3

Section I The City 1

Making a Modern City | 21

2

Visuality and City Planning | 50

Section II Liberal Subjects 3

Instruments of Reform | 75

4

Framing Citizenship | 100

5

Arthur Goss and the Portraiture of Modern Subjectivity | 128 Conclusion | 151 Illustrations Credits | 157 Notes | 163 Bibliography | 187 Index | 205

Acknowledgments

Many individuals and institutions contributed to the research and writing of this book in very significant ways. I am grateful to the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Western University, including the J.B. Smallman Fund, for the financial support that made this project possible. I visited numerous archives and libraries during the course of my research, and I would like to thank the archivists, librarians, and staff at the Library and Archives Canada, Toronto Reference Library, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, Special Collections at York University, Ontario Jewish Archives, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Chicago History Museum. I spent countless hours at the City of Toronto Archives, and I am especially grateful for the help of Patrick Cummins, Jess Erhenworth, John Huzil, Steve Mackinnon, Gillian Reddyhoff, Karen Teeple, and Glenda Williams. The exhibition I curated with colleague Patrick Mahon at the City of Toronto Archives Gallery in 2012–13 was a significant opportunity to engage with a selection of the photographs in new ways, and the curatorial process informed my thinking about many aspects of the material discussed in the book. I also want to thank Susan Dobson for the new work she produced for that exhibition and for helping me to draw new connections between early twentieth-century Toronto and the present-day city. My investigation into photography in early twentieth-century Toronto began years ago, and I have benefited from discussions with many mentors and colleagues along the way. I would like to thank Bill Burns, Mark Cheetham, Jonathan Finn, Sophie Hackett, Anna Hudson, Tony King, Andrea Kunard, Jonathan Long, Tom McDonough, Andrea Noble, Luc Noppen, James Opp, Carol Payne, Tim Pearson, Joan Schwartz, Tanya Sheehan, Shawn Smith, Karen Stanworth, Georgiana Uhlyarik, Krys Verrall, Ed Welch, Renate Wickens, and Andrés Zervigón. My doctoral supervisor, John Tagg, greatly influenced my thinking about photography and power, and I offer special thanks for his many insights.

I very much appreciate the opportunities I have had to present portions of this research at conferences and in print. Many thanks to the organizers, respondents, and audiences of sessions at the Universities Art Association of Canada, the Canadian Historical Association, Association for Canadian Studies in the United States, and Feeling Photography. An early version of chapter 3 was published in History of Photography, aspects of my research on city planning appeared in two articles in the Journal of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada, and an earlier version of chapter 4 was published in The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada. An essay on Arthur Goss was published in the catalogue for Arthur S. Goss: Works and Days, an exhibition curated by Blake Fitzpatrick and John Bentley Mays at the Ryerson Image Centre in 2013. Many thanks go to editor Jonathan Crago at McGill-Queen’s University Press for his patience and advice. Thanks also to the staff at the press for their contributions to the project and to series editor Martha Langford. I am grateful for the valuable feedback from the anonymous readers. The support of Western University, where I have been a faculty member for the duration of the project, has also been important. Research grants from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities helped me develop the project as a new faculty member. I am indebted to my supportive colleagues in the Department of Visual Arts, especially Cody Barteet, Kathy Brush, Bridget Elliott, Patrick Mahon, David Merritt, Kirsty Robertson, and Christine Sprengler. The opportunity to discuss aspects of this research with graduate students in various seminars has helped me to refine my ideas, and I would like to thank those who have assisted with the research, namely, Rima Puteris, Jon Sarma, Matt Smith, and Bettina Urcuioli. I am especially grateful to Jennifer Orpana, who contributed to the research in many ways over the course of the several years she worked with me. My academic life has been greatly enriched by the members of the Toronto Photography Seminar. Matt Brower, Sarah Parsons, and Linda Steer read many drafts of these chapters in their early form during the years we worked together in a writing group. Shared conversations and suggestions from other members – Marta Braun, Elspeth Brown, Lily Cho, Deepali Dewan, Laura Levin, Gabby Moser, Thy Phu, Sharon Sliwinski, Dot Tuer, Kelly Wood, and Carol Zemel – have also been important to the direction of the project. The group’s monthly meetings, special events, and trips abroad have provided both intellectual stimulation and enduring friendship. Finally, I want to thank my mother Ann, my sister Madeline, and my brother-in-law Randall Martin, who have offered ongoing support in a multitude of ways. My father, before his passing, was unwavering in his encouragement of my intellectual pursuits. I am especially grateful to my partner, Dexter Bonaparte, who has been a sustaining force for so many years, and to our son Max, who has greatly enriched our lives.

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P i c t u r i ng To ro n t o

Introduction

Modernity Photography transformed modern life. Writing about the changes it initiated, Walter Benjamin described photography as a means of revealing secrets and making discoveries.1 He noted that Karl Blossfeldt’s photographs of magnified plant specimens displayed the underlying structure of nature, and photographs taken by French photographer Nadar in the sewers of Paris made it possible to see unfamiliar parts of the city and to comprehend the modern metropolis in a way that was previously unthinkable. 2 For Benjamin, as well as for many artists, photography seemed to offer a new way of seeing. It enabled a heightened power of vision and produced new experiences of space and time. Photographs allowed viewers to see places they had never been and preserve images of loved ones who were no longer alive. While the camera was considered a tool for extending vision, illustrated publications supplied mass audiences with photographs as new forms of information and entertainment. In this way, photography altered perception and allowed for new understandings of the world that were central to the experience of modernity. Studies of photography’s relation to modernity have tended to focus on major European or American cities such as Paris, London, or New York. This book explores the impact of photography on the formation of the modern city of Toronto. In the following chapters, I explain how photography was at once fundamental to the production of urban modernity and at the heart of city officials’ attempts to solve the perceived problems of modernity. Photography helped to constitute the modern city by picturing previously unseen spaces and people. It shaped ideas about modern urban life and played a role in the identification and management of urban issues. In this respect, it was central to the project of envisioning the modern city and influenced plans for its development. It also affected social relations and the constitution of new forms of urban subjectivity, such as the reformer and the immigrant. In other words, photographs did not simply document the changing conditions of modern urban life in early twentieth-century

Toronto; rather, they, along with the processes and encounters that were fundamental to their production, circulation, and reception, were central both to the constitution and to the negotiation of urban modernity. Much of the scholarship on modernity relates the changed nature of modern life to new conditions brought on by urbanization, industrialization, capitalism, and technological development. Nineteenth-century textual and visual accounts of urban areas sought to produce the city either as an object of knowledge or as the site of new forms of modern experience. Charles Baudelaire, for instance, expressed his deep ambivalence about modernity in his commentary on the capitalist metropolis. Describing the transitory nature of modern life, he wrote about the city as a source of information and a site of extreme experience.3 Following theorists of modernity from the period, including Baudelaire, Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Georg Simmel, contemporary cultural historians often associate modernity with experiences of alienation, anxiety, and fragmentation, or alternately, with overstimulation, cravings for excitement, and extreme feelings and sensations.4 Contemporary scholarship has also described the emergence of the modern city in the nineteenth century as having given rise to a complex intersection of two closely related, but seemingly contradictory, discourses: surveillance and spectacle.5 On the one hand, discourses of surveillance focus on knowing the city in order to render it governable. Emerging with the rise of liberal modes of governance, these discourses of reason developed alongside a diffuse network of governmental technologies; surveys, statistics, photography, and cartography are some of the rational mechanisms that sociologists, city planners, government officials, and social reformers utilized in an attempt to render the city a stable, coherent entity. On the other hand, discourses of modernism produced the city as spectacle, and defined it as the site of new forms of pleasure and desire, as well as an environment for experiences of shock, alienation, and fear. In the visual arts, new aesthetic strategies such as montage, juxtaposition, and distortion aimed to produce viewing experiences that mirrored the transitory temporality and disjointed psychological effects of modernity. Within modernism, artists explored the sensory and emotional experiences of modernity, and embraced photography as a new and implicitly modern way of seeing in which the camera was considered an extension of the body.6 Studies of modernity have offered important insight into how photography participated in the reconfiguration of urban experience, especially in relation to changing relations of gender, ethnicity, and class.

Liberalism In order to understand how photography transformed modern life in Toronto, this study looks at its role in attempts to reconfigure the urban environment and to constitute liberal subjects. It focuses on the first two decades of the twentieth century, during the expansion of liberalism in relation to the first concerted effort to modernize the city. Liberalism is a form of governance, which, paradoxically, operates through the production of freedom and the corresponding constitution of self-regulating subjects. I use the term liberalism not to refer to a cohesive set of ideas, but rather, to indicate a form of

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governance that occurs across a web of non-governmental sites to construct a civil society. Liberal governance depends upon creating subjects who monitor their own conduct, while at the same time questioning the mechanisms that limit their freedom.7 Liberalism has become an important framework for studying Canadian history, particularly the period between 1840 and 1940 when new state institutions were established and new infrastructure was developed. Historian Ian McKay’s proposal to study how the “liberal order” was instituted as a system of government has been highly influential in the field of Canadian history. His premise is that rather than taking for granted the existence of an entity called “Canada,” historians should instead approach the study of Canada as though the nation was “a political and socially specific solution to a series of historical problems.”8 Although some scholars have critiqued aspects of McKay’s argument, few would dispute that it has had broad implications for the field. Among the effects are studies offering new perspectives on colonialism and patriarchy. Historian Adele Perry, for instance, has shown how the oppression of women, First Nations people, and non-white immigrants was central to the constitution of the liberal subject and thus at the heart of the liberal order in Canada.9 Most challenges to McKay’s concept of the liberal order have taken issue with his definition of liberalism. Bruce Curtis’s approach, which is especially relevant to this study, has been to use Foucauldian concepts of governmentality to focus on the internal struggles and administrative mechanisms of liberalism.10 Although historians differ in their attitudes towards McKay’s concept of the liberal order, many agree that his proposition is significant because it provides a framework for considering the intersections between social, cultural, and political history.11 While McKay’s thesis has been widely debated and explored in Canadian history, his work has only recently been taken up in Canadian art history. As Lynda Jessup, Erin Morton, and Kirsty Robertson explain it, liberalism has not received attention because of the field’s focus on culture and the limited attention art historians typically pay to politics or economics. Rather than looking at the nation as essentially a cultural formation, they argue that art historians should start to consider the nation-state as a project of liberalism. In this way, art historians can think more deeply about the economies that drive art production.12 Similarly, liberalism has not been discussed in histories of photography, neither in studies on Canadian topics nor in the broader field. One of the aims of this book, then, is to adapt this important framework from the discipline of history to the field of art history, specifically through photography studies. But rather than concentrating on the level of the nation, I am concerned with the city, because photography was most influential in liberal governance through its role in the reconfiguration of urban life. In Canada, the development of a liberal mode of government occurred alongside the modernization of cities, which contributed to rendering the territory and the population governable. The process of introducing new technology and infrastructure, such as electricity, sewer systems, roads, and bridges, engineered cities into new and more governable forms.13 Liberal reformers saw infrastructure development as a means of liberating urban dwellers from both the dangers and the miseries of modern urban life. Among the primary

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problems they identified with modern cities were disease, poverty, overcrowding and congestion, and social and moral degeneration. These issues were a source of concern for the individual as well as for the collective because, as Methodist reformer J.S. Woodsworth remarked, the modern city was “an immense and highly developed organism” in which “the welfare of one is the concern of all.”14 Paved roads, bridges, water filtration, and other structural amenities were seen as ways of removing obstacles to the smooth movement of people and goods and a means of achieving the conditions – most notably cleanliness and circulation – necessary for urban subjects to exercise freedom.15 As the case studies in this book show, questions regarding which infrastructure projects to fund, and which areas of the city were most unsanitary and congested and thus in greatest need of intervention, were a source of considerable debate. In Toronto, the drive to improve the overall condition of the city and to produce self-regulating urban subjects was at the centre of the urban reform movement. It was also here that photography figured prominently.

Urban Reform and Governmentality Like many other major North American cities, Toronto experienced a period of rapid growth from before the turn of the century to after the First World War. This study focuses on this intense period of change, during which the influx of new immigrants and the expansion of industry precipitated rapid population growth. While the majority of Toronto’s new immigrants arrived from Britain, a growing number came from eastern and central Europe.16 As the downtown core became congested with these newcomers, widespread concerns developed over housing shortages, sanitary conditions, and the health and welfare of citizens. At the same time, new land appropriations significantly increased the area of the city, and there was a substantial rise in manufacturing and construction.17 Toronto’s transformation into one of the country’s major commercial, industrial, and financial centres created new challenges. There was a pressing need for an efficient system of transportation to and from the central business district. Despite the growing financial success of the city, there were still outbreaks of contagious diseases, the most common of which were cholera, typhoid fever, diphtheria, and smallpox. The pervasiveness of disease raised the fears of middle-class Torontonians, and the efficient circulation of people and goods, along with sanitation, housing, and other development issues, emerged as acute concerns during the first decade of the twentieth century. Under pressure to meet the rising demand for services of all kinds and to prevent the occurrence of the wretched conditions associated with the slums of large European and American cities, the municipal government occupied itself with development initiatives such as improving the sewer system, establishing a water filtration system, and constructing new fire halls, police stations, roads, and bridges. The sense of crisis brought about by this period of rapid change fostered the urban reform movement, which peaked in Toronto after the turn of the century until about 1920. The reform movement was a progressive campaign born of liberalism that aimed to solve the problems of modern, industrialized, urban life by establishing order and unity within the country’s large cities. In Canada, both professional and volunteer organizations

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were involved in the struggle to address perceived urban problems, including disease, poverty, and criminality. Following reform initiatives in major cities across the United States and Europe, the men and women active in Canada’s reform movement focused on a wide variety of concerns, from sanitation problems and congested streets to the question of how to effectively assimilate new immigrants. Histories of the movement have shown that reformers were predominantly educated, middle-class, Anglophone Canadians living in urban centres.18 Whether they were fighting to eliminate overcrowding or striving to protect children from neglect, reformers in the municipal government, social service organizations, women’s groups, and Christian agencies were driven to influence public welfare by a sense of moral duty. In Toronto, which was one of the country’s focal points for urban reform, some of the city’s most influential figures combined empirical research with a particular brand of British idealism to influence the principles and strategies of the movement.19 Idealist philosophy emphasized social responsibility and public service, while the emerging discipline of political economy dictated that direct observation and statistical analysis were the best methods for studying the problems of urban life. Using these scientific methods for collecting data, reformers drew conclusions about how to address the emotionally charged, moral issues at the heart of reform ideals. In this context, photography seemed to provide an objective technology, and quickly became a popular means of gathering information. But it also played a central role in the impassioned way the reform vision was conveyed through newspapers, magazines, journals, government reports, pamphlets, and other media. While the scholarship on Toronto’s reform movement, and the numerous studies on Toronto in the field of urban history, are important sources on the city’s social, economic, and political conditions, these studies frequently use photographs as illustrations of historical conditions, rather than as sources of historical meaning.20 By using photographs as if they could be taken, unproblematically, as self-evident records of real places in the world, these works often assume that the city itself can be accessed and studied through such photographic documentation. With this approach, photography is seen as a transparent medium unaffected by the discourses that shape its production and use. In this study, I instead concentrate on the way the city’s social, physical, and economic development was affected by photography, and how photographs were employed by a range of groups, particularly the municipal government, social reformers, municipal researchers, civic improvement advocates, and the press, to influence the built environment and to constitute liberal subjects. By analyzing the work of photography in liberal governance, this book treats images as a vital part of cultural and political history, rather than as merely illustrations of people, places, and events. In order to look at how photography figured in the urban reform movement, this study engages with a rich body of literature on governmentality, which has contributed to a nuanced understanding of liberalism.21 My approach is related to Michel Foucault’s formulation of governmentality and the work that has arisen from it, which investigates both the complex intersections of power and knowledge in the strategies of liberal governance, and the production of social subjects, who are at once the targets of governance and the objects

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of knowledge that make government possible.22 Foucault and others have used governmentality as a broad term to refer to the means for regulating both individual conduct and the possibilities of action for populations, rather than as merely an analysis of state power.23 This expansive concept of governance emphasizes that all social relationships involve regulation in various forms, and that liberal systems of government establish frameworks for regulated freedom.24 As some of the key proponents of governmentality have pointed out, in this framework, government is considered “an attempt by those confronting certain social conditions to make sense of their environment, to imagine ways of improving the state of affairs, and to devise ways of achieving these ends.”25 This broad definition of government includes a wide range of reform initiatives in relation to the rationalities and techniques of traditional state government. Thus, governmentality offers a productive framework for analyzing the various ways photographs were taken up in attempts to implement the goals of the reform movement. Key to Foucault’s concept of governmentality is his theory of power. Power, he makes clear, must be understood as an active and dynamic relation that produces discourse, pleasure, knowledge, and truth, along with new kinds of subjects. Power is not merely negative and repressive, nor is it something that can be possessed. Rather, it is exercised in relation to physical bodies and is always variable and subject to resistance.26 Although subjects internalize the everyday regulatory mechanisms of modern liberal governance, it is also at the level of the everyday that mechanisms of power can be resisted. Foucault’s formulation of power/knowledge offers a framework for historical study that does not concentrate on uncovering the truth about historical circumstances. Instead, it emphasizes the effects and implications of sets of relations in the determination of what was considered to be “the truth” at a specific time and place. According to Foucault, “Truth is a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements.”27 It is produced in different ways at different times and places, but it always induces effects of power. By looking at urban reform and photography through the framework of governmentality, this study concentrates on how truth was constructed in a specific set of historical circumstances. It seeks to understand how discourses of photography informed the ordinary business of reform in the everyday life of the city. A common critique of Foucauldian governmentality is that studies arising from it have focused too much on the viewpoint of those in power, often overlooking the plight of marginalized groups and the question of resistance.28 Perhaps one of the more effective responses to this criticism comes in a review of governmentality scholarship in which the authors argue that rather than looking for resistance to come in the form of a specific, unified struggle against a power structure – an approach based on a conventional understanding of power as possessed by the state – studies of governmentality should attend to the conflicts and failures of a given political rationality. Studies of governmentality should focus on “how those who seek to govern imagine their world and seek to fashion it anew,” rather than on a falsely conceived binary of constraint versus freedom.29 This approach suggests we look at tensions between the appearance of inclusiveness and practices of regulation and exclusion that characterize liberal governmentality. So while this study does not attempt to speak for the

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many individuals and groups targeted by reform initiatives, it does aim to show how municipal authorities and reformers mobilized photography in their efforts to manage social conduct and define problems of the collective, as well as how photographs often failed to perform in the ways authorities intended, and thus how reforms were either resisted or were ineffective. It attends both to the complex ways in which the liberal political order constituted middle-class professionals as liberal subjects, and to the multifaceted attempts by reformers to establish the conditions under which immigrants and the working class would in turn become self-regulating liberal subjects. Studies of governmentality have long recognized the central role of the city in the formation of the modern state. As Foucault and others after him have shown, cities have been the focal point for debates about liberal modes of governance since the nineteenth century, just as they have been key sites for working out systems of government.30 In Canada, the project of state formation was well underway by the mid-nineteenth century with the implementation of a range of techniques for the collection of data and the production of knowledge, including geological surveys, cartography, and the gathering of statistics.31 Growing urban centres, particularly Toronto and Montreal, became increasingly important in attempts at nation-building, and as sites for rationalizing the conditions of the collective and normalizing individual conduct and social relations according to the principles of liberalism. As Michèle Dagenais has shown, municipal systems of governance were crucial to the larger project of establishing liberal governance within the province of Canada.32 The municipal system encouraged citizens to take responsibility for the everyday problems of their cities, from public works to garbage and health, and it prepared citizens to participate at other levels of government. Efforts to transform Toronto into an efficient, modern city involved gathering statistics and producing maps and photographs, which provided the data that formed the epistemological foundation of liberalism. In the following chapters, I focus on instances in which photography was central to attempts to convince the public to support a vision for an orderly urban environment and a unified social and political sphere. I show how and why the city became an important site in the production both of new relations of power and of new social subjects, from the “foreigner” to the professional.

Histories and Theories of Photography This investigation developed out of my encounter with photographs made by the official city of Toronto photographer, William Arthur Scott Goss, who produced thousands of images of many aspects of the city from 1911 until his death in 1940. This vast collection, housed at the City of Toronto Archives, is an important resource for understanding Toronto’s history, but its significance for histories of liberalism, modernity, and photography has not been adequately recognized. When I began my research, I was struck by the skillful, elegant, and expressive images I came across in this archive. One of the photographs that intrigued me depicts a solitary figure, dressed in an overcoat and hat, standing near the centre of the frame between two sets of railway tracks (figure 1.20). The man in the picture holds a card with the number fifteen written on it. The railroad ties, fence

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posts, and utility poles fade into the distance in the flat, misty light of an overcast day. The date of the photograph has been neatly inscribed (backwards) in black ink on the negative and is legible along the lower left-hand edge of the frame: B.V. No. 48 Oct. 18 1912. Even before I knew precisely why the photograph had been made, I was curious about Goss’s use of the aesthetic conventions of landscape photography. These conventions, which include a gentle recession into space, a penetrating line of sight, and an extended depth of field to ensure both the foreground and background are in focus, elicit a different mode of engagement than the numbered card that is at the centre and is the focal point of the image. Initially, I was interested in the slippage between the aesthetic treatment of the landscape and what appeared to be the scientific syntax of a land survey. In a photograph of the land, one might expect to find a difference between aesthetic and instrumental discourses as a difference in the way a location is depicted. With aesthetic approaches to picturing land, the landscape photographer might focus on conveying poetic feeling at the expense of showing a specific location, whereas in an instrumental image the specificity of the location is key. The image is valued precisely because it marks a location and ostensibly conveys information about that site. In Goss’s photograph, however, this kind of distinction is not made. The photograph appeals to feeling at the same time that it functions as a record. I wanted to understand this tension, and as I looked into this and other images in the collection, I began to question how civic officials used photographs such as this one to produce knowledge about the city, even as the images drew on a set of established aesthetic conventions. Following on my initial fascination with the images in the Goss collection, I began to explore the range of ways photography came to operate in Toronto during this crucial period in the city’s development. Looking at government reports, city planning documents, social service pamphlets, and newspapers, I found photographs at the heart of debates about what the city should look like, how it should operate, who should live in what areas, and under what kinds of conditions it was considered appropriate for people to live. Used as evidence of everything from the substandard housing adjacent to City Hall to the lack of playground facilities for children, photographs circulated by the press and municipal departments played a crucial role both in cultivating anxiety about the city’s rapid growth and changing demographics, and in fostering hope for the future. Photographs of the city’s poor, run-down areas aroused anxiety about disease and immorality, while photographs of eastern-, central-, and southern-European immigrants published in the city’s newspapers generated both unease and interest, and fueled debates about the country’s immigration policies. At the same time, however, photographs were also central to the way city officials reassured citizens that they were in control. Photographs of the urban landscape seemed to render a complex, heterogeneous environment into a manageable form and were used by city administrators to establish their authority over development decisions, and in one instance to advance a major infrastructure project. Meanwhile, civic improvement advocates used photographs of the changes made in other cities to stimulate desire for a modernized Toronto and to further the goals of city planning. In other words, photographs functioned as records, but they were also used to

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galvanize public opinion and constitute urban subjects. To analyze this new and complex intersection of photographic discourses, this book builds on studies of urban photography, as well as on histories of photography in Canada. Many twentieth-century cities had a robust culture of commercial, artistic, governmental, and vernacular photography, and historians of photography have studied urban photographic production using a variety of approaches. Photographs of early-twentiethcentury urban life have frequently been discussed in the context of what is often called either social reform photography or social photography. At times, studies have focused on the development of a distinct documentary genre, or alternatively, they have discussed photographic documentation as a historically specific practice and as an instrument of social engineering.33 The work of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine has been most extensively studied as examples of this practice. Photographs from this period have also been discussed in the context of modernity, as in Mary Warner Marien’s cultural history of photography, in which she argues that art photography was seen as separate from vernacular photography because of the prevailing assumption that mass culture was a lower form of culture, distinct from art.34 A few studies of urban photography have seen the social, political, and economic conditions of modernity as formative of new modes of visual experience, and these modes themselves have been taken as the source of new photographic visions and new architectural spaces.35 Another approach has been to fit the study of images of cities into the conventions of traditional art history by focusing on stylistic analysis or the aesthetic development of photography. For instance, in his history of photography and American urbanization, Peter Bacon Hales has attempted to trace the development of “an urban photographic style.”36 Histories of art photography of the period have also focused on stylistic development, discussing pictorialist groups such as the New York-based Photo-Secession and the Londonbased Linked Ring, and influential photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, in order to argue for an evolution from pictorialism to modernism.37 Studies such as these provide important context for considering the multiple ways photography influenced urbanization; however, by and large, these histories have focused on the idea of a progressive development of photography in which one genre or style is seen as superseding another. Instead, my approach is to address how the modern city itself was constituted in relation to the way city officials, social service agencies, reformers, the press, and others became involved with photography. In looking at a Canadian case study, this book necessarily engages with the growing body of scholarship on the history of photography in Canada. In their historiography of photography studies in Canada, Andrea Kunard and Carol Payne explain that from the 1960s to the 1990s, most of the research on Canadian historical photography was influenced by social history and focused on the archival collections of Library and Archives Canada, and to a lesser extent on Quebec studio photographers.38 With the turn to cultural theory, they note that issues of gender and race became more widely discussed, and a number of studies focused on recovering women photographers. Over the past decade, artists and scholars critical of Canada’s colonial legacy have played an important role in

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reclaiming historical representations of First Nations people.39 Additionally, recent studies, such as Payne’s book on the National Film Board of Canada Still Photography Division, explore crucial questions about the federal government’s use of photography in nation-building.40 Although there are some exceptions, much of the research on the history of photography in Canada has been carried out either by archivists or by academics and curators trained in art history. This research has given us a much richer understanding of aspects of the nation’s past and has been important for securing increased recognition for non-art photography in museum and gallery collections, as well as in the field of art history. However, as noted previously, the disciplinary boundaries between art history and history have limited the exchange of analytic frameworks. As a result, studies of photography have tended to use scholarship from Canadian history to provide context; meanwhile, in the field of history, visual material has been used to illustrate findings based on textual research, rather than as a crucial source for understanding the past. This book endeavours to bridge the gap between the disciplines by bringing the study of liberal governance from Canadian history into dialogue with theoretical concerns from the broader field of photography studies. The diversity of theoretical approaches within photography studies today attests to the growth of the field, its interdisciplinary character, and its broader significance within the humanities and social sciences. As Ed Welch and Jonathan Long have explained, the field of photography studies has drawn on frameworks from a range of disciplines as it has developed, making it difficult to define a limited set of approaches that constitute photographic theory.41 Yet, even though we cannot identify an overarching theory of photography, there are, nonetheless, conceptual frameworks that structure the particular questions at the heart of the different studies. Picturing Toronto is focused on the relation between power and knowledge, including the issue of how photographs were used as evidence, but it suggests a tension between the regulatory and affective discourses of photography, showing how they worked in tandem to make Toronto modern. Precedents for the approach I take in this study include several influential histories that have looked at discursive formations of photography as they emerged in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on the ideas of Foucault, now-classic studies by Allan Sekula and John Tagg in the late 1970s and early 1980s introduced new ways of thinking about how visual representations produce meaning, and about the relation between power and knowledge.42 As Sekula and Tagg have shown, photography was established as a new technique and procedure for the acquisition of truth in conjunction with the emergence of new social institutions and new fields of study in the pure, applied, and human sciences in the second half of the nineteenth century. These authors use the term “instrumental” to describe photographic representations that came to function as a technique of documentation and as a method of surveillance and record in administrative practices and in the newly professionalized social sciences of the nineteenth century. Institutions of social order – such as the police, the legal system, and modern systems of government, the medical sciences such as physiology, psychiatry, and clinical medicine, and the social sciences such as anthropology, sociology, and psychology – all emerged in the

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West in conjunction with photography. These studies have been important for considering the constitutive role of photography within institutions of the state and in relation to new strategies of governance, as well as for examining how meaning was instated in relation to specific discursive fields. From the late 1990s, a number of scholars published significant studies of instrumental photography, investigating some of the ways photographs have functioned as instruments of truth in a range of discursive fields, perhaps most notably in relation to colonial expansion. James Ryan has argued that the imperialist ideology of the British Empire during the Victorian period was sustained by photography as it was practised in relation to geographical exploration, military campaigning, hunting, and anthropology.43 Robin Kelsey has offered a new interpretation of Timothy O’Sullivan’s US geological survey photographs, in which he challenged formalist readings of the photographs and instead showed how they were used to justify territorial expansion.44 Also significant is Martha Sandweiss’s work on the relation between photography and the cultural imagination of the American West, which examines how photography was used to develop the narrative of American expansionism, including the notion of Native Americans as a “vanishing race.”45 Writing about the Canadian frontier, Carol Williams has convincingly shown how British settlers used photography to claim ownership of contested territory.46 Other scholars have further explored how photography has been mobilized in the production of modern social subjects in relation to concepts of gender and criminality, as well as in terms of new subject categories such as the worker and the consumer.47 This scholarship has significantly developed our understanding of photographs as sites where power is negotiated and subjectivity is constituted. Over the past decade, historians and theorists researching photography have turned to an array of new critical perspectives. As a result, the field has been greatly enriched by studies into how photography mediates relationships between people and involves encounters between photographer and subject, and image and viewer. This includes scholarship on the materiality of photographs, the ethics of witnessing, and the role of spectatorship in human rights struggles, as well as research into performativity and photography as a form of encounter.48 For example, in Martha Langford’s analysis of the work of Robert Minden, she describes a photographer, influenced by his sociological training, who emphasized the social aspects of photography in his documentation of Canadian exile communities in the 1970s and 1980s. Langford has suggested that Minden’s dialogical method foregrounded the collaborative aspects of photography, rendering it “an art of copresence.”49 In a related way, studies of anthropology and photography have increasingly focused on photographs as “contested sites of encounter and cultural exchange.”50 Also looking at the realm of inter-subjective relations, curator and theorist Ariella Azoulay has emphasized the political stakes of the social dimension of photography through her research on citizenship and human rights. Her idea of “the event of photography,” which she conceives of not in terms of an encounter between a photographer and a subject but instead as a form of “being-with-others,” involves interactions and even potential exchanges that do not necessarily result in actual photographs.51 These compelling new approaches

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emphasize the consequences of viewer responses to photographs and open up new questions about how photography shapes public discourse. Especially relevant for Picturing Toronto is the intensified interest in what has become known as the “affective turn.”52 Studies of affect have had a significant impact on the field of photography, resulting in a range of new research, as well as re-examinations of early attempts to articulate a theory of photography. Looking back to the late 1970s and early 1980s and the publication of Victor Burgin’s influential edited collection, Thinking Photography, Welch and Long have argued that Burgin’s book was a rejection of the emotional and reflective character of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, published in English one year earlier. Barthes’s text, they suggest, was a retreat from the rational modes of inquiry that guided his earlier work on photography.53 Elspeth Brown and Thy Phu have since analyzed the history of photography criticism, showing that even though a materialist, language-based model of analysis meant “thinking photography” dominated scholarship for several decades, thinking and feeling were not always as separate or opposed as one might expect.54 While a generation of scholars has been interested in the political stakes of instrumental photography, at the same time significant studies of personal, and more obviously emotional, work in the field have focused on family and other vernacular photographs to explore issues of identity, memory, and loss.55 And now, the turn towards affect has brought about a re-examination of Barthes’s Camera Lucida and a productive reconsideration of practices and effects of viewing.56 This renewed recognition of the multiple ways photographs can work in the world has opened up new possibilities for thinking about photographs of all kinds, from the vernacular to the instrumental and artistic. While the central questions of this book focus on knowledge and power and are informed by scholarship on instrumental photography, these concerns intersect with the way affect and emotion were activated as photography formed the basis of social exchanges on the streets and in the parlours and council chambers of Toronto. Studies of affect and emotion can be traced to psychoanalytic and philosophical sources, and while there are significant debates about how to define affect, it is normally characterized as more than simply an emotion because affect registers before the formation of the subject and is considered an imprint of the social on the body.57 It encompasses corporeal responses, including sensations and involuntary reactions such as flushed skin or an accelerated pulse. Emotions, cultural theorist Sara Ahmed tells us, are formed in relation to objects, but they can also influence the shape of objects. Emotions are transmitted through objects, which themselves can become “saturated with affect.”58 As photographs were imbued with affect, they participated in regulating the conduct of the social and became a central feature of modern life. As anthropologist William Mazzarella has explained, “Any social project that is not imposed through force alone must be affective in order to be effective.”59 The study of affect and emotion is important for understanding how power and knowledge worked in liberal governance because the circulation of affect served as a means to constitute subjects in relation to the social order.60 Affect therefore offers an important compliment to studies of liberal reform because the movement itself was motivated by an affective desire to engage with the conditions of modernity.

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Finally, before delving into the case studies, it is also necessary to account for how photography itself is understood in this study. Rather than taking photography as a coherent object or a unified medium or technology, I approach it as a discursive formation. Because we commonly use the term “photography” to refer to an array of practices, from the artistic to the instrumental, which operate across a range of institutional spaces, we tend to think of it as “a medium” with intrinsic qualities. However, by considering photography as a discursive formation, it becomes possible to understand the meaning and status of a photograph as always conditional and specific.61 With this approach, photographs are discursive outcomes in which the seemingly intrinsic qualities are not given, but instead are understood as contingent. The meaning and status of a photograph is considered variable, rather than latent and fixed. Meaning is instated through rules that govern and constrain the performance of the photograph; it is constantly produced and reproduced. By studying the specific ways in which meaning is generated, we gain insight into the epistemological field and the discursive realms in which photographs are active. In considering photography as a discursive formation, I reflect on how a specific set of historical circumstances gave rise to the range of ways in which photography intersected with the emergent liberal order and the attendant drive to reconfigure and rationalize the city and its inhabitants. As an analysis of a discursive field, this study is concerned with mapping the set of conditions that made it possible to conceive of a modern city and at the same time to delimit other possibilities.62 It looks at the range of mechanisms at work in early twentieth-century Toronto to define what was possible, rejecting a linear historical narrative in favour of examining the relations between the liberal political order and the fields in which photography operated. Seeking to understand both the complex specificity of the way photography was put to work and how photographs sometimes failed to operate in relation to a network of governmental and non-governmental sites, I look at the discursive field of photography as the basis for new forms of subjectivity and new social relations. Instead of looking for continuities and attempting to construct a unified or progressive account of the city’s history, this study looks at moments when photography was central to the disruption and contestation that characterized the process of modernization. In other words, I consider the meaning of photographs as the product of a complex intersection of the conditions of production, circulation, and use, in order to better understand how photography figured in attempts to advance a vision in which order and unity coalesced with the very idea of a modern city.

Outline of the Book This book is comprised of a series of case studies that together explore how photography came to define modernity in Toronto, and how the production and circulation of photographs contributed to the constitution of the modern city and its inhabitants. I focus on Toronto for two main reasons. While many cities across the continent struggled to become modern in the early twentieth century, it seems that photography was rarely so central to the constitution of modernity as it was in Toronto. And, having considered Toronto home for much of my life, I have a particular affective attachment to the history of the city. In

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the chapters that follow, I concentrate on two key sites of photographic intervention: the urban environment and liberal subjectivity. Thus, the book is organized into two sections. The first section deals with cases in which photographs played a central role in attempts to shape the built environment of the city. Chapter one traces the emergence of photography as a new bureaucratic apparatus in Toronto’s municipal government, showing how photography was invested with the works commissioner’s ambition and was used as a technology of government in attempts to assert control over the development of the city’s infrastructure. The second chapter examines the visual strategies employed by civic improvement advocates to set forth a vision for the future of Toronto. Comparing photographs in plans for Toronto with architectural renderings produced for the 1909 Plan of Chicago, this chapter shows how reform ideals were rendered in visual terms, and thus how images were used to stimulate desire for a city with the same aesthetic qualities as the photographs and renderings presented in the planning documents. Taken together, these two chapters explore how two different groups, city officials and civic planners, relied on different photographic discourses as they worked to produce an urban environment that would be conducive to the constitution of liberal subjectivity. In the second section of the book, three chapters examine different aspects of the way photography worked to constitute liberal subjects. Chapter three takes up the question of how the municipal government and civic organizations used photography as an instrument of urban reform. Turning to “the Ward,” one of the most discussed and yet most marginalized spaces of the city, it focuses on the way evidentiary photographs were used to generate fear in the push for new reform measures. Chapter four explores the intersection of fascination and anxiety by considering how photography shaped ideas about central- and eastern-European immigrants living in Toronto during a period when theories about which immigrants could be assimilated and how acculturation should happen were under debate. It looks at variations in the way select newspapers, magazines, and settlement house pamphlets articulated ethnic difference and positioned immigrants, specifically Jews and Italians, for working-class and middle-class readers, and it considers how studio portraits offered newcomers a way to negotiate issues of class and identity. Chapter five focuses on a selection of portraits by city photographer Arthur Goss to consider how his work constituted different kinds of photographic subjects. Where Goss’s artistic portraits celebrated individualism and liberal subjectivity, his work for the city focused on those who were the targets of reform initiatives and served as evidence of the positive impact of liberal reform policies. By connecting questions of subjectivity to the context of the making of modern Toronto, and by looking at the conventions that governed Goss’s photographic production, I show how his portrait photography contributed to the constitution of new, and specifically liberal, urban subject categories, and thus how both photographic discourses were ultimately shaped by anxiety about modern urban life. The book concludes with a brief reflection on why photography was so important during the first two decades of the twentieth century and how its role has since changed. In the following chapters, each case study explores an aspect of the way photography affected the emergence of urban modernity in Toronto during the early twentieth

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century. Overall, the book examines how photography figured in the formation of the modern city, and how it was used in attempts to solve the perceived problems of modern urban life. It explores why photography was so central to the multifaceted attempts to establish the conditions through which liberal subjects were constituted and could exercise their freedom. I maintain that it was because photographs seemed to be at once rational and emotional. They could be used as evidence, but they could also produce strong affective responses and capture the imaginations of viewers. As we shall see, photography was used to express ambition and desire, as well as to arouse fear, anxiety, and fascination. With this distinctive relation to reason and sensation, photography paralleled the discourses of modernity.

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Section I The City

CHAPTER ONE

Making a Modern City

By the early twentieth century, North America’s photographic industry was well established and photography was widely practised, both as a profession and as a leisure pursuit. In Toronto, commercial photography studios, such as Alexandra Studios on Queen Street West, produced portraits and photographed weddings and social events. They also marketed photographs of landmarks, streetscapes, and other features of urban life to visitors and local residents. Meanwhile, itinerant photographers soliciting customers in public parks were so prevalent that city officials identified them as a public nuisance.1 The technically skilled photographers of Toronto’s Camera Club sought out picturesque views in and around the city, and casual amateurs armed with Kodak’s easy-to-use instant cameras took snapshots of their friends and families involved in the activities of modern urban life. Various aspects of the city were also routinely depicted in news photographs, providing a mass readership with an unprecedented set of visual references. For instance, press photographer William James depicted Toronto’s burgeoning urban economy in a photograph of bank messengers carrying bags of money down King Street, while in an image of the fair grounds at the Canadian National Exhibition he portrayed the city as a vibrant site of new social relations. A photograph of newsreel and press photographers gathered at Queen’s Park on the steps of the Ontario Legislative Building affirms the centrality of photography to reporting on the daily activities of the city. The increase in illustrated news stories gave readers a new kind of visual access to the city, inviting them to participate, even if only vicariously, in the events of the city. Photographs came to serve as sources of information that allowed people of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds and differing education levels to learn about current events and issues. The prevalence and diversity of photographic practices meant that making and looking at photographs became an important way of encountering and relating to the city.

Fig. 1.1 Opposite top Unknown photographer, Lou Turofsky and others outside the Alexandra Studios, 338 Queen Street West, 1920s. Fig. 1.2 Opposite bottom William James (Canadian, born England, 1866–1948), Group of bathers being photographed at Hanlan’s Point, 1913. Fig. 1.3 Below William James, Bank Messengers, King Street West, 1912.

Fig. 1.4 William James, “The House That Jack Built” Midway Game, Canadian National Exhibition, 1913.

Fig. 1.5 William James, Newsreel and Press Photographers, Queen’s Park, 1911.

It was within this photographic milieu that in 1911, amidst dramatic changes in Toronto brought about by industrialization and urbanization, city councilors voted to hire William Arthur Scott Goss as the city’s first official photographer. Born in London, Ontario, on 4 March 1881, Arthur Goss moved to Toronto with his family in 1883, where his father, John Goss, worked in the newspaper and publishing industries. In 1891, when his father died, the young Goss was taken out of school and went to work as an office boy in the city engineer’s office.2 He was promoted to clerk of street repairs in 1899, and was employed as a clerk and a draughtsman for nearly twenty years before taking up the newly formed position of head of the photography and blueprinting section in 1911. Working until his death in 1940, Goss produced thousands of photographs for a range of municipal departments.3 As the city photographer, Goss was regularly called upon to photograph the activities of all municipal departments, including, in the early years, related agencies such as the Toronto Harbour Commission.4 Photographs for the Works Department included everything from street cleaning and sewer construction to the city’s new hydroelectric system. For the Property Department Goss photographed the condition of public buildings, and for the Assessment Department it was houses and trees. For the Claims Department, he was charged with making records for evidence in accident claims. The Health Department required photographs of unsanitary conditions along with images of laboratory work.5 Under Goss’s oversight, the photography section produced over 3,000 prints in the first year alone. Some of these photographs were used as evidence in government reports, and some were circulated to a wider public through newspapers and other published materials. Others were never published, but were used internally to identify problems that needed to be addressed, to track the progress of particular projects, or to report on new technologies and methods for carrying out a department’s work. With Goss as the city photographer, photographs quickly became an important resource in government operations. How did the municipal government mobilize Goss’s photography in their effort to address the perceived problems of the city? And how did the photographs themselves advance the creation of a modern city and a liberal political order? Goss’s photographic survey for the construction of the Bloor Viaduct offers a revealing case study of the systematic production of photographs for the municipal government. As the bureaucratic apparatus worked to frame this survey as evidence, instrumental photography became an important source for representations of the city. Photography, in turn, became imbued with one city commissioner’s ambitions for Toronto’s future, and the resulting images were used to influence expansion. Reflecting on discourses of surveillance, this chapter shows that civic officials relied on Goss’s photographs to render the urban environment and its population governable by directing the development of the city’s infrastructure. Then, considering Goss’s artistic interests, it explores how the aesthetic strategies he employed in the survey photographs also cultivated ideas about progress and modernity. I explain how the formal qualities of the photographs worked to advance their instrumental use in the constitution of a liberal citizenry and a modern city.

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Photography as a Bureaucratic Apparatus With the hiring of an official city photographer, the Works Department created a bureaucratic apparatus for the production, collection, and circulation of photographs of the city, which up to that point had been carried out on an ad hoc basis. The Engineer’s Department had been using photographs to monitor the progress of its projects since 1891. Select images were used to illustrate annual reports, particularly to demonstrate the scale and complexity of certain public works projects described in these reports. At first, local commercial photographers Frank Micklethwaite, Josiah Bruce, and others took these photographs. Then in 1899, a program for photography services was set up in the Engineer’s Department and city employee Arthur Rust began producing the photographs. The images were typically distant views of construction sites that indicated how complicated projects were carried out, such as laying massive sewer pipes from the Sewage Disposal Works across Ashbridge’s Bay and out into Lake Ontario.6 Other government departments also occasionally commissioned commercial photographers to work on particular projects; however, this intermittent use of photography differed in scale and significance from photographic work after 1910. The primary significance of these early efforts may have been that they intensified demand for images of work undertaken by government departments to the extent that, when a full-time city photographer was hired, photography was readily accepted as an important part of the day-to-day operations of city departments.7 When the Works Department was formed in 1912 with Roland Caldwell Harris appointed commissioner and city engineer, the photography and blueprinting work for the city was transferred from the obscurity of the Sewer Department to the new and separate branch.8 Harris, himself an amateur photographer, evidently recognized the potential of integrating photography into the everyday activities of the municipal government, and he encouraged civic officials in other departments to use Goss’s services.9 Instrumental photography was only one of a whole range of institutionalized photographic practices and discourses, and it was the institutional framework more than the images themselves that distinguished governmental work from the broader field of photography. Under Harris’s direction, Goss instituted a meticulous, standardized procedure for the production of official photography. Orders were placed by telephone, in person, or through a written requisition form; negatives were made and “numbered, titled, printed, developed, fixed, washed, dried and trimmed.”10 Under ordinary conditions, the process took two days, but rush orders could take as few as two hours. Prices were set according to the type of work and the size of print. Lantern slides, for example, cost twenty-five cents, whereas trimmed 5 ⫻ 7 inch prints cost ten cents. One dollar was charged “for time taken in going out to make exposures.”11 After a photograph had served the purpose for which it had been made, it was sent to the head office of the Works Department where it was classified, first according to size – standard or not standard – and then according to subject. Standard photographs were filed in binders, while those not of standard size were placed in enclosures and indexed by subject and then by alphabetical order. Photographs were regularly loaned out, and a system was established to ensure they were returned promptly and were re-filed in the appropriate place.12 This methodical system for

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Fig. 1.6 Above G.G. Powell, Annual Report of the City Engineer, 1910. Fig. 1.7 Requisition Form, Department of Works, Photography and Blue Printing Section, c. 1910s.

archiving photographs guaranteed that the work produced for each project and for each municipal department was kept together. For instance, Goss created a subseries for all the photographs taken of street grading on Bloor Street, as well as a subseries for photographs produced for the city surveyor.13 The bureaucratic standards and protocols of the photography and blue printing section aimed to regularize photographic practice as much as possible in order to institute its role within governance. This systematic process for making and filing shows that Goss’s photographs were taken to fulfill specific governmental requests, but another outcome was a framework both for gathering information about the city and its inhabitants, and managing and constraining the use and meaning of the photographs to support the ideals of liberalism. The filing system assured the authority of the information it contained, while the methodical system of production, distribution, and archiving provided assurance for users that the photographs were transparent records of the activities and sites depicted in them.14 In other words, the system naturalized the instrumental use of photographs. This bureaucratic use of photography was based on the same epistemology as the use of statistics and cartography, and was therefore similar to these other means of producing knowledge about the city. In particular, the expectations that Goss’s photographs would serve as records of real conditions paralleled contemporary assumptions about maps as objective sources of data. As studies in the history of cartography have shown, however, maps are cultural systems embedded in a politics of knowledge, meaning they are both constructed by and constitutive of political and social effects.15 The abstract, scientific rhetoric of cartography facilitated its use as a technology of liberal governance by standardizing and homogenizing space such that it became possible to organize and construct the city as an object of knowledge.16 The process of mapping the city of Toronto preceded the systematic use of photography within government by many decades. Indeed, even the

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Fig. 1.8 James Cane, Topographical Plan of the City and Liberties of Toronto in the Province of Canada, 1842.

Toronto Purchase of 1787, in which the deputy superintendent of Indian affairs obtained land from the Mississauga, was negotiated with the aid of maps. To be sure, the use of maps to mediate the expropriation of land from a First Nations group explicitly demonstrates the relationship between the abstract representation of a territory and control over it.17 The early maps and surveys of the area that became Toronto defined it as an unoccupied territory that could be seized, reinforcing the colonial notion that Toronto was a site available for British settlement.18 Cartography was thus a significant means of defining the modern against the supposedly primitive and pre-modern well before the use of photography. As the city grew after the incorporation of Toronto in 1834, numerous detailed maps were produced, including some, such as the 1842 map of the city and surrounding area, that were published commercially and thus circulated widely, rendering a particular way of understanding the modern city accessible to a broad readership.19 The role of mapping within liberal governance is also evident when looking at fire insurance plans, a highly specialized form of map developed for use by fire insurance underwriters. These maps compiled detailed information about the physical characteristics of structures, including building material, size and layout, the thickness of walls, and the type of roof. The data gathered by surveyors was recorded on a map of the city streets using line and colour to delineate property boundaries, construction materials, and fire protection provisions such as water mains, hydrants, and alarm boxes. First produced in Canada in the early nineteenth century, but in regular use in Toronto after 1880, these standardized maps allowed for a comparison of property at the level of individual streets and districts.20 The spatial concentration of buildings made of wood, for example, was easily

Fig. 1.9 Charles Goad Atlas, 1910 revised to 1912, showing the northeastern area of the city prior to viaduct construction.

29

Fig. 1.10 Edgar Gariépy (Canadian, 1881–1956), Montréal: Tramway sur la rue Saint-Denis, c. 1914.

discerned, and the value of a property combined with its risk of fire was used to calculate insurance rates. Maps were an important means of constituting the city as an object of knowledge, and decisions about its development could be made and rationalized in relation to that knowledge. Like cartography, photography was another discourse of modernity mobilized to negotiate and manage the problems of the modern city. Although photographs of cities are common in the history of photography, the comprehensive and systematic character of Goss’s work makes the situation in Toronto quite unusual. In many cities, municipal governments never did hire an official city photographer; instead, commercial photographers produced the majority of photographs of the urban environment. Montreal offers a case in point. There, photography relating to the city focused more on scenic views than on governance. Starting in the late-nineteenth century, William Notman and his sons photographed panoramas and streetscapes, but because Notman was in the business of producing photographs for public sale, in most cases these images depicted picturesque views or noteworthy events that were likely to appeal to customers. The Notman studio, which operated until 1935 when Notman’s son Charles retired, is arguably more significant for its contribution to Canadian nation-building than for influencing urban

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development within the city of Montreal. Like Canada’s first official photographer, Samuel McLaughlin, who photographed public works projects including the construction of the parliament buildings in Ottawa, Notman and his sons were interested in portraying the progress of the nation.21 At the same time that Goss was photographing sewers and road construction sites in Toronto, the Québécois photographer Edgar Gariépy was focusing on Montreal architecture and views of the changing conditions of urban and rural life in and around the city, occasionally selling his photographs to institutions such as la Commission des monuments historiques de la province de Québec.22 As these examples show, photographs of Montreal, produced for the most part by photographic studios and other commercial photographers, emphasized the scenic and historic features of that city, whereas in Toronto photography was important in making the city modern. Also worth noting are photographs of Winnipeg by Lewis Benjamin Foote. Foote, who worked as a commercial photographer from about 1905 until 1948 (when he was injured in an accident), is known for his images of the slums in the city’s north end, which were used by the social gospel movement in publications about urban decay.23 He also photographed the city’s labourers, and the labour unrest that resulted in the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, along with other more ordinary events such as winter carnivals and weddings. Foote was resourceful and adaptable, working on commissions for a wide variety of clients. Thus, while his photographs offer a fascinating account of urban life, they are not part of a systematic attempt to manage it. In contrast to commercial photographers, or photographers working on projects of national importance, a city photographer was able to participate more systematically in the documentation and management of urban issues. For example, when Charles Marville was hired as the official photographer of Paris in 1862, he worked to produce a comprehensive series of photographs of the old city. This series focused on the limitations of the pre-modern city, including its narrow cobblestone streets and cul-de-sacs. Marville’s work was intended as a record of those parts of the city on the verge of being demolished to accommodate Baron Haussmann’s ambitious plan of improvements.24 Like Goss’s work for the city of Toronto, Marville’s systematic documentation of aspects of the city of Paris was implicated in a broad program of modernization. However, in contrast to the way photographs were used in Paris and other cities, Goss regularized all photographic production for the municipal government. In doing so, he made it possible for the city’s bureaucrats to mobilize photography as a tool for negotiating the changing conditions of modern urban life. Perhaps the photographic production that is most comparable to that of Goss is the work of Eugene de Salignac, the photographer for the New York City Department of Bridges/Plant and Structures from 1906 to 1934. Like Goss, de Salignac was a city employee and a meticulous record keeper who produced an extensive collection of photographs that recorded the day-to-day work of the city, including the construction of major infrastructure projects.25 Although he worked for a specific municipal department, de Salignac’s assignments were diverse and covered work for the mayor and other city departments, including Sanitation and Weights and Measures. Using an 8 ⫻ 10 inch large-format camera

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Fig. 1.11 Eugene de Salignac (American, 1861–1943), Queensboro Bridge, template of 10-foot car at first tower Manhattan shore, on north outside track, template on present track line and 1’11” above present grade, 1914.

and glass plate negatives, he photographed bridge and subway construction, street scenes, accidents, the waterfront, workers, and even some political events and radio personalities, all at a time when the city was rapidly changing. Although we do not know how de Salignac came to learn photography or how he understood his practice, it is fair to say that, like Goss, he was technically skilled and understood how to produce engaging compositions. Both photographers made images that exceeded the mere documentation of the activities of city departments by adopting at times similar aesthetic strategies, such as the juxtaposition of incongruous details. Goss and de Salignac thus participated in the dramatic process of modernization in their respective cities. Goss’s photographic work for the city was produced alongside, and contributed to, the spatial restructuring of Toronto in the early twentieth century. The transformation of the city, which was driven by industrialization, the sudden growth of the population, and an accompanying demand for increased and improved services, precipitated an ambitious program to improve public works overseen by Commissioner Harris. In little over a decade, Toronto had more than doubled in area and population, growing from approximately 208,000 residents in 1901 to a major urban centre of thirty-four square miles and

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Fig. 1.12 Arthur Goss (Canadian, 1881–1940), Gasoline Motor Flusher, 1922.

over 450,000 people by 1914.26 Everything from roads and bridges to sewer systems and water filtration needed to be modernized. The health of urban dwellers and the efficiency of the economy were prime concerns. The city’s streetscape was most radically reshaped by the construction of bridges, the elimination of level rail crossings, and the widening and paving of roads to accommodate motorized vehicles.27 The photographs Goss produced for the Works Department show many of these development projects, including street grading and widening, bridge, underpass, and sewer construction, street cleaning, and garbage disposal, as well as the variety of vehicles used in these activities, which was gradually shifting at this time from horse-drawn carts to motorized trucks.28 In Goss’s day, these photographs provided records to assist with the routine business of the Works Department, which focused on improving the physical environment of the city. Today, the photographs help us to understand how photography participated in the modernization of the city. The desire to transform the city corresponded to the new knowledge generated by Goss’s photographs, and produced the new systems of management that mobilized these photographs to advance the pace and scale of development and the overall improvement of urban life according to the ideals of liberalism.

Instrumental Photography and Infrastructure Development As studies in material history have shown, the physical environment of a city is not merely a background for social interaction. Rather, urban infrastructure affects human subjectivity in multiple ways.29 The development of modern urban infrastructure was crucial to the constitution of a modern city, which, in turn, established the conditions necessary for liberal subjectivity. In Toronto, one of the most significant initiatives to modernize the city was a much-debated proposal to build a bridge across the Don Valley, which would link

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a recently annexed northeastern section of Toronto with the downtown core. (Refer to figure 1.9 for Charles Goad’s fire insurance plan of the area prior to viaduct construction.) From 1909, when the bridge was first seriously considered, to 1915, when construction started, the Bloor Viaduct became a focal point for questions about growth, transportation, housing, and the management of the city. During this period, the district to the east of the valley was both difficult to access and sparsely populated, and the proposed bridge was envisioned as an efficient transportation route for people and goods. The bridge was expected to foster future development in the recently annexed area and was considered important for the social and economic benefits it would bring. Namely, it would help to eliminate congestion in the downtown core and would support suburban development.30 Following an extensive report on transportation produced by a New York engineering firm in 1910, which emphasized the need for new routes and recommended schemes that required constructing a viaduct to connect streets in the city’s east end with downtown thoroughfares, municipal officials repeatedly discussed building a viaduct over the Don Valley.31 By 1912, the mayor, governing council, and other city officials were convinced that the bridge was crucial, both to the city’s future development and to the elimination of areas in the downtown that had been identified as slums. They argued that a bridge would provide an efficient transportation route, which would open up new areas to commercial and residential development. The bridge was also crucial to Commissioner Harris’s ambitious plans to modernize the city, and the design, which included a lower deck for the street railway with the potential for future development for a subway, demonstrates the foresight and efficiency with which he embraced this undertaking.32 However, the bridge was only one of numerous development schemes under consideration in the rapidly growing city, and it was important to secure the necessary funding for this costly endeavour. Because the city had to borrow money for the project, a majority of voters were required to endorse it. Photography proved to be an important tool not just in the eventual construction of the bridge but also in the very process of securing the necessary funding for it. In the fall of 1912, early in his tenure as the city’s photographer, Goss was asked to produce a photographic survey of the proposed route for the Bloor Viaduct. Its purpose was to gather data and to produce a record of the conditions of the land prior to development. Photographic surveys became routine for street extensions and widenings when Goss was hired; however, the survey for the proposed bridge took place even before the project had been approved.33 It was part of the preliminary work commissioned by city council in preparation for what would be a successful proposal to voters in the January 1913 election.34 Two previous proposals, one in 1910 and another in 1912, in which constituents were asked to authorize the issue of debentures for the construction of the bridge, had failed to receive support from a majority of voters.35 Neither of these earlier defeated proposals had been prepared with photographic support. The cost, the materials (concrete or steel), and the route of the bridge were all contentious issues.36 Concerned with working out a plan for a third proposal to present to voters, city council commissioned Goss’s photographic survey of the route, along with an extensive set of borings, levels, cross-

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Fig. 1.13 Bloor Viaduct Survey, copy of tracing of general survey, 4 June 1913.

sections, and a general survey.37 These preliminary procedures aided in the preparation of plans and specifications for the proposed bridge. The survey photographs taken by Goss were not presented to voters directly; rather, they provided detailed information for the preparation of contract drawings. The photographs were one component of the data that was collected to determine surface and sub-surface conditions in the valley.38 Architects, engineers, and Works Department employees used the photographs, along with other information, to work out cost assessments and to determine materials for the proposed bridge. For the engineers, the photographs provided technical data equivalent to architectural drawings, but with more detail.39 The photographs, which depict the land along the proposed viaduct route, the surrounding streets, and the adjacent properties, supplied the specialized knowledge necessary to prepare a comprehensive proposal that conveyed Harris’s ambitions and evidently convinced voters of the project’s importance for the future of the city. Goss’s photographic survey of the viaduct route and environs could only effectively provide the data necessary to shepherd the proposal through to adoption if it was accepted as a record of real conditions in and around the Don Valley. Taking one photograph from the series as an example, we can see how the systematic method of the survey worked to establish the photographs as evidence and to transform the valley into an objectified site that could be acted upon. The photograph shows a man in profile, dressed in a dark suit and hat, standing amidst the trees and undergrowth of the Don Valley, holding out a card printed with the number two. Three more men are pictured in the image, all of them in the background, standing on an incline in the path. One of the men is looking into the scope on his surveying equipment, and the other two are looking down at the photographer. Sunlight beams through the trees, illuminating the leaves covering the valley floor and emphasizing their texture. A screen of trees defines the background and frames the middle ground occupied by the surveyors.

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Fig. 1.14 Arthur Goss, Bloor Viaduct Survey, no. 19, 17 October 1912.

Drawing on the pictorial conventions of landscape photography, which in turn borrowed from painting, the photograph emphasizes texture and light, a gentle recession into the picture plane, and a high horizon line. However, for the purposes of the survey, it was the numbered card that was the important feature. The survey photographs mapped the route of the viaduct by tracking men holding numbered cards, while the cards corresponded to precise locations in and around the valley. Thomas Taylor, the Works Department’s construction engineer who collaborated with architect Edmund Burke to design the bridge, described the photographs as “a permanent record of original conditions.”40 In an article on the viaduct, he outlined the process where, for each image, the position of the camera was marked on a key plan with a small circle. The direction the camera was pointing was shown on the plan by an arrow, and the number of each photograph was written in each circle.41 All of the images were carefully plotted so that it was possible to determine the precise spot where each photograph was taken and where each numbered card was located. By plotting the positions of the camera onto the key plan, the surveyors mapped out the physical geography of the Don Valley as it was photographed. While the scenic representations of trees and shrubs adopted pictorial conventions from artistic representations of the landscape, the aesthetic quality of the images was subjugated to the instrumental one. For the photographs to function effectively as records, their aesthetic

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qualities had to be disregarded. In addition, it was essential to establish a direct relationship between the site and the image, which is what the key plan and general survey did. In this way, the systematic process of the survey standardized and homogenized a complex natural environment, producing space as an abstraction and constituting an area within the city as an object of knowledge. While it was being built, Goss’s photographs of the viaduct’s construction were published in a range of reports and articles celebrating the bridge as a feat of modern engineering. The Toronto Board of Trade, a business organization concerned with the city’s economic development, included a section on the viaduct in its 1915 yearbook outlining the project’s history and progress.42 Four of Goss’s photographs of pier construction and the erection of structural steelwork emphasize the ambitious scale of the undertaking described in the text. The details of the project convey a sense of wonder at both the magnitude of the bridge and the materials and technology required for its construction: “The construction of this bridge involves approximately 50,000 cu. yds. of excavation, 43,000 cu. yds. of concrete, and 11,500,000 pounds of structural steel” and “the two piers supporting the arch span were carried down into rock to a depth of about 30 feet below the roadway in the valley.”43 Similar articles on the viaduct appeared in engineering publications such as The Canadian Engineer and The Contract Record. These articles used Goss’s construction photographs to show structural features and details, and to convey the significance of the project to a readership interested in modern building methods. The bridge, described in one progress report as “probably the largest viaduct in the empire” was predicted to transform the economy and change the city’s traffic routes.44 As urban historian Richard Dennis has argued, the bridge was a symbol of modernity and “an essential link in the making of a networked city.”45 The standardized approach used in Goss’s survey brings to mind Allan Sekula’s assertion that the instrumental use of photography by the modern state is dependent on the filing system, rather than the camera, in its claim of truth.46 Goss evidently recognized how important it was to catalogue the hundreds of photographs he produced over a period of several months in 1913 during his survey for the Bloor Viaduct.47 Using a meticulous system of record keeping that was common among photographers working to produce instrumental images for government projects and photographic surveys, Goss recorded the series, number, and date of each exposure on the negative to ensure that the images could be identified as records of particular places or events on specific days. And Goss’s survey photographs were accepted as records of conditions along the viaduct route prior to construction. The success of city council’s bid for public support to build the bridge and the construction of this major public works project are both evidence of that.

Property and the Liberal Order With the relationship between the plans, the photographs, and the valley established, Commissioner Harris used Goss’s survey to manage the site and the progress of construction, in particular to rationalize land expropriations and to achieve his objective, all the while making the case for civic order. When Goss undertook the survey, very little of

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the land in the area belonged to the city, and the surveyors were not permitted to cut trees or to otherwise alter private property.48 In sections of the survey that crossed private land, the photographs were taken as records of property that the city would have to obtain. For instance, one survey photograph recorded the spot where the bridge would connect with the wealthy enclave of Castle Frank Road. The two properties depicted in the image were eventually cleared to make way for the viaduct. It was only after the property and dwellings along the route had been carefully photographed and plotted on a plan, and voters had approved the city’s proposal for the bridge, that a by-law was passed allowing the city to begin acquiring or clearing the land.49 Although the photographic survey was not solely responsible for the expropriation of land, photography did make doing so seem more palatable and necessary to the general public and possibly to the owners of the properties in question. In other instances, Goss’s survey photographs were important to the land clearance process because they depicted areas of undeveloped land as unused and therefore available. Where possible, the route was planned across lands regarded as vacant, and areas with unregulated, poorly constructed shelters that were purposefully staked out for development. A photograph showing a dilapidated shack and the barren land behind some houses offers an example of how survey images supported the city’s mandate for controlled growth. Off

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Fig. 1.15 Opposite Arthur Goss, Bloor Viaduct Survey, no. 25, 17 October 1912. Fig. 1.16 Above Arthur Goss, Bloor Viaduct Survey, no. 13, 16 October 1912.

to the right of the frame and behind a pile of scrap, a blurred figure hovers while a surveyor stands with his numbered card in the distance beyond the shack. The distant view pictured here situates the bleak, ramshackle structure in the centre between the undeveloped land on the left and a residential area on the right. The photograph emphasizes the uncertain state of this area by focusing on dirt and piles of debris, rather than on the people who might use the land, making it seem all the more ready for development. As other scholars have noted, photographs of undeveloped or transitional land played a significant role in nineteenth-century colonial settlement because they could be used to argue that land was available to be populated and developed.50 Goss’s survey for the viaduct is an urban equivalent of the photographic mapping of colonial territories because it too attempted to construct space as an abstract territory in which landscapes perceived as disorderly were considered ripe for possession and improvement. In the debates over the route of the viaduct, city officials and civic improvement advocates were concerned about preserving land values and developed residential property as much as possible, as well as

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conserving the natural beauty of the Rosedale Ravine and the sections suitable for parkland. Safeguarding the shacks of the poor was not a consideration.51 Photographs like this one not only mapped the landscape, they confirmed that the preferred route would help to both eliminate unregulated buildings and improve the area. The survey photographs converted a heterogeneous environment – which included significant natural features such as a major river, steep hills, and areas dense with trees, along with constructed elements, such as roads, residences, and businesses – into manageable component parts. Each photograph contributed to the series as a whole, and taken together, the over 800 photographs were put to work in the service of a progressive narrative of modernization. In a related manner, Goss’s survey also helped to advance the cause of land expropriation by depicting some residential areas as disorderly. Although the bridge route avoided developed land as much as possible, the eastern connection of the Bloor Viaduct extended into the residential streets of a well-off neighbourhood, and a few families were displaced when their properties were claimed by the city. In photograph twenty-five of the survey (figure 1.15), the man with the numbered card stands in profile at the centre of the image, positioned in the treed area between two houses. The number on the card is not visible because of glare from the sun; however, another numbered card – card seven – sits on a post, jutting out from behind a tree. There are two houses on either side of the image, cut off by the frame. With the numbered cards as the focal point of the image, the other elements in the photograph – the wooden swinging chair in the foreground, the shed behind it, the pathway winding its way between the houses, and the houses at either edge

Fig. 1.17 Arthur Goss, Bloor Viaduct Survey, no. 166, Castle Frank Road, 3 July 1913.

of the frame – become visual obstacles. Because of the unconventional framing of the scene, the pictorial elements appear to clutter the image, distracting the viewer from the survey cards. The photograph depicts the area as lacking picturesque features, and thus the image supports the idea that these plots of land could be improved through expropriation and development. Although displacement was uncommon, the city did take over the two properties in the photograph, and many more houses were built in the area following construction of the bridge. Land expropriation is implicitly tied to concepts of property ownership, which, as historian Ian McKay reminds us, is a core feature of the liberal order that forms, among other things, the basis for claims to the status of individual.52 McKay describes how as liberalism and capitalism became intertwined in Canada, property ownership became a “measure of political and social worthiness” that enabled the individual to benefit from its sale or exchange.53 Among the diverse effects the viaduct had on the city was the validation and reinforcement of the individual’s right to profit from property ownership. As the city acquired land prior to the construction of the bridge, individual property owners were apparently aware of the financial gains they were likely to see when the new infrastructure was complete. In fact, some residents of the area not only benefited from the new development, they pushed for it. In a letter to a local newspaper, one citizen suggested that if it were not for the persistent lobbying of property owners with land to the east of the Don Valley, the bid for the viaduct would seem an “almost farcical” and extravagant project because it would only benefit “really a very small portion of the population.”54 The rise in property values in the Castle Frank area adjacent to the bridge in the east demonstrates the financial benefits of the new infrastructure for landowners in the area. A comparison of the assessment rolls for the years before and after approval of the viaduct development clearly shows the increase in property values at the eastern connection of the bridge. For example, the 1911 assessment rolls record twenty-four vacant lots along Drumsnab Road and Castle Frank Road, all belonging to the same man.55 The lots ranged in size and, therefore, in value, but by 1921 were each worth three and a half to four times as much as they had been in 1911, and they had all been sold to the city of Toronto.56 The significant increase in value in only ten years (between $3,960 and $4,725) of lots bordering the viaduct roadway was a direct result of the viaduct development. Another indication of the rise in property values is evident from an assessment of one house on Castle Frank Road pictured in Goss’s survey that tracked the value of the building and the land separately. The residence constructed in 1909 saw only a modest increase in value; however, the land value almost doubled by 1921.57 This dramatic rise is explained by the new transportation route that allowed for easy access to the rest of the city. By using the photographic survey to assist in expropriating land for the viaduct, the Works Department valorized property owners as models of liberal subjectivity in accordance with techniques of liberal governance. Furthermore, the whole process of voter endorsement was another way in which liberal governance operated, because it was a means through which citizens were prompted to understand themselves as owners of the city’s infrastructure.

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While city councilors seem to have responded to the pressure of wealthy landowners, they were also captivated by Commissioner Harris’s vision of a modern city. They backed the new bridge for its potential to open up a habitable area of the city and, at the same time, to improve the living situation in the inner city. Therefore, the viaduct project also had an impact on the working poor, many of whom lived in the downtown area under conditions that were considered sub-standard. In his 1914 inaugural address to the people of the city, Mayor Horatio Hocken emphasized the need for further annexations to gain control over the areas under development. With plans for viaduct construction underway, he explained that the area adjacent to Danforth Avenue must be annexed because the northeastern district was expected to develop rapidly with the construction of the viaduct and the opening of a new streetcar line. Although there were relatively few existing dwellings and businesses, there was considerable land designated for new construction, and Mayor Hocken described the Danforth Avenue district as “well suited to provide homes for a large working class population.”58 Among other benefits, the viaduct offered the possibility of relocating members of the working class who were concentrated in a downtown area often referred to at the time as a slum, which was perceived by some as uncomfortably close to City Hall.59 Under liberal governance, we witness what Patrick Joyce has referred to as the “objectification of power and social relations.”60 This objectification came in the form of new indirect methods of government, which established the conditions under which liberalism could operate. These were seemingly politically neutral material changes in the urban environment, and changes to the way the surroundings were pictured, which actually had significant political effects. In Toronto, both the bureaucratic use of photography and infrastructure projects like the viaduct should be considered examples of such objectifications – they were modifications that reconfigured the possibilities for conduct and established the conditions for new forms of social relations. The construction of the bridge enlarged the livable area of the city, stimulating private development and property ownership in the city’s northeastern district. Within only a few years of the bridge’s completion, many new homes and businesses had been constructed in the area. This validated the liberal belief in self-improvement by giving well-off professionals the luxury of living in spacious new homes away from the dirty and congested downtown, even as it allowed them convenient access to it. It also provided new opportunities for the working class to live under conditions that were considered suitable to a modern city. With the steady growth of vehicular traffic in the 1910s, development decisions increasingly focused on moving people and goods smoothly around the city. Greater access to automobiles transformed the modern city into a terrain that could potentially be traversed with ease and speed. As the efficiency of traffic circulation became a primary consideration in development decisions, city officials used photography as though it was a rational instrument, which helped them achieve their political objectives. Valorizing individualism and proprietary rights, they established the conditions that would make the city modern.

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Aesthetics, Propriety, and Progress As we have seen, the survey photographs were used as records to prepare a comprehensive proposal for the viaduct, and once the project had been approved, they played a role in the expropriation of land. Both uses are characteristic of the discourses of reason and surveillance that were used by government officials and urban reformers to produce the city as an object of knowledge. Yet, the photographs are also significant for the way they drew on artistic discourses to promote notions of progress and modernity. In this respect, we must look at how certain survey photographs used aesthetic strategies to picture the ideals of liberalism, thereby contributing to the constitution of the modern city. The formal qualities of Goss’s survey photographs convey his interest in art and relate to his work as a pictorialist. His enthusiasm for art led him to become active in the pictorialist movement, a turn-of-the-century campaign to promote photography as an art form.

Fig. 1.18 Arthur Goss, The Bluffs, c. 1918, gelatin silver print.

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Goss was an admirer of Alfred Stieglitz, the well-known founder of the New York–based Photo-Secession and a key figure in American modernism. He even met and exchanged photographs with Stieglitz in 1912 during a visit to New York to purchase equipment.61 In his personal practice, Goss explored customary pictorialist subject matter, such as portraits and landscapes, and experimented with the characteristic soft-focus style. His photograph The Bluffs, which won a bronze medal in the landscape category at a Toronto Camera Club exhibition and was published in the annual international publication of pictorialism, was valued for the play of light and shadow and its affective qualities.62 To capture the desired effect, Goss paddled along the shoreline of Lake Ontario in a canoe, carefully balancing his large camera, waiting for the right moment.63 The dramatic composition, which took numerous attempts to achieve, evokes an experience of the sublime in nature. Like others associated with the movement, Goss aimed to produce aesthetically pleasing images and viewed his artistic practice as a form of personal expression. He was involved in organizing exhibitions of art photography, and he also won awards for his own photographs, which were shown at exhibitions in Canada and England.64 Even though Goss earned his living producing photographic records for the city of Toronto, he was also dedicated to photography as an artistic practice. Fig. 1.19 Arthur Goss, Bloor Viaduct Survey, no. 105, 650–658 Parliament Street, 8 April 1913.

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Indeed, Goss likely chose the photographic apparatus he employed in his survey photographs at least partly for aesthetic reasons. By the 1910s, when Goss began his work for the city, an array of large-format and hand-held cameras were widely available. There were numerous alternatives to the cumbersome, wooden-view camera that Goss typically used; however, the view camera was advantageous because it produced 5 ⫻ 7 inch glass-plate negatives. It was standard practice to make contact prints directly from the large negatives because it was inexpensive and required minimal labour. This facilitated the efficient production of prints from negatives, and the large negative was valuable for its crisp image and extensive detail. But while the clear, undistorted quality of the photographs rendered them effective as documents, the choice of a large-format camera had another significance. Many professional and commercial photographers, as well as camera-club amateurs driven by their desire for technical excellence, continued to use large-format cameras, even when smaller, lighter cameras became available. In an age where suddenly anyone could be a photographer, “serious” photographers were often distinguished from the “frivolous” ones by their choice of technology. The large-format cameras Goss chose to use were significant because of their aesthetic and technical possibilities, which indicated his dedication to photography. I do not want to overstate my case, however. Goss’s artistic capabilities were not always evident in his professional work. In many cases, Goss used formal characteristics that did not draw attention to his authorship. In a series of photographs of houses along the streets surrounding the viaduct route, for example, Goss systematically and methodically plotted the existing residences in this area of the city. From the large lots with expensive Victorian houses on Castle Frank Road, to the new and more modest semi-detached houses and apartment blocks lining the streets of the middle-class eastern suburbs, the photographs use the unobtrusive visual discourse of documentation. The photographs show clearly focused subjects: the houses are usually the focal point and the main subject of the image is often situated in the middle distance. Instead of using dramatic framing or an unusual point of view, in most cases the houses are centred within the image, shown in a flat, frontal view. A survey photograph showing the houses from 650 to 658 Parliament Street is a typical example. A row of modest two-storey houses is framed between a band of sky and an almost equal strip of sidewalk and nondescript road. The camera would have been placed at a standard distance from the houses and aimed directly at the subject. Any minor adjustments in focus would have been made, and then the glass-plate negative would have been loaded and exposed. While Goss unloaded the exposed negative and recorded the precise location and number of the photograph, his assistant may have moved the heavy equipment along to the next set of houses. Instead of calling attention to the production process and the authorship of the photograph, this technique emphasized the mechanical basis of the photographic process. While Goss himself did take the survey photographs, once the method was established, photographs taken by his assistant would arguably have looked much the same. With this standardized approach, the camera settings could be established, with only minor adjustments necessary. Setting up each photograph and pressing the shutter release could become as systematic as the survey as a whole. Deviations in

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the procedure were undesirable, as the purpose of the survey was to produce standardized records, and consistent formal qualities contributed to that outcome. Because he was charged with fulfilling orders for the Works Department, Goss had to negotiate the requirements of his work with his artistry. Like other photographers interested in aesthetic questions, he was expected to strike a balance between purposeful recording and artful rendering. Elizabeth Edwards has described a similar tension between objective record and pictorial interest in her study of amateur photographers in the English survey movement. In the case she examined, photographers produced thousands of photographs of ancient monuments and buildings in an attempt to create a historical record, which Edwards explains as a new, modern practice of memorialization. Although Edwards considers a different kind of survey – one in which thousands of photographs of parish churches and village cottages contributed to a new form of historical imagination – there is a similarly complex relationship between the idea of a photographic record and the question of appropriate style. As Edwards has pointed out, individual style could be considered indulgent and distracting in photographs that were intended as records, so many photographers were constantly negotiating instrumental and aesthetic discourses.65 Likewise, in the work Goss produced for the city, and specifically in his survey of an urban area slated for development, he sometimes introduced aesthetic features, but these were always moderated by the systematic and methodical way Goss carried out the survey. Still, it is worth considering how certain photographs within the series emphasize the values of liberalism by drawing on the aesthetic conventions of artistic photography from the period. Take, for instance, the photograph of a large, stylish Victorian house at 115 Castle Frank Road taken from an oblique angle (rather than the usual frontal view) that shows the noteworthy architectural features of the house (figure 1.17). The asymmetrical façade, the irregular gabled roof, the rusticated stone of the lower story, and the Romanesque arches are characteristic of the shingle style, which was primarily used in North America by architects creating fashionable residences for wealthy clients. This house, designed by the architects Chadwick and Beckett for C.H. Fleming in 1909, signified prosperity and propriety, and the visual features of the photograph convey these same characteristics. Leaves from a nearby tree hang down, providing a delicate frame for the image. Mottled sunlight plays across the street in front of the house. Rather than setting the camera level with the house, Goss chose a lower vantage point, so that in the resulting image the viewer looks up at the grand residence and its landscaped grounds. These attributes give the photograph a picturesque quality that breaks the formal codes typical

Fig. 1.20 Opposite top Arthur Goss, Bloor Viaduct Survey, no. 48, 18 October 1912. Fig. 1.21 Opposite bottom Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864–1946), The Hand of Man, 1902, photogravure, 8.3 x 11.3 cm.

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of instrumental photography. In comparison to the flat lighting and frontal view that characterize Goss’s photographs of the working-class row houses along Parliament Street (figure 1.19), the stylish, custom-built Fleming house was photographed in a manner that emphasized the potential for and value of aesthetic experience within the city. Perhaps in this instance Goss was inspired to deviate from his standard approach by the elegance of his subject. In any case, this departure from the standard frontal view offers one example of the way picturesque aesthetic strategies advanced liberal ideals. Another of Goss’s survey photographs draws on artistic conventions to evoke the potential of human technology to create a modern city. This photograph, mentioned in the introduction, shows a solitary figure, dressed in an overcoat and hat, standing near the centre of the frame between two sets of railway tracks. The man holds one of the numbered cards that would plot the route of the bridge through the Don Valley. In this image, the man appears as a small figure in a vast landscape. The railroad ties, fence posts, and utility poles fade into the distance in the flat, misty light of an overcast day. The plunging perspective of the image offers the viewer a landscape where evidence of settlement and industry mingles with nature. Like the other survey photographs, this one was valued for marking a specific location along the viaduct route. Unlike the others, however, this one employed a metaphor that is reminiscent of Alfred Stiegltiz’s The Hand of Man (1902). Stieglitz’s famous photograph, published in Camera Work in 1903, celebrates human creativity and the technical innovations of the industrial age by comparing artistic creation with the triumph of modern machinery. Using a similar compositional structure, Goss positioned the figure between two sets of train tracks that cut through the natural landscape and disappear into a hazy background. In this way, Goss emphasized the power of humans to shape the terrain for their own ends. His photograph pictured the very ambition that was behind the viaduct project in the first place. The presence of the surveyor holding the numbered card affirms that human intervention is desirable and necessary, and it signals the rational mechanisms that were so often used in development. Like Stieglitz’s celebration of modern machinery, Goss’s photograph seems to embrace the potential of technology and industry to reconfigure the landscape and produce urban modernity.

Conclusion While the systematic approach of both the survey itself and the larger bureaucratic apparatus of the photography and blueprinting section made photography an effective instrument in city governance, the aesthetic strategies used in the production of individual images reinforced the municipal government’s liberal ideals. Even as the survey photographs prepared the way for feats of modern engineering, some photographs attempted to contain and develop an unruly environment, while others gave credence to the liberal doctrines of progress and private property. The slippage between instrumental and aesthetic discourses did not undermine the functionality of the survey photographs. On the contrary, both the Works Department’s instrumental use of Goss’s survey and Goss’s skillful application of aesthetic strategies contributed to the overall efficacy of his work. And the

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sheer volume of images Goss produced as city photographer suggests how significant photography was in Toronto’s modernization. While Goss’s survey photographs once played a role in the making of a modern city, they are now a celebrated part of the city’s history. The approximately 26,000 negatives that currently make up the Arthur Goss collection at the City of Toronto Archives were salvaged from cardboard boxes stored in the attic of old City Hall after the photography and blue printing section closed in 1954. During this time, extreme temperatures and negligent treatment damaged some of the negatives. When the photographs were rediscovered and catalogued by city archivists in the 1960s, archivists, historians, and other researchers began to use them to better understand the city’s history.66 The photographs in the collection have been used as evidence of conditions in the city during the particular periods in which they were made, and have figured prominently in exhibits on the history of Toronto, where they have been admired for their directness and honesty.67 Other exhibits of the photographs, including Arthur S. Goss: Toronto Photographer in 1980, Official Photographers: The Work of Arthur Beales, Arthur S. Goss, and Alfred J. Pearson in 1992, and Arthur Goss: Selected Photographs in 1998, have celebrated the work of the city’s photographers while at the same time emphasizing the historical value of the photographs.68 A recent exhibit, Arthur S. Goss: Works and Days, focused on a range of lesser-known photographs of Goss’s day-to-day work, including some of the survey photographs discussed in this chapter, to show how Goss’s photography participated in the governance of the city.69 As literature aficionados will also know, Goss’s photographs of the Bloor Viaduct and another infrastructure project, the Harris filtration plant, were a source of inspiration for Michael Ondaatje’s popular novel In the Skin of a Lion.70 These contemporary uses of Goss’s photographs affirm their historical value, while what I have aimed to show here is that these photographs are significant because they help us to understand how photography influenced the making of the modern city. With the municipal government’s embrace of photography as an instrumental tool in the modernization of the city, photography of all kinds, from the artistic to the instrumental, began to be perceived as a particularly modern pursuit. The camera was thought to provide a new way of seeing, and taking photographs, looking at photographs, and using photographs to validate ideas were ways of participating in urban modernity. The bureaucratic practice of photography itself became a symbol of modernity, even as it was mobilized in attempts to harness and control the new social order. As we shall see in the next chapter, aesthetic issues came to figure prominently in the way the problems and solutions of governing the city were worked out, as the liberal political order gave rise to new kinds of photographic encounters.

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CHAPTER TWO

Visuality and City Planning

The 1906 meeting of the Ontario Association of Architects (oaa) was an important milestone in Toronto’s planning history. After an evening banquet of salmon, sweetbread cutlets, plum pudding, and other delicacies, former oaa president William Langton delivered an address on civic improvement. Setting the activities of Toronto architects in context, he showed that their effort to plan a modern city was part of an international movement. Langton explained: When the idea of planning the future development of Toronto first came into our minds, some of us thought that we had got hold of an original idea, but when, having become interested in the matter, our attention was awake to allusions (in professional and other journals) to similar efforts elsewhere, we found that everybody else on the Continent of America seemed possessed by the same idea. Plan making is in the air; we have caught it from our generation. Toronto, he went on to argue, must follow this movement in order that it “not be left too far behind.”1 Over the next few years, Langton and his colleagues worked to promote the idea of a planned city. By 1909, the oaa had collaborated with an affiliated group, the Civic Guild of Art, to publish a report calling for a comprehensive city plan for Toronto. A civic improvement organization made up of citizens, including architects and members of the business community, the Civic Guild played a pivotal role in envisioning Toronto as a modern city. The 1909 study aimed to convince city councilors, businessmen, and other concerned citizens that city planning would improve urban life. Appealing to the emotions of its readers, their landmark report used photographs of celebrated buildings and distinctive sites in major European and American cities, such as Paris and Chicago, to set forth a vision for

the future of Toronto. The affective and aesthetic qualities of these photographs conveyed the Civic Guild’s ideas for the beautification and efficient organization of the city. The images offered readers a visual experience of harmonious urban space, especially in relation to wide boulevards, and encouraged support for a particular series of development initiatives associated with modern cities. Setting out the components for a beautiful, planned city, the collection of photographs provided a powerful vehicle for imagining a new spatial and social order. The Civic Guild conceived of the modern city of Toronto as a totality, rather than as a collection of individual buildings and separate districts such as residential, business, or industrial sectors. In thinking about the city as a whole, the Civic Guild, along with politicians and other citizens’ groups, began to view the city as an organic entity, and as the focal point for political action and social change. With civic improvement advocates claiming that morality, health, and social relations were constituted in and through the urban environment, the spatial organization of the city and the development of city infrastructure became both highly politicized and contested. If the modern city was to function as a kind of apparatus of government, it had to be designed as a single entity and in such a way that it would help to produce the liberal citizenry it would govern. Many government officials, architects, and members of the business community were captivated by the idea that cities could be planned, and that beauty and order were mutually generative. This new awareness of the value of planning meant that the physical and aesthetic experience of the city became a means to transform it according to the principles of liberal political reason and that, in turn, the assumptions of liberalism influenced ideas about the spatial organization and appearance of the city. Emphasizing the idea of the city as a social construction, civic improvement advocates took into account the relationship between how a city looked, how it was experienced, and how inhabitants were expected to live within it.2 Aesthetics and spatial order were seen as integral both to the city’s efficient and orderly operation and to the creation of a social field for self-regulated liberal subjects. These concerns manifested themselves in the imagery used to convey planning goals. How, then, were photographs and renderings used to conceive of a liberal city? And how did architects communicate their plans for civic improvement using the aesthetic strategies they hoped would establish a new regime of visuality? This chapter explores these questions by connecting planning ideals with attempts to manage the conditions of perception. In order to set the practices in Toronto in the context of North American civic improvement and city planning, I compare the plans for Toronto and the visual strategies used to develop them with the renowned Plan of Chicago produced the same year. Significant differences between the two plans demonstrate the importance of photography in Toronto’s civic improvement campaign, while noteworthy parallels show how civic improvement advocates across North America advanced the liberal political order through the plans for their respective cities, and through the visual representations they used to promote their goals. Through a comparison of plans for the two cities, this chapter considers how images offering an immersive visual experience embodied principles of the liberal political order.

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Fig. 2.1 Plan of the Suggested Development of the City of Toronto, 1905.

Planning Toronto In Toronto, discussions about comprehensive city planning began in earnest at the turn of the century. Architects, in particular, argued that in order for the city to grow, prosper, and become modern, it had to transform from the congested, overgrown, and inefficient place it had become into a site of beauty and pleasure. And, they claimed, a comprehensive approach to city planning was the best way to avoid the horrors of crime, disease, and moral depravity associated with the slums of major European cities. In contrast to “piecemeal” development, which meant fixing minor problems without considering their effect on the city as a whole, “comprehensive” planning involved developing in advance an ideal for a city that took into account its future growth.3 Piecemeal changes undertaken by municipal works departments could include, for example, widening a road or building an underpass. Comprehensive planning, on the other hand, required a practitioner with specialized knowledge in drafting and design, and an exceptional aesthetic sensitivity. Through a broadly conceived approach to planning, architects maintained, it would be possible to enhance the urban environment rather than merely fix discrete problems.4 While such planning provided a mechanism for implementing practical solutions to address problems such as traffic congestion and overcrowding, many architects were attracted to it because it promised to beautify the urban environment, thereby improving living conditions and establishing the circumstances for a modern way of life.

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The situation in Toronto was by no means unique. There was a push for comprehensive planning in cities all over North America, and as Toronto architects became aware of planning initiatives in other cities, they produced visual comparisons between their own city and the ones they admired. They became interested in what modern cities should look like and how they should feel. Photographs, plans, and renderings were especially important in their attempts to situate proposals for Toronto in relation to planning initiatives in other cities, and to affiliate themselves with a growing international movement for comprehensive city planning.5 Both locally and internationally, architects were the major stakeholders in planning until city planning developed into a distinct profession. In Canada, the first professional organization dedicated to planning was founded in 1919.6 Until that time, architects combined what one oaa advertisement described as a “specialized knowledge of building methods” with their aesthetic training to advance their claim for jurisdiction over planning initiatives.7 Early in the campaign for civic improvement, architects turned to visual modes of expression to convey their ideals for the city. They made or found images they thought persuasively communicated their planning goals to a broad, non-specialized audience.8 The Civic Guild, which described itself as “an association of citizens united in the desire to accelerate the progress of civic improvement,” played a key role in advancing city-planning initiatives in Toronto.9 Although it was a community association rather than a professional one, its members included prominent architects Edmund Burke and William Langton, as well as wealthy businessman George Gooderham. Incorporated in 1897, the group began promoting beautification initiatives such as fountains, monuments, and mural paintings in public buildings, but soon broadened its scope to include “the improvement of thoroughfares and of transportation facilities; for open spaces and wholesome houses; for the preservation of public amenities; for all such measures as will add to the convenience, the health, the dignity and the beauty of the City.”10 While the Civic Guild addressed a multitude of practical concerns, its members also supported many of the principles of the “City Beautiful” movement. This was an international, turn-of-thecentury planning movement that modeled its ideals on Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris in the 1850s and 1860s, on the construction of the Vienna Ringstrasse in the same period, and on Daniel Burnham’s design for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.11 City Beautiful planning favoured monumental neo-classical architecture, broad boulevards, pleasing vistas, and design principles such as order and harmony. Although support for City Beautiful planning was by no means unanimous among the city’s architects, the Civic Guild followed the quest for beauty and order that was central to the movement and pushed for a transformation of the physical space of Toronto through systematic planning.12 Published in 1909, the Civic Guild’s “Report on a Comprehensive Plan for Systematic Civic Improvements in Toronto” was the culmination of an eight-year campaign for civic improvement in Toronto. The idea for a city plan was first discussed in 1901 at a meeting that brought together representatives from the business community with architects and artists. In 1903, the Toronto chapter of the oaa set themselves the task of producing a plan

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for the “beautification and general lay-out of the city.”13 Then, in 1905, the oaa produced a blueprint in which proposed development was plotted onto a city map (fig. 2.1).14 To local architects and engineers, many of whom were already committed to the idea of city planning, the unveiling of a preliminary plan of improvements for Toronto was an encouraging sign of progress. However, they recognized that it was necessary to address a wider audience in order to show city council and the public that the improvements were a viable project for the city, and not merely the pipe dreams of utopian architects. When the local government refused to provide financial support for developing the preliminary drawing into a city plan, the architects of the oaa and the Civic Guild agreed to collaborate in order to produce a plan themselves.15 A plan committee, headed by Langton, developed the blueprint further, while a publicity committee set out to promote it and to gain support for its implementation. A citizens’ committee of one-hundred members then pressured city council and the provincial government to introduce legislation that would establish a commission to carry out the improvement plan.16 Concerned to see that the vision was developed in an expert way and that the plan itself was properly prepared, the advisory board of the Civic Guild considered hiring an architect and a draughtsman. With some financial support from city council and more funds from their private sponsors, the Guild engaged the services of prominent English architect Sir Aston Webb to develop the plan into a form suitable for public distribution.17 Specifically, Webb was to finalize details for junction streets and squares formed by the proposed diagonal roadways in a way that was both beautiful and practical.18 The plan showed features of the existing urban landscape, such as topography and principal streets, along with proposed improvements, the most prominent of which was a park system and a network of new roads. The plan embodied many of the features that characterized a modern city. Following proposals for cities such as Washington, dc, Cleveland, and Chicago, the Guild envisioned diagonal roadways that could cut across the city grid, and beautiful urban spaces that could be enjoyed during work and leisure.19 The graphic clarity and simplicity of Webb’s drawing rendered the plan accessible to a wide audience and signified that the plan was reasonable and achievable.20 Both the Civic Guild’s report and plan itself were widely circulated. The Plan Committee produced a small version of the drawing for publication that showed the principal streets and proposed improvements. A large, fully detailed, colour version was hung in City Hall and loaned out for city planning exhibitions.21 Two-and-a-half-thousand copies of the Civic Guild’s “Report on a Comprehensive Plan for Systematic Improvements in Toronto,” and the accompanying “Plan of Improvements to the City of Toronto,” were distributed to city councillors, prominent businessmen, and civic-minded citizens. The smaller version of the plan was also issued to newspapers, along with a letter from Langton, in which he impressed upon readers the practical nature of the plan, the intention to carry out the improvements gradually, and ultimately, its value to the people of the city.22 He explained that the scheme would be beneficial both for business and pleasure, and he argued that although the interventions were directed at the city itself, citizens would feel their effects. In their bid to improve living conditions in the city and to inspire civic pride,

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Fig. 2.2 Toronto Guild of Civic Art, Plan of Improvements to the City of Toronto, accompanying the Report on a Comprehensive Plan for Systematic Improvements in Toronto, 1909.

the Civic Guild had to convince the public and the municipal government to support their planning initiatives. Through the twenty-one-page report and the plan itself, the Guild sought to garner public support for the aesthetically appealing environment they desired. However, the struggle to gain support for their ideal was not primarily enacted in the physical city. Rather, the Civic Guild fought their campaign for a modern city in the photographic realm.

City Planning and Modern Perception In relation to civic improvement and city planning initiatives in other North American cities, the Civic Guild’s plan for Toronto was modest in scale. However, a comparison with a similar project undertaken in Chicago reveals how, in both cities, images offering an immersive visuality spurred desire for change. In contrast to the 1909 Plan of Chicago, by far the most elaborate city plan of the early twentieth century, the proposals for Toronto and the degree to which they had been worked out were limited. The Plan of Chicago, which was developed over the same three-year period as the plan for Toronto, was financed by that city’s business elite at a cost of $70,000, and was prepared by internationally recognized architect Daniel Burnham and his assistant, architect Edward Bennett, in consultation with members of the Commercial Club, an organization of prominent Chicago businessmen and municipal politicians.23 The Commercial Club’s Plan Committee, mainly comprised of Commercial Club members, held hundreds of meetings, public hearings,

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and private consultations in order to develop the plan.24 While the Toronto plan established a set of goals and made the case for comprehensive planning, in Chicago the committee actually produced a comprehensive plan. Its ambitious aim was to transform Chicago from a congested industrial city into a beautiful, prosperous, and orderly city – one that would rival the great capitals of Europe.25 There were many similarities in the way the two plans sought to reconfigure the physical environment of each city. Both focused on a city-wide public parks system connected by grand boulevards, as well as a new and efficient system of roads aimed at connecting the city centre with outlying areas and improving traffic circulation. In addition to these features, the Plan of Chicago also proposed a public lakefront recreation and park area, a coordinated arrangement of the central railway terminals, and a civic centre grouping major cultural and municipal buildings.26 Although there were significant differences in their scope, the proposals for both cities were influenced by the principles of City Beautiful planning, and strove for many of the same kinds of transformations. The plans for both cities aimed to reconfigure urban space into a carefully moderated sensory environment attuned to modern modes of perception. As Jonathan Crary explains it, perception in its modern form emerged in the early nineteenth century in conjunction with new technologies of spectacle and display, new practices of representation, and new economic systems and social relations. Breaking with the classical model of perception rooted in the eye, modern perception was grounded in the body.27 In an analysis of the relationship between vision and modern perception, Chris Otter has foregrounded the concept of visuality, a form of perception involving the corporeal, material, and discursive aspects of vision.28 Visuality involves the subjective and sensory characteristics of vision, and is therefore influenced by changes in atmosphere and environment. Visuality also refers to a kind of corporeal synthesis and individualized experience of what one sees. Take light as an example. Light is perceived through vision, but it is also felt through heat. Levels of light and previous experiences of lightness and darkness contribute to a subject’s perception of whether an environment is clean, safe, and pleasant, or unsanitary and threatening. Immersive, orderly, aesthetically pleasing urban environments were thought to appease modern perception and produce ordered subjects, while the dirt, congestion, and disorder associated with poor, run-down areas were considered disruptive to the senses and a hindrance to self-regulation. This new regime of perception was, therefore, connected to the transformation of subjectivity, which, Crary has argued, aimed to insure subjects were “productive, manageable, and predictable,” as well as able to integrate into a dynamic and shifting social sphere.29 In other words, planned, organized spaces helped to establish perceptual norms suited to liberal subjectivity. Liberal subjects were expected to develop a range of visual capacities related to the conditions of modernity, the requirement to self regulate, and the visual organization of space in modern, planned cities.30 The main features of a modern, planned city – expansive views, long vistas, and light, open spaces – were desirable because they fostered the ability to control the senses, and in turn they were thought to yield the freedoms of liberal subjectivity – especially sensory freedoms such as moving and looking.

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At the beginning of the twentieth century, these features were produced in images before they were ever produced in space. Architects used imagery to work out how to establish the attributes of an ideal modern city in their own urban environments. To this end, it was common for architects to preface proposals for their own cities with an illustrated history of planning, drawing on examples of cities in a diverse array of countries. For this purpose, many architects collected images they could use as examples that would allow them to explain and justify their own planning initiatives. This was certainly the case in Toronto where architects collected slides of cities around the world, particularly images of improvements in other cities, to present at lectures where they argued for the importance of planning, and discussed how it should be handled in their own city.31 Similarly, in Chicago, Burnham amassed a broad range of visual documents, including historical and contemporary maps, plans, and photographs from colleagues, ambassadors, and other officials, to aid in developing his plan.32 The Plan of Chicago was published as a 164-page book, extensively illustrated with many of the diagrams, maps, and photographs Burnham had collected. These served as examples of the many desirable features that could be found in celebrated European cities. The photographs and plans were especially important to the explanation of ancient and modern city planning offered at the beginning of the book, but they also appeared throughout the publication as examples of ways other cities had incorporated parks, railway viaducts, boulevards, and grand municipal buildings into their designs. Although the quantity and quality of visual material that accompanied the Chicago plan was unusual, the practice was widespread. This source material was important for identifying the key features of a modern city – the wide boulevard or the civic centre, for example – that architects then incorporated into their own plans. The visual materials produced for the Plan of Chicago take this approach further, however, and actually present the desired spatial configuration of a modern city. An array of diagrams and renderings, produced as colour lithographs painstakingly reproduced in the book, illustrate particular aspects of the plan.33 They include elaborate renderings prepared as presentation drawings, as well as a series of plans produced as working drawings. These materials borrow from principles of City Beautiful planning to visually organize a space conducive to modern perception. As planning historian Jon Peterson has pointed out, more than any other approach to city planning, the City Beautiful movement mobilized imagery and visual metaphors in rallying support for its goals.34 In contrast, the sanitary reform movement of the nineteenth century had an olfactory focus. Following miasmatic theory, those reformers blamed the noxious fumes from decomposing organic material, specifically human and animal waste, for outbreaks of infectious disease such as cholera, typhoid, and diphtheria.35 With City Beautiful planning, the emphasis was no longer on eliminating miasmas by improving the living conditions of the urban poor. Rather, although it was not phrased in these terms, City Beautiful planning sought to produce the physical conditions conducive to free, self-regulating subjects. Unified streetscapes and wider, straighter roadways were expected to ease traffic congestion, but also to lead to improved sanitary conditions because they would create circumstances that discouraged the inappropriate dumping of waste.

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The importance of visually oriented spaces, and the aesthetic appeal of both the Plan of Chicago and the Civic Guild’s plan for Toronto, connects these documents to the wider discourse of the City Beautiful movement. Rather than using the reformist discourse of health, lawfulness, and urban redemption, and the imagery of squalor and decay, this movement sought to control urban space through aesthetic terms. However, even though the aesthetic orientation and focus on visuality differed from other progressive-era planning, City Beautiful planners continued to focus on eliminating urban conditions that were deemed undesirable.36 Creating an environment that would foster physical and moral health remained a central goal, and visual images were essential for showing how those goals could be achieved. In both Toronto and Chicago, the aesthetic and social goals of City Beautiful planning were established and promoted through imagery that focused on features that architects believed would produce suitable conditions for modern subjects. By comparing the photographs used in the plan for Toronto with the architectural renderings produced for the Plan of Chicago, we can identify similar visual tropes and particular kinds of atmospheric conditions and views employed in the bid to reconfigure and modernize these respective cities. The open, airy, and orderly environments planned for Toronto and Chicago and pictured in the planning images produced visual capacities, such as spatial awareness, that city dwellers would require to navigate the planned environment. That is to say, the images offer an immersive visuality that developed the modern modes of perception at the root of liberal subjectivity.

Visual Tropes in the Plan of Chicago With the professionalization of architecture in nineteenth-century Britain and the United States, architectural renderings became an important way of representing projects before they were built. The first architectural rendering specialists were hired in the 1870s and 1880s to produce illustrations for professional architecture journals. With the emergence of large architectural firms in major American cities around 1890, building plans became too complex to be handled by one individual and were instead produced by a team. Professional delineators, known as “perspectivists” or “renderers,” were increasingly sought after to complete competition drawings and client presentation drawings.37 Burnham’s friend and fellow architect Charles McKim commented on the importance of renderings in 1901, when the two men collaborated on the Senate Park Commission Plan for Washington, dc: “Plans and drawings, [McKim] argued, mean nothing to the lay observer, and not much more to the professional. In order to carry conviction, drawings must be rendered. For this task, the best illustrators in the country [are] none too good.”38 Rendering implied a process that was interpretive, and that synthesized the main features of a plan in order to capture a client’s imagination and desire. Their purpose was to persuade a client to go forward with a commission. This persuasive aspect of rendering was particularly important to the Plan of Chicago. The architectural renderings commissioned for the Plan of Chicago had a central place in the campaign to persuade Chicagoans to support the proposed improvements to their

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city. Architectural historian Joan Draper has described Burnham’s approach as “planning through imagery,” observing that the plan’s graphic presentation was essential to the publicity campaign.39 While diagrams and plans were important for showing key technical features of the plan, and for making the case that the proposals had been thought through, perspective renderings, the most numerous and visually engaging of the presentation materials, were best for illustrating and publicizing particularly noteworthy attributes of the plan.40 Referring to the artist who produced many of the renderings, one contemporary author, Samuel Swift, stated, “Mr. Guerin has been guided through his [drawings] by maintaining a broad spirit of fidelity to the purpose of the designs he has translated into pictures, rather than by slavishly adhering to unimportant facts.”41 Jules Guérin’s renderings captured the viewer’s imagination by expressing the proposal in pictorial form. This was imperative because, as Swift argued, most viewers lacked imagination and would not be able to envision a project’s potential without the aid of architectural renderings.42 In response to a presentation of the renderings for the Plan of Chicago, one Commercial Club member noted, “The best way to influence the public and to make these things permanent, would be to have the drawings exhibited in many places.”43 As these comments make apparent, the purpose of perspective drawings was not merely to reproduce the factual components of a project. In order to be effective, the imagery had to offer the viewer a visual experience that promised to parallel what the planned city would provide. Of the renderings made for the Plan of Chicago, a number were perspective drawings depicting a bird’s-eye view – a viewpoint often used to convey the overall impression of an architectural project. Bird’s-eye views had been favoured by French topographical artists in the seventeenth century, and then made their way into the lexicon of architectural rendering in the late-eighteenth century.44 From the mid- to late-nineteenth century, bird’s-eye views of cities, often drawn by itinerant artists, were popular as massproduced lithographic prints and were often displayed in homes.45 Because the bird’s-eye view was a style of rendering many viewers were familiar with, it would have been easy for viewers to interpret them, even when an image depicted an unbuilt project rather than an existing landscape or cityscape.46 It was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that bird’s-eye views became a popular way of representing proposed projects, when renderings were often produced for exhibitions and architectural competitions, first in Britain and then elsewhere.47 Bird’s-eye perspective renderings of cities became part of American city planning discourse with the McMillan Commission’s plan for Washington, dc, in 1902.48 In a bird’s-eye view, the city is drawn pictorially and obliquely from an elevated position. The elevated perspective is preferred because it can convey the totality of a design, including building types and the general street pattern, rather than scale or the accurate placement of features.49 Similar in some ways to a panorama, a bird’s-eye view synthesizes a complex urban environment into a single, powerful image.50 The bird’s-eye view renders key features of the city in a way that is sufficient to symbolize the particular city, and to distinguish it from other cities. Thus, in the Plan of Chicago, renderings focus on the proposed changes that would be unique to Chicago, but these features are pictured in a

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Fig. 2.3 Jules Guérin (American, 1866–1946), View of the City from Jackson Park to Grant Park, Looking towards the West (plate 49), reproduced in Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett, Plan of Chicago, 1909. Watercolor and graphite on paper, 103.5 x 480 cm.

generalized way and from a distant, elevated point of view that conveys the overall sensibility of the plan to a non-specialized audience in an accessible manner. In one example, a watercolour and pencil rendering of the proposed harbour and waterfront park, View of the City from Jackson Park to Grant Park, Looking towards the West, the bird’s-eye view effectively provides the kind of visual experience that is promised in the Plan of Chicago. Looking down from a point suspended over Lake Michigan, the illustrator, Guérin, pictured the distinctive shoreline described in the plan. The breakwater and recreation piers proposed for the harbour decoratively frame the central downtown district. The waterfront, which was intended as a vast stretch of parkland that would open up the lakefront to the people of Chicago, appears in the drawing as an abundant green border along the city’s edge. Parks along the shore were considered important for the health and enjoyment of the city’s inhabitants, and by producing a sweeping vista, Guérin provided what Burnham felt the citizens of Chicago needed: “A great unobstructed view, stretching away to the horizon,” which, Burnham explained, is “helpful alike to mind and body.”51 For viewers who saw the drawing first-hand, its massive scale would have provided the effect of a grand view, enveloping the viewer in its expanse. Many of the renderings produced for the plan follow the same rationale as this one. The unrestricted, sweeping vista offered viewers a sensation that paralleled the kind of scenery the proposed changes to the city promised. That is to say, the rendering gave the experience of the healing power of the view that Burnham sought to produce in the built city. Immersive perspective and totalizing panoramas, important for convincing viewers of a project’s transformative value, produced an experience of visual mastery that was equivalent to the abstract, detached view from above offered by modern maps. This visual device afforded observers an encounter with the kind of sensory experience that the modern city was expected to provide.52 In Guérin’s rendering titled Proposed Boulevard to connect the North and South sides of the River; View Looking North From Washington Street, the urban space is visually conceived from a single viewpoint, as if from atop a central tower. The

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deep, perspectival view at once establishes a distance between the viewer and the scene and eliminates that distance. Erwin Panofsky described this dual nature of perspective as “in a sense, drawing this world of things, an autonomous world confronting the individual, into the eye” – a process that he explained as “as much a consolidation and systematization of the external world, as an extension of the domain of the self.”53 The push and pull of the perspectival view, in which the world is made distant and then is drawn into the eye, separates the viewer from the scene and sets the subject apart from the world. Distance, as Otter has shown, is one of the key features through which liberal subjects could detach themselves from their environment in order to view it as separate.54 The high horizon line and penetrating perspective in Proposed Boulevard simultaneously enables the viewer’s identification with and separation from this luminous visual space. In this gratifying viewing experience, the viewer is constituted as a knowing subject with a privileged ability to make sense of the world. Guérin’s rendering locates the viewer in an all-seeing place, where it seems as if the world were an extension of the self. With the viewer able to satisfy the human desire for God-like vision, the city appears as if it can be possessed and controlled, thus fulfilling the liberal ideal of the city as an apparatus of government.55

Fig. 2.4 Jules Guérin, Proposed Boulevard to connect the North and South sides of the River; View Looking North From Washington Street (plate 112), reproduced in Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett, Plan of Chicago, 1909. Watercolor and graphite on paper.

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By the time the plan was under development, Michigan Avenue, which formed the basis of Proposed Boulevard, was already the busiest street in downtown Chicago, and the proposed extension was considered key to relieving congestion in the city center.56 Two parallel roadways were planned, one providing access to shops and theatres, and the other for use by those just passing through the area. Heavy commercial traffic would be separated from the pedestrian and light vehicle traffic by elevating the boulevard. This proposal was considered one of the most important components of the plan because it would unify three areas of the city and improve circulation. The circulation of people and goods in urban areas became a key concern with the advent of the nineteenth-century hygiene and sanitary reform movements, and thus the new boulevard was associated with health as well as with efficiency.57 Eliminating traffic congestion in the city was comparable to ridding an organism of stagnant fluids. It was believed that just as blood must circulate in the arteries of a healthy organism, traffic must flow, unimpeded, through the streets of a healthy city.58 In Guérin’s rendering, the idea of unimpeded circulation is represented visually by the vast open space of the boulevard. The deep perspective view, the wide, orderly thoroughfare, and the figures calmly traversing the boulevard all contribute to the sensation of fluid, easy movement. These features emphasize the expansive, uncluttered space of the revitalized boulevard. Guérin’s rendering transformed Michigan Avenue into a space unconstrained by congestion, and by implication, he pictured the heart of the city as the site of autonomous experience, free from the stagnant conditions that were believed to cause disease. Guérin’s portrayal of the proposed boulevard as a harmonious, sanitary space is reinforced by the written component of the published plan. Aesthetic terms saturate the text and frame the viewer’s interpretation of the rendering, at once drawing attention to the aesthetic features of the rendering and suggesting that these qualities could be applied to the city in order to offer an equally pleasing result. Michigan Avenue is described in the plan as “the Heart of Chicago” and “the base of a great composition.”59 In an effort to create a unified city, details such as the fountain, lamps, sculptures, and trees framing the boulevard were intended “to give finish and unity to the composition.”60 By describing the city as a composition, and by using aesthetic terms such as “unity,” “dignity,” and “beauty” to describe proposed solutions to the practical problem of congestion, the text draws attention to the design solutions offered by the architects and worked out by Guérin in his rendering. With symmetry, harmony, and unity yielding such gratifying results in the rendered composition, the descriptive text suggests that these principles of design could be harnessed to produce a similarly satisfying outcome in the built environment. Not only did the rendering, coupled with the text, present a persuasive case for redesigning the city, it portrayed the modern city as an ideal mechanism for governing the conduct of its inhabitants. Both Guérin’s pleasing rendering and the aesthetic terms used to describe the proposed Michigan Avenue extension demonstrate the importance the architects placed on the aesthetic reform of the urban environment. Aesthetic reform drew on the symbolism of lightness (which was also central to Burnham’s neo-classical design for the 1893 Chicago World’s

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Fair’s “White City”) to suggest the progressive-era association between sunlight and air, health and morality. At a time when sunlight and fresh air were thought to be, in themselves, remedies for ill health, and the poor sanitation and congested conditions of slum housing were seen as breeding grounds for disease, the proposed aesthetic changes to Michigan Avenue were associated with health and vitality. Delineated in a peach wash that seems to glisten under the bright sky, Michigan Avenue appears spacious and filled with light. With this luminous thoroughfare and the daubs of ochre, blue, and vermilion demarcating the horses, carriages, and people dotting the streetscape, Guérin presented the boulevard as a lively and healthy social space at the heart of a renewed city. In the rendering, the potential for developing this central area with fashionable businesses is suggested by the uniform grandeur of the neo-classical buildings lining the boulevard. The text confirms what the rendering suggests: lightness, open space, pleasing views, and regularity are favourable characteristics for an urban environment because they cultivate a desirable way of life. The text describes the structures along the boulevard as “office buildings, hotels, clubs, theatres, music-halls, and shops of the first order,” and the extension of the boulevard as creating new opportunities for buildings of “the highest class.”61 The park opposite the shops and hotels is described as “insuring light, air and an agreeable outlook.”62 While the rendering suggested how the proposed boulevard would look and feel, the text emphasized the quality of the development and indicated who would use it. The proposal for Michigan Avenue was intended to transform the boulevard from a dirty and congested roadway, dominated by commercial traffic, into a clean, orderly thoroughfare that catered to business and leisure activities. A more efficient and pleasant boulevard would strengthen commerce in the city centre. The aesthetic reform promoted in the plan, therefore, was a strong endorsement for business interests and the liberal values that accompanied them. Among the other aesthetic effects that contributed to the planned city’s potential to encourage liberal governmentality were unity and order. Unity was important in conveying the significance of public space for the planned city. While the plan included a number of proposals for centralized public spaces, none was more elaborate than the civic centre plaza, where new administration buildings were to be built. The rendering, View, Looking West, of the Proposed Civic Center Plaza and Buildings, Showing it as the Center of the System of Arteries of Circulation and of the Surrounding Country, shows why centralized public space was seen as such a valuable component of the plan. The blue watercolour wash used to define the buildings created the effect of a twilight street scene and enhanced the unified appearance of the architectural landscape. The blue-grey shadows of the buildings and the light from street lamps are reflected in the toned, unpainted paper that demarcates the streets. Even accounting for the inevitable deterioration of the watercolour wash, Guérin’s palette was limited to subdued tones, and the simple, symmetrical composition produced an immaculate, airy vision of the proposed civic centre. Small figures, set down with daubs of the same twilight blue, populate the street, drawing the viewer into the civic center plaza and demonstrating the monumental scale of the space. The open, uncluttered, and unified quality of this central area was set against what this proposal sought to replace: the rundown, unsanitary structures and narrow, dirty streets of the city’s slums, and the chaotic,

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Fig. 2.5 Jules Guérin, View, Looking West, of the Proposed Civic Center Plaza and Buildings, Showing it as the Center of the System of Arteries of Circulation and of the Surrounding Country (plate 132), reproduced in Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett, Plan of Chicago, 1909. Watercolor and graphite on paper, 75.4 x 105.5 cm.

overcrowded city centre filled with “great masses of people.”63 The massive domed City Hall at the center of the rendering was meant to stand as a “symbol of civic order and unity,” and the cluster of government buildings at the city centre was expected to become a distinguishing feature of Chicago, like “the Acropolis was to Athens, or the Forum to Rome.”64 The desire for what historian Paul Boyer has described as a morally cohesive social order is rendered here in pictorial form.65 In contrast to the disordered and congested conditions the architects sought to eliminate, the rendering concentrates on harmony, order, and visibility. It shows centralized public space as an important architectural solution to the disordered conditions the plan sought to ameliorate and envisions civic buildings as at the heart of a new civic order. The perspective renderings produced for the Plan of Chicago presented the city as an object of visual consumption. Seen from above and outside, expansive vistas offered the viewer the power to experience visually what theorist Louis Marin has referred to as a “utopic space.”66 In rendering the city visible, it became possible to know it and act upon it in new ways. As Michel de Certeau has noted, the concept of “the city” involves the production of the city itself as “a universal and anonymous subject,” and that generalized subject, in turn, makes it possible to constitute a space that can be rationalized and governed.67 City planning sought to manage the disordered conditions that were commonly understood to characterize industrial cities. In order to exert control over “the city” as it figured in city planning discourse, it was necessary to visualize the urban space that was the target of reform. Instead of picturing the urban problems city planning sought to solve, such as inefficient and congested street systems, unsanitary conditions, and overcrowding

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Fig. 2.6 Plan of Chicago, Meeting in Daniel Burnham’s Office, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, 1908.

in the city’s slums, the Plan of Chicago focused on what the city would be like once its problems had been overcome. Instead of inciting fear in its middle-class audience, the plan stimulated desire. The renderings created an affective atmosphere of pleasure to engage viewers in the transformation of space and subjectivity.68 What made Guérin’s renderings so compelling and persuasive was the way he was able to evoke parallels between the renderings and the architectural solutions proposed in the plan. The formal qualities of the renderings offered viewers a sensory experience equivalent to the one they could expect from the planned city. The plan essentially promised that just as the renderings offered the immersive visuality of liberalism, so too would the city.

The Civic Guild’s Ideal City Whereas architectural renderings were key to the presentation of proposals in the Plan of Chicago, photography was central to the way the Civic Guild articulated its vision for a modern city of Toronto. Taking a more moderate and inexpensive approach, the Civic Guild did not commission any images for its 1909 report.69 Instead, it reproduced photographs of celebrated buildings and distinctive spaces in major European and American cities, alongside photographs of conditions in Toronto.70 Placed as headers at the top of each page of text, the images were offered as visual examples of the kinds of spaces that the Civic Guild desired for Toronto. The Rue de Rivoli and Place de la Concorde in Paris, St. Mark’s Square in Venice, the Reichstag in Berlin, and Jackson Park in Chicago are a few of the sites portrayed. Taken from a high vantage point, the photograph of the Rue de Rivoli shows a bird’s-eye view of the wide boulevard as it stretches off into the distance. The plunging perspective of the photograph creates the kind of expansive, dignified space that the Civic Guild described in their report. While Guérin used bird’s-eye view renderings to convey Burnham’s aspirations for Chicago, the Civic Guild turned to an elevated view of a grand Parisian boulevard to exemplify what they hoped to achieve. Another photograph, a view of Paris looking along the Rue Soufflot towards the Panthéon, offered a long vista, like the ones that the Civic Guild envisioned for the diagonal streets

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it proposed for Toronto. With its emphasis on spatial order and good sight lines, the rhetorical structure of these photographs confirmed the qualities for which the boulevards of Paris were valued. The text of the twenty-page report repeated terms such as “great,” “beautiful,” and “dignified” in explaining how these spaces could be achieved and what their effects would be for the people of the city. The architects maintained that the aesthetic pleasure afforded by these dignified spaces would help to foster feelings of civic pride, while the existence of beautiful spaces would stimulate tourism and earn the city international recognition. Although the Civic Guild’s choice to use photographs may have been primarily a practical one, photography had played a key role in the reconfiguration and modernization of other cities before, most notably in nineteenth-century Paris. During the Second Empire, the city of Paris was reconfigured into what Sigfried Gideon has characterized as a “metropolis of the industrial era.”71 Medieval buildings in the old quarters were demolished and a new streetscape, defined by long, straight, uniform boulevards that terminated in historic monuments, was constructed. These changes, often referred to as the Haussmannization of Paris because they were directed by Napoléon III’s prefect, Baron Haussmann, established a new, visual experience of urban space conducive to photography.72 New experiences of time and space, which were a defining feature of modern Paris, were also attainable through photography, and as Shelley Rice has explained, the reconstruction of Paris introduced “the possibility of seeing the city itself as a work of art.”73 Captivated by the potential of having an aesthetic design for their own city, members of the Civic Guild found photographs with the visual tropes and views representing the transformations that could turn their own city into an elegant composition. In the context of the report, photographs of other cities present a kind of fantasy for Toronto. In psychoanalytic terms fantasy has a number of modes, from daydreams to primal phantasies. Although the photographs depict real places, they operate as imaginary scenes, representing how the fantasy may be fulfilled. Paris, which was consistently held up as an ideal in contemporary city planning discourse, was central to their fantasy of a modern city. With its expansive, unified streetscape, the city as it was reconstructed under Baron Haussmann seemed to embody the aesthetic qualities the Toronto architects wanted to experience in their own city. The photographs make manifest the Civic Guild’s affective investment in a modern city, both their anxieties and their wishes. Affect, as Sara Ahmed explains it, does not inhabit an object or image; rather, it is produced “only as an effect of its circulation.”74 Imagining a city saturated with photographic values, such as perspective and clarity, the Civic Guild’s report aimed to activate a desire in the reader for a similarly clean, orderly, and unencumbered urban space. Overlaying their values onto photographs of other sites of urban modernity, the Civic Guild expressed their desire for an escape from the congestion and decay of their own city and sought to trigger the same engagement in their audience. The Civic Guild imagined an urban realm suited to autonomous movement and unencumbered visuality. In effect, the very notion of urban space constructed in these images was photographic. The photographs represented the city as a setting without conflict

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Fig. 2.7 Left “A boulevard and arcaded sidewalk,” Report on a Comprehensive Plan for Systematic Improvements in Toronto, 1909. Fig. 2.8 Above “The dignity of harmony,” Report on a Comprehensive Plan for Systematic Improvements in Toronto, 1909.

or congestion. They pictured a joyous environment for the body, where dirt and disease dissolved. The Plan Committee of the Civic Guild selected photographs that pictured a pleasant sensory environment – a regulated public space where citizens would not encounter the stenches and obstructions of the existing city. In a moderated sensory domain such as this, city dwellers could develop the capacities of liberal subjectivity. The photographs established the perceptual norms the architects hoped the planned city itself would one day institute. The authors of the Civic Guild report used captions to direct readers to the most salient points of the plan. In one photograph, we see figures walking, sitting, and riding in carriages along a pathway. People cluster in small groupings, but the atmosphere is spacious and leisurely. A line of trees divides the path from a narrow waterway on one side of the image, and on the other the waterway extends beyond the frame. The caption reads, “Another view of an inshore waterway.” For the Civic Guild, the photograph provided an excess of signification, so the caption drew the reader away from the specific park pictured to focus on the possibility of creating a park system for Toronto. The heading on the same

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page as the photograph – “The Park System” – reinforced the point. Once again, the deep perspective offers up the kind of unobstructed views found in Guérin’s renderings for the Plan of Chicago. This image, in fact, depicts Jackson Park in Chicago. Designed by the wellknown landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead and his partner Calvert Vaux in 1871, it was incorporated into the grounds of Daniel Burnham’s “White City” for the 1893 World Exposition. When it was re-established as parkland a few years later, Olmstead carried out the original plan for an inshore lagoon system, which is pictured in the image.75 The Civic Guild used captions and titles to draw attention to aspects of the photographs they thought would persuade an audience of city officials, businessmen, and influential citizens of the benefits of a modern city. The report connected the ideal of “beautiful,” “dignified” urban spaces created by comprehensive planning to a photograph of a roadway along the Harlem River, and High Bridge, a 1,450-foot-long aqueduct built from 1839 to 1848 between Manhattan and the Croton River. High Bridge was built to address the pressing problem of providing the rapidly growing population of New York City with adequate clean water.76 The bridge combined the best of the classical and the contemporary – its monumental, multi-arched structure emulated the design of Roman aqueducts, while the masonry and steel-arch construction provided an up-to-date method for hollowing out and lightening the loads of the arch rings. In the Guild’s report, however, the caption described the aqueduct as “a riverside drive, both useful and beautiful,” while the text discussed a continuous system of connecting parkways, a “large park reservation,” and an inner and outer park system, all of which were planned for Toronto.77 The captions and text make clear that the architects were interested in a system of roads to connect the city’s parks, rather than the specific site depicted in the photograph. A park system offered the promise of autonomous movement and the fluid circulation of traffic. In addition to the photographs of ideal, planned urban spaces, for the purpose of comparison the report included several images of the poor conditions found in Toronto. In contrast with the spacious, healthy, planned environment of Jackson Park, another photograph shows a haphazard row of assorted small buildings. The people sitting on the steps of the house in the centre of the frame and the person standing on the sidewalk on the far left are not at leisure like those in Jackson Park. The caption reads, “Fronting on Toronto’s only parkway.” The corresponding flat, frontal view of the Toronto parkway is radically different from the long vista of the Chicago park and the light, open spaces depicted in Guérin’s renderings. Instead of inviting the viewer into an expansive, pleasurable environment, the composition blocks off the viewer’s sight line. The people in the photograph appear to inhabit undesirable spaces and thus the environment fails to establish the conditions for modern perception. There are more negative examples in the report. In another image depicting Toronto’s problems, we see another frontal, tightly framed view, this time of the stores along a downtown street. In this photograph, taken by press photographer William James, the confined space of the frame gives the sense that this is a congested, run-down area. The signs for

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Fig. 2.9 Clockwise “Another view of an inshore waterway,” Report on a Comprehensive Plan for Systematic Improvements in Toronto, 1909. Fig. 2.10 “A riverside drive, both useful and beautiful,” Report on a Comprehensive Plan for Systematic Improvements in Toronto, 1909. Fig. 2.11 “Fronting on Toronto’s only parkway,” Report on a Comprehensive Plan for Systematic Improvements in Toronto, 1909. Fig. 2.12 “A central part of our city in need of improvement,” Report on a Comprehensive Plan for Systematic Improvements in Toronto, 1909.

Old Dutch Cleanser and Mrs Hickman’s Catarrh Remedy provide evidence of the visual pollution and “piecemeal” urban development the architects complained about in unregulated, unplanned areas.78 The context of the report implies that the cleanser and the catarrh remedy were made necessary by the filth and sickness that unplanned development had caused. Literally referencing congestion, the photograph presents the undesired opposite to the photographs of Paris, Chicago, and New York, as well as the antithesis of other images of planned cities, such as Guérin’s renderings, which conveyed the possibilities of unrestricted circulation on the streets of Chicago. These examples attempted to make a visual case for planning by showing a series of poor conditions. The cluttered compositions of the photographs reproduced the Civic Guild’s argument for planning. As American planning historian Christine Boyer explains it, there were two central goals of city planning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The planning movement aimed to design and manage spatial growth in order to support industrial production. At the same time, it attempted to develop new ways of regulating the problems that emerged in urban centres.79 The Civic Guild used photographs in their report to produce an imagined city with all of the benefits that could be derived from planning. Members of the civic improvement movement thought that if they were able to manage urban development, then slums, congestion, and the problems associated with these forms of disorder could be avoided and eliminated. Their goal to produce a regulated urban environment was projected onto the photographs of regulated spaces in other cities, while the rhetorical structure of the images reinforced the idea that if these glorious, harmonious spaces were built in Toronto, the city itself would then offer the desired perceptual conditions. Instead of identifying the places portrayed in the images as areas in real cities, the captions and the text connected these idealized spaces to an imagined system of parks, parkways, and diagonal roads in a planned Toronto. Only those with specialized knowledge would have been able to set the original site in its proper place, in a particular city. Therefore, the photographs also worked towards establishing an exclusive field of city planning. The professional could prove his expertise (this was an almost entirely male domain) and improve his position within the field through his expert handling of visual discourse. Whether published in a report, such as the one discussed here, or shown at a lecture on planning, architects used photographs of other cities to constitute an ideal city of their own. Although the architects in the Civic Guild did not succeed in realizing their plan for Toronto, they were effective at promoting the idea of comprehensive planning in general. Shortly after the publication of the 1909 report, a deputation of members of the Civic Guild appeared before the Board of Control, the governing board of City Council, asking that a joint committee, composed both of members of the Council and of citizens, investigate and report on plans for civic improvement.80 The success of this mission, and the subsequent appointment of several members of the Civic Guild to the city’s Civic Improvement Committee (Edmund Burke and John Lyle among them), shows that the Guild played an important role in the city’s modernization, even though, as Christopher Armstrong points out, few of its schemes were ever realized.81

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Conclusion The Civic Guild mobilized photographs of exemplary sites in other cities in the hopes of influencing public sentiment toward supporting comprehensive planning in Toronto. Seeking to generate widespread support for their vision of a modern city, they argued that it was a pivotal moment in the city’s history, and Torontonians should “act with far-sightedness, confidence and a wise boldness” to create a beautiful city “which [was] lovely and pleasant in its own way.”82 Appealing to the affective capacities of readers, the Civic Guild relied on photographs of other modern cities to convince city dwellers of the benefits of an ordered and harmonious sensory environment. Yet, amidst contentious debates about urban development and modernization in early twentieth-century Toronto, the only way spatial order could really be established was in the realm of the photographic. As we saw in the previous chapter, city officials were embroiled in their own attempts to control the development of the unruly city. Even though they shared a desire for a modern city, municipal bureaucrats and the Civic Guild had different ideas about how to realize it. While bureaucrats attempted to manage the city’s development by subordinating the photographic to the real, the Civic Guild subordinated the real to the photographic. And yet, photography was at the core of both approaches. It was through their use of photographs that each group set knowledge and sensation in opposition. On the one hand, city officials favoured an instrumentalist empiricism that subordinated aesthetic concerns. On the other hand, architects worked out the principles of an immersive visuality in photographic form, and attempted to captivate their audience in an affective relation through an aesthetic conception of liberal values.

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Section II Liberal Subjects

CHAPTER THREE

Instruments of Reform

In July of 1911, just nine months after his appointment to the post of Medical Health Officer (mho) for the City of Toronto, Dr Charles Hastings issued a report on slum conditions in the city. The investigation found that Toronto had many of the conditions associated with the slums of “great cities” in Europe and the United States: tenement houses, overcrowding, dark rooms, filthy yards and lanes, and outdoor privies. Focusing on the central downtown area around City Hall and the business district, referred to as “the Ward,” the study found the area was overcrowded with poor and working-class immigrants. Here alone, Hastings discovered sixty-three tenement houses, and 108 houses were declared unfit for habitation.1 Investigators also exposed common lodging houses where sometimes more than twenty people lived under conditions described as a threat to the sanitary welfare of the city. In the report, the mho noted areas where outdoor privies overflowed into nearby yards and lanes. Photographs of dilapidated houses, narrow, muddy lanes, and backyards littered with refuse provided evidence to support the written descriptions and statistical data. The report, which was presented to city council and released to local newspapers, was immediately recognized as a thorough and significant study of one of the city’s most pressing concerns.2 With the rapid growth of the geographic area of Toronto and an 80 per cent increase in population between the turn of the century and 1911, the city faced a range of new urban problems. The growing number of poor, non-English-speaking immigrants from Germany, Russia, Poland, and other eastern European countries settling in this primarily British city caused civic officials particular anxiety about how to integrate newcomers into Canadian life. At the same time, the growing demands both for new services and for improvements to the city’s existing infrastructure burdened the city’s resources and strained its finances. City council attempted to address key areas of concern, such as housing shortages and sanitary conditions, while citizens’ groups campaigned for good government. Health concerns were paramount at this time. The city had experienced an epidemic of

Fig. 3.1 Charles Hastings, “Report of the Medical Health Officer dealing with the Recent Investigation of Slum Conditions in Toronto, embodying Recommendations for the Amelioration of the Same,” 1911.

typhoid fever in 1910, and rates of other infectious diseases were high. These circumstances contributed to a sense of crisis that spurred the urban reform movement. The press, social agencies, religious organizations, and municipal officials were among those seized by the reform impulse. One of the significant ways local government and other groups and individuals responded to the city’s problems, and to the apparent threat of urban decay, was to implement new procedures for the surveillance and regulation of the city and its population. Crucial among these new practices was photography. With its ability to quickly and inexpensively record features of urban life deemed objectionable, photography provided a new tool to document changing conditions in the city. The value of photography as a recording mechanism was based on the assumption that photographs could provide accurate records of a set of real conditions, and it was this instrumental use of photography that reformers turned to in safeguarding and even promoting liberal principles. Two key groups in the reform movement, city officials and concerned citizens, used instrumental photography in their efforts to bring about a variety of changes to the city’s physical environment, particularly to the impoverished conditions of the Ward. In the process, they worked to establish a set of social norms that were constitutive of the liberal political order. Three public reports are particularly notable for the way they employed photographs as evidence in proposals to implement new measures of urban reform. Drawing on international reform initiatives, Dr Hastings’s groundbreaking survey of slum conditions influenced public policy by raising public awareness of poverty and a range of related circumstances. Also influential were the earliest investigations undertaken by municipal researchers in Canada: a major study commissioned by the Civic Survey Committee in 1913 that examined the administrative processes of the local government and the physical condition of the city, and a second study five years later that once again specifically concentrated on conditions in the Ward. In each case, researchers used photographs in their attempts to improve the way the city was governed and the way municipal officials coped with undesirable conditions and behaviours in specific districts. My analysis concentrates on how government officials and municipal researchers employed instrumental photography as a tool in urban reform practices in early twentieth-

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century Toronto, and how this practice of photography produced social subjects, both those who sought to enact reform as well as those who were its focus. I am interested in how the instrumental and affective capacities of photography contributed at the local level to the liberal political order, and how it worked to define subject categories from the professional and the citizen to the disadvantaged and subjugated. Although photography had been used in studies by various organizations during the late-nineteenth century, it was not until Toronto experienced a range of new and pressing problems in the early twentieth century that photography began to play a constitutive role within liberalism. It was only then that it became an important means of generating both knowledge and fear, which rendered it a new strategic tool of liberal governance.

Early Reform Initiatives During the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was growing concern about slum conditions in urban areas.3 Because of the prevalence of contagious disease and high infant mortality rates, these conditions were seen as a threat to public health and became a prime target for reform. Slum conditions had become associated with infectious disease during the growth of large cities in nineteenth-century Europe. The use of inspections, or surveys, to identify sources of disease dates back to the early nineteenth century with, for example, Edwin Chadwick’s work on sanitation in England in the 1840s. The regular inspections of houses, especially of those that appeared run-down or that housed many people, such as lodging houses, became increasingly prevalent in mid-nineteenth-century England. Even with advances in bacteriology in the 1870s, it was still a common belief that filth, generated by the chaos and congestion of growing urban centres, was a leading cause of diseases such as typhoid fever, diphtheria, and scarlet fever, and inspections only became more pervasive with new concerns about contaminated food, milk, and water. Sanitary inspectors focused on issues that were medical in nature, and the sanitary reform movement, which attempted to eliminate sources of filth, and therefore of disease, emerged from early investigations of infectious disease.4 Influenced by the principles of the international sanitary reform movement, Toronto’s Health Department began to survey sanitation and slum conditions in the late-nineteenth century. In the 1880s, the first Medical Health Officer, Dr William Canniff, began to use policemen as sanitary inspectors.5 In 1885, Canniff employed data collected by this sanitary police force to support the city engineer’s recommendation for upgrades to the municipality’s water and sewage systems. The new title of the Health Department’s annual reports, “Report on the Sanitary Condition of the City of Toronto, also an account of the operations of the Board of Health and the Vital Statistics for the Year,” implemented at the beginning of the 1890s, conveys a specific concern for the city’s sanitary conditions, and reveals an early attempt to gather information about the perceived problem.6 However, during this period the purpose of the annual reports was to inform council members of the Board’s work to improve the sanitary condition of the city, and their use was therefore narrower and more specific than later studies, such as Hastings’s 1911 survey of slum conditions.

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While Canniff’s studies of sanitary conditions in the 1880s were associated with the sanitation movement, early twentieth-century investigations of Toronto’s slums were related to a growing international reform movement aimed at ameliorating the wretched living conditions attributed to industrialization and urbanization. Although many people still accepted that impoverished people were biologically and morally inferior, there was a growing concern among civic officials and middle-class citizens with the effects of poverty. Even though Canadian cities were smaller, and were generally considered to be in better shape than cities like London and New York, reformers were motivated by stirring narratives of abysmal urban conditions described in numerous British and American exposés, such as Andrew Mearns’s The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883), James Cuming Walters’s Scenes in Slum-Land, a series in the Birmingham Daily Gazette (1901), and Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890). Locally, reformers were spurred on by public lectures on social problems, delivered to many religious and civic groups, including Canadian Clubs, women’s organizations, and the ymca and ywca, as well as by articles in popular mainstream newspapers.7 Anxiety about social degeneration, crime, and disease prompted reformers to instigate new initiatives and urged governments to take greater responsibility for the welfare of the population. There were a number of individual reform initiatives in Toronto prior to the mho’s extensive and methodical survey of 1911. In the spring of 1909, a visiting British evangelical reformer, Gipsy Smith, sent out theology students from Victoria College (now part of the University of Toronto) to investigate the “religious outlook” and living conditions of inhabitants of the congested downtown districts of the city. Although the primary object of this survey was to evangelize, the student investigators were appalled by the unsanitary conditions they discovered. One of the students, Arthur H. Burnett, who had previously worked in London’s Whitechapel district, photographed the conditions he found, and gave illustrated lectures to some of the religious and civic groups mentioned above using lanternslides made from the images.8 Burnett’s lectures are notable because they relied on photographs for their impact, and because of their similarity to popular stereopticon lectures on the poor of New York given by Riis in the 1890s. The photographs in Riis’s lectures inspired fear and fascination in his middle-class viewers by showing working-class subjects as shadowy, indistinct figures in dirty, derelict conditions.9 Burnett’s lectures likely provoked a similar reaction among his reform-minded colleagues. Following the theological students’ investigation, J.J. Kelso, a Canadian reformer influenced by the well-known American social researcher Jane Addams, published a pamphlet called Can Slums be Abolished or Must we Continue to Pay the Penalty? He distributed 250 copies to key citizens and public officials, including the new mho, Dr Hastings.10 While these initial investigations identified slums as a problem, procedures for regulating the slums were not implemented until after Dr Hastings’s official government survey and illustrated report appeared in 1911. The photographs of slum conditions produced by Burnett, and later Dr Hastings, and the Civic Survey Committee (discussed below) drew on the “survey method” and its attendant mapping techniques, which, in its early use in London, justified and supported

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the imposition of sanitary laws and slum clearance projects as a means of improving the physical and moral health of populations. A well-known and particularly influential example is Charles Booth’s The Life and Labour of the People of London, published in seventeen volumes between 1889 and 1903. In his extensive study of poverty in London, the first of its kind, Booth’s objective was to demonstrate, in a quantifiable, mathematical form, the relationship between depravity, earnings, and the general living conditions of the poor. Booth’s goal was the amelioration of social problems through the improvement of the living and working conditions of the working class. As American sociologist Robert E. Park explained, however, the social survey was both “a method of investigation and a means of social control.”11 Booth’s study instituted a method of investigation where members of the upper and middle classes studied and then categorized people of the lower social classes. Textual descriptions of conditions were accompanied by a series of maps illustrating the extent of poverty in the various districts of the city. His in-depth survey and “Descriptive Maps of Poverty” effectively contributed to the designation of poverty as a social problem and a target of social engineering. It was through social surveys such as Booth’s that urban conditions were diagnosed as problems and new policies aimed at regulating deviations from what was considered the middle-class norm were implemented. Booth’s survey of poverty in London was widely publicized, and it helped to popularize survey research and urban reform initiatives throughout Europe and North America.12 In the United States, the survey model was applied in an extensive social reform project undertaken between 1906 and 1909 in Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh Survey, which was sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation and carried out by reformers Paul Kellogg, Florence Kelly, Robert Woods, and others, sought to improve conditions for workers in the city’s steel industry. The results of the research were conveyed to local employers, politicians, and citizens through publicity and exhibits, and to an international audience of social reformers in thirty-five articles published in the journal Charities and The Common in early 1909.13 In the Pittsburgh Survey, photographs were important for publicizing the terrible price workers paid for industrial labour. For example, in one volume of the survey, Crystal Eastman’s study, Work-Accidents and the Law, Lewis Hines’s photographs of men dressed in their work clothes, with mutilated hands or missing limbs, illustrated the consequences of work accidents.14 Together with the findings of the study, Hines’s photographs were used to inform social reformers, as well as the citizens and politicians of Pittsburgh, about poor working and living conditions and to convince them to support change. The Pittsburgh Survey was a model for two investigations of Toronto: Hastings’s and the 1913 Bureau of Municipal Research survey.15 Like the survey of Pittsburgh’s steel industry, both Toronto surveys used images to convey their results. Dr Hastings and the Bureau researchers turned to photography as evidence of the appalling living conditions in the slums of Toronto, and as a means of bringing about new regulations aimed at producing public health. These inspections generated information about a set of conditions that were considered threatening to the welfare of the city’s citizens at the same time that they provoked the fear that would drive change. They used the survey as a method for

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identifying the material deficiencies that needed to be fixed in order to create the conditions for liberalism.

Surveying Toronto’s Slums The aim of the mho’s investigation of Toronto’s slums was to generate a new form of data about the population that could be used to regulate and ultimately improve public health. Like Charles Booth and other late-nineteenth-century social reformers, Hastings believed that urbanization was the root cause of social decline. He felt that unless he intervened, the filth and disorder of the city would bring about the physical and mental degeneration of the population.16 While Hastings drew on the model of the social survey for his investigation, he was influenced by the increasingly medical focus of inspections in Britain and approached the study of the city as a physician. In the same way that he would physically examine a patient in order to diagnosis a disease, Hastings inspected the city. Slum conditions were considered infectious, like disease on the body. Hastings explained, “The slum germ produces its diseases as truly as the germ of tuberculosis, [but] both are curable and preventable.”17 By observing the visible manifestations of disease, the infection could be identified and contagion could be prevented. Hastings subjected the city to the physician’s gaze, and his use of photography as an instrument for recording the findings of his investigations paralleled the use of photography in medicine. In both cases, the object of study – whether the body or the city – became the target of a systematic and critical surveillance.18 Thanks to the social survey method, Dr Hastings’s appraisal of slums was much more extensive, more systematic, and more thorough than any previous study of Toronto. The investigation itself entailed visits by sanitary inspectors to 4,696 houses, as well as interviews with the dwellings’ inhabitants. In order to undertake the study, Hastings secured $800 from the Board of Control to cover the wages of four inspectors for a period of seventeen weeks.19 Recognizing the invasive character of the study, he hired female investigators because, he explained, “A tactful woman, possessed of the necessary training experience, will be able to establish sympathetic relations with the women and children … thereby securing enhanced opportunity for closer investigation.” Hastings went on to say, “Such an inquiry prosecuted by men must of necessity be superficial.”20 The inspectors were expected to win the confidence of slum dwellers in order to gain access to the dwelling and to obtain the desired information, and Hastings thought that women were naturally better suited to gaining the trust of other women. His gender-based assumptions, associating women with domestic space, and by implication, men with the public sphere, are significant precisely because they are typical of the period.21 Women played an important role in this survey – gathering the information necessary for the mho to draw conclusions and make recommendations, but also acting as the chief informers and subjects – just as they had in numerous other social surveys of the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Toronto, inspectors collected data on a wide range of factors regarded as indicators of lifestyle and determinants of slum conditions. Photographs were made of interiors and

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exteriors that did not measure up to expectations. These included exteriors of the many poor-quality, small-frame cottages in close proximity to each other and the numerous alleys and laneways interrupting the narrow streets to make rear cottages. Investigators asked about the nationality and religion of inhabitants, their length of time in the city, the kind of house and amount of rent paid, the condition of the interior and exterior of the dwelling, the number and gender of occupants, the number of rooms without windows, and the number of animals living in the house. The resulting statistics were used to determine whether conditions in each dwelling threatened the physical and moral wellbeing of the inhabitants. Through this process, they defined what constituted a slum, and established profiles of the kinds of people likely to live in slum conditions. The information was then used to determine the prevalence of various slum conditions by district, and to ascertain the population of non-British immigrants by nationality and district. The data clearly showed that the central district, known as the Ward, was by far the most densely populated area of the city, and that it had the highest concentration of non-British immigrants.22 Photographs of the exteriors of houses, backyards filled with junk, and outdoor closets and privy pits accompanied lists of problematic conditions and vivid explanations of resulting problems, notably the spread of communicable diseases. Adapting investigative techniques that were developed as tools of inspection and reform during the nineteenth century, Hastings and his team of investigators accumulated statistical, descriptive, and visual information and then used it to generate knowledge about the environment and inhabitants of the so-called slums. The mho used the report to argue for more public resources to remedy existing problems, to prevent further incidents of slum conditions, and thereby to improve the overall condition of the city. The photographs included in the “Report of Slum Conditions” provided evidence of the abysmal situation inspectors discovered. They generated fear precisely because they were understood as proof of an imminent threat.23 One photograph shows a three-storey building with a small outdoor privy jutting into the foreground on the right. Taken from an oblique angle, the photograph focuses on a small brick structure jutting out at the end of the building. A pail sits under a tap in the foreground, and narrow wooden planks lie amidst the mud and refuse outside of the building. Large windows reflect the light of the sky and the shadow of an adjacent building. On its own, the photograph is unremarkable and rather ambiguous. However, the caption establishes where the photograph was taken and the nature of the problem the photograph was meant to illustrate: “This is a rear tenement under the morning shadow of the City Hall.” The building is adjacent to the workplace of the city councilors receiving the report. It goes on to recount the numerous sanitary infractions identified by the health inspector, and notes the seemingly irresponsible and irrational behaviour of the landlord: “[O]n the day the photograph was taken, the owner had for some unknown reason cut off the use of the sole sanitary convenience for 30 people, by nailing it up, as shown in the picture.” The inhabitants of this tenement were discovered disposing of “night soil” in a nearby vacant lot, in the manner practised “in the cities of Europe in the Middle Ages.”24 This image is the first to appear in the report and is found directly before lists of statistics on the density of population and the

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nationalities in each district, and thus suggests a link between demographics and poor living conditions. The caption, which is so detailed it fills a proportion of the page equal to that of the photograph itself, guides the viewer’s interpretation of the image. The photograph was not accepted as evidence of slum conditions because its meaning was selfevident. Rather, it, and all the others included in the report, was accepted as a realistic record of slum conditions precisely because its meaning was carefully set in place through the descriptive text, the compelling account of slum conditions put forward in the report, the official status and professional reputation of the report’s author, and the authority of the sponsoring government agency.

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With the attention of city officials directed at unsanitary conditions, and with fearmongering newspaper articles appearing in mainstream newspapers, poor living conditions became the subject of many different kinds of representations. The freelance news photographer William James photographed children from the Ward to illustrate human-interest stories and sensational accounts of the city’s slums. His photographs tended either to emphasize the human face of poverty or to focus on features of the streetscape that were unique to the Ward.25 Urban poverty also became a subject in modern art. The well-known Canadian painter Lawren Harris (later a member of the Group of Seven) sketched and painted run-down houses in the Ward. The impasto, vividly coloured oil paint and nondescript figures in his paintings indicate that he approached the area as an aesthetic subject rather than as the object of reform. Harris explained his aim in painting houses in Toronto’s Ward district as expressing “the experience of all life in decrepit houses” through “the particular relationships of forms, colours, lines, rhythm.”26 For Harris, painting was a search for universal principles, and his paintings of the Ward were a visual manifestation of the common features of slum conditions. Whereas Harris’s artwork was created for its expressive qualities, the photographs in the mho’s report were intended to accurately document the specific conditions found during an investigation. Thus it was the knowledge that was attributed to the photographs,

Fig. 3.2 Opposite left “Detail Map of ‘The Ward,’” Bureau of Municipal Research, “What is ‘the Ward’ Going to do With Toronto?” 1918. Fig. 3.3 Opposite right Charles Hastings, “Report of the Medical Health Officer dealing with the Recent Investigation of Slum Conditions in Toronto, embodying Recommendations for the Amelioration of the Same,” 1911. Fig. 3.4 Left Lawren S. Harris (Canadian, 1885–1970), In the Ward, Toronto, 1917. Oil on wood pulp board, 26.8 x 34.8 cm.

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rather than the subject matter, that set the instrumental photographs apart from representations of the Ward operating in other discursive fields. Because the instrumental photographs in the mho’s report were produced as evidence of slum conditions, they were made to appeal to and agitate already existing fears of contagious disease, crime, and immorality. The report as a whole spread fear, which is an affective response to those who are considered a threat to one’s own existence or way of life, by representing the slum and its inhabitants as a threat that could engulf the city.27 Quoting surveys from Birmingham, London, and Glasgow, Hastings stated that the connection between overcrowding and disease had been proven, and that because slum dwellers rarely consulted a physician when ill, “infected people [were] mixing up with citizens in the large hotels, crowded street cars, crowded theatres, and public buildings generally, and hence becom[ing] a menace not only to themselves but to the municipality generally.”28 Contagious diseases such as tuberculosis, typhoid fever, scarlet fever, and diphtheria were responsible for a high mortality rate in Toronto between 1905 and 1910, and the report portrayed the disease-ridden poor as circulating freely throughout the city, beyond the confines of isolation hospitals and slum housing.29 In addition to responding to the threat of disease, Hastings was concerned with public health, which entailed regulating the health of the population. Children raised amidst slum conditions were described as having “about the same chance of escaping a life of shame or crime as an unvaccinated baby confined in a pest-house would have of escaping small-pox.”30 The report effectively alarmed its readers by identifying the mobile lower classes with the object of investigation – slum conditions – thus extending their effect far beyond the physical area of the city in which these conditions were found and onto its social life. At the same time, the report presented a compelling case, garnering the public’s attention and widespread support for the work of the Health Department.31 As a result, the photographs in the “Report of Slum Conditions” effectively justified inspection as a key feature of the liberal order.32 While the homes of liberal subjects were for the most part considered private because these subjects were assumed to self-regulate, the domestic spaces of the poor were considered in almost constant need of inspection. Photographs played an important role in distinguishing one type of dwelling from another, even when the conditions were not visible. Take as an example one image, which shows a frontal view of a residential street in the diffuse light of an overcast day. Situated in the middle ground is a plain, run-down Victorian house. The horizon line of the photograph is inclined, giving the appearance that the house itself is slanted. Instead of showing conditions inside, the line of a sidewalk in the foreground obstructs the viewer’s access to the house. Nevertheless, the accompanying caption describes the overcrowded conditions inside, where nineteen men inhabited three filthy rooms. The photograph demonstrates the difficulty of knowing conditions inside merely from looking from the outside. As the caption explains, “external appearances are sometimes deceiving.”33 By confirming the invisibility, and therefore suppressed nature of the slum problem, the photograph justifies intrusive inspections in areas where poor conditions were suspected. The regular visits by Health Department officials recommended in the report were necessary “to protect the

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Fig. 3.5 Charles Hastings, “Report of the Medical Health Officer dealing with the Recent Investigation of Slum Conditions in Toronto, embodying Recommendations for the Amelioration of the Same,” 1911.

City” precisely because interior conditions are not evident from the outside.34 What the photographs fail to show functioned as evidence in the report of the need for more invasive surveillance. The hidden character of the conditions also meant that it was important to define which areas were prone to problems and thus in need of inspection. In addition, the report used photographs to identify a range of disparate conditions – from overcrowding to untidy yards – as slum conditions and as a public health crisis. The categorization of a variety of urban conditions as fundamentally a slum problem rendered a broad segment of the population the target of social discipline. The photographs effectively designated immigrants, and the conditions in which many of them lived, as a focal point for diagnosis and intervention. Although the survey aimed to ameliorate people’s living conditions, slums, and the people living in them, were singled out for observation and regulation at least in part because they were in the central business district. The area under investigation – the Ward – was adjacent to City Hall in the political and financial core of the city, and it was on valuable land. In his report, Hastings attributed the existence of neglected living conditions to unscrupulous landlords who charged poor immigrants high rents for substandard housing while they waited to clear the dilapidated dwellings for profitable developments.35 Critical of landlords exploiting immigrants, he maintained that the poor and working class residents of the Ward would be “more economically and much more efficiently and satisfactorily housed in the suburban districts.”36 Hastings was an avid supporter of the garden cities movement, a British town-planning initiative for building workers’ housing in planned communities on the outskirts of cities. Apparently inspired by a recent visit from British mp Henry Vivian, a proponent of this solution to Britain’s “housing problem,” Hastings outlined the potential social and health benefits of implementing this kind of

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Fig. 3.6 Charles Hastings, “Report of the Medical Health Officer dealing with the Recent Investigation of Slum Conditions in Toronto, embodying Recommendations for the Amelioration of the Same,” 1911.

planned housing in Toronto.37 The final image in the “Report of Slum Conditions” is a reproduction of a photograph of a uniform residential street in Hampstead, England, from town planner Raymond Unwin’s Town Planning in Practice. The houses in this picturesque scene are, according to the caption, rented for less than the “filthy hovels in the slums” because of the difference in land value. With this image of one of England’s “garden cities,” Hastings provided an orderly and scenic ideal that was radically different from the photographs of slum housing that populate the rest of the report, but which, by claiming to offer a solution to the problems he identified, worked equally to justify the close scrutiny of the investigation. Thus, the meaning of the photographs in the report was produced in a rhetorical contrast with an idealized space that was all that the slum was not.38 When it was released in July 1911, the mho’s report aroused public interest and caused widespread consternation. It also seemed to deliver photographic and statistical proof to skeptical citizens that Toronto had living conditions that were as bad as those identified in major European and American cities. Local newspapers publicized the report’s findings, reiterating the kind of calls for action that often appeared in news reports on slum conditions in the city. The Evening Telegram focused on the appalling circumstances found by the health inspectors, including one house where nineteen men were found sleeping in three rooms (figure 3.5), and 390 houses deemed “absolutely unfit for habitation for various reasons.”39 The Toronto Daily Star emphasized the proposed remedies outlined in the report: “A good housing by-law, with provisions for its adequate enforcement,” “suburban garden cities, with rapid transportation facilities at single fare,” and “city planning.”40 These news stories recounted the report’s findings and stimulated concern among many

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Torontonians, which no doubt helped Dr Hastings marshal support from both the public and local politicians for government intervention. The photographs published in the report evidently made the investigation more convincing and urgent, not only to news reporters but to city councilors as well. The mho relied on the report to make a forceful argument to government officials for increased spending on public health and for the new housing by-law he was working toward. Although the garden city suburb the mho hoped for was not attainable once land speculators bought up large tracts of the property surrounding the city, many councilors did rally behind the idea.41 In his drive to improve the welfare of Toronto’s citizens, Hastings, through his use of photography, contributed to the construction of an underclass of the poor and the “foreign,” who became subject to new regulatory measures. Shortly after the release of the report, Hastings made use of a clause in the Public Health Act to call for assistance from the police and other city employees in carrying out regular inspections of the 80,000–100,000 yards and lanes in the city.42 The alternative, he argued, was an unreasonably large staff of sanitary inspectors to accomplish monthly inspections of these spaces. For the purpose of the inspections by city employees, Hastings supplied the police and other government departments with cards listing all the information that should be recorded in the event of a sanitary infraction. An administrative system was consequently set in place in which municipal workers became agents of regulation and reform, while the inhabitants of the slums had to submit to regular inspections of their homes and were bound by the findings of the inspectors. The unsanitary disposal of human waste was seen as one of the worst offences, and city council directed the mho to do everything possible to eliminate this practice. During the year following the report, 5,000 of 18,000 outdoor privies were replaced with indoor plumbing.43 City council also responded to the recommendations in Hastings’s report by ordering houses that were deemed unfit for human habitation to be demolished, and by calling for the mho to work with other government officials to develop a housing by-law with the aim of preventing slum conditions.44 With his systematic investigation of the slums, Hastings launched a campaign for public health reform that furthered the goals of liberal governmentality. Because of Dr Hastings’s survey, the municipal government instituted new social welfare policies and public health initiatives, which focused on managing the poor and immigrants and the seemingly chaotic urban environments in which they lived. Establishing procedures for monitoring interior and exterior spaces was important to the liberal project of regularizing urban living conditions for people of all classes. Hastings earned broad-based public support with his methods, and as a result of the survey, city council passed regulations governing the occupancy rate and cleanliness of lodging houses, while resources were also allocated for regular inspections of areas deemed slum districts. Under Hastings, the Health Department emphasized the importance of public health education, and it set up programs to teach the poor and immigrants “better methods of living.”45 From May 1911, he published a monthly Health Bulletin, which contained information about the department’s activities and offered guidance on disease prevention. Fortythousand copies of the bulletin were distributed each month to school children, university

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students, professionals, and businesses throughout the city.46 For his educational mission, Hastings also hired female inspectors in a “Municipal Housekeeping” program, where inspectors were sent out to poor districts to instruct women in the “necessity of cleanliness in their homes, and the danger of unsanitary methods.”47 As well, a housing commission composed of a physician, an engineer, an architect, a real estate expert, a building expert, and a social worker, was appointed to address the housing problem and to institute “a constant and persistent campaign of education.”48 Dr Hastings’s contention that public health must be adequately financed became widely accepted, and, between 1910 and 1913, the Board of Control more than doubled the appropriations for the Department of Health. Municipal spending on public health increased from 27 cents per capita in 1910 to $1.58 per capita in 1922.49 As Mayor Horatio Hocken (1912–14) stated, the increases in expenditures had been offset by the “enormous increase in the work undertaken and accomplished by the Department.”50 Dr Hastings’s illustrated “Report of Slum Conditions” came at the beginning of his nineteen-year tenure as Toronto’s Medical Health Officer, and was an early but crucial step in his struggle to institute a cohesive public health system.51 Hastings’s campaign for increased funding for the Health Department was not unchallenged, because other departments were competing for limited government resources, but it was ultimately effective. While the inspection of sanitary conditions was only one factor in Hastings’s successful bid to raise awareness about and regulate public health, this was where photography contributed most to the regulatory environment that was a key component of the liberal political order and crucial to the making of liberal subjects. Photographs were used as sources of knowledge about low-income social subjects, which, in turn, enabled the mho to generate the support necessary to implement reforms. The report reinforced class divisions, with middle-class liberal subjects who were expected to self-regulate exempt from the frequent inspections to which others were exposed. And even though the photographs often failed to show the conditions that were considered threatening, they were a vital element in the fearful response. The report intensified an already existing narrative of crisis, creating an “affective economy” that recruited councilors and citizens to support Hastings’s reform mission.52

Municipal Research and New Public Policy Two years after the mho’s investigation of Toronto slums, a second survey was undertaken. Once again, instrumental photography played a key role in the drive for policy reform and in shaping the liberal political order. This time, however, the emphasis was on streamlining administrative procedures at City Hall. In November of 1912, a small group of businessmen formed an organization dedicated to improving Toronto’s city government. Describing themselves as “deeply interested in our City’s welfare,” these businessmen established the Civic Survey Committee. Their intention was to create a city that was more conducive to business and tourism by improving public administration and by implementing social reforms.53 Encouraged by similar activities in several American cities, and particularly by measures taken in New York City, the Civic Survey Committee or-

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ganized and financed an independent survey that examined the administration of five municipal departments as well as physical conditions in the city, with the aim of informing citizens and public officials about the operations of the city’s government.54 The Civic Survey Committee hired the New York Bureau of Municipal Research (bmr) to conduct the survey, in which both the administrative systems of municipal government and the urban environment were the objects of investigation and reform. According to the members of the Civic Survey Committee, eliminating corruption in local government was a necessary step in improving the functioning of government and advancing the welfare of the population. By the time the New York bmr began its work, numerous groups and individuals in the city had already declared that Toronto’s municipal government needed to become more accountable and efficient. For instance, in 1912 members of the Board of Control and the Committee on Legislation and Reception made several attempts to restructure city council by reducing the number of aldermen and increasing the number of controllers. Their goal was to shift control away from aldermen, many of whom were suspected of protecting their own business and political interests at the expense of their constituents, or, at the very least, of mismanaging the affairs of their wards.55 Urban historian John Weaver has noted that standing committees possessed the real power in municipal government, as contractors and private corporations regularly “bought” aldermen by contributing to their campaigns.56 Although the attempt to eliminate the rewards of corruption and the influence of unscrupulous aldermen in policymaking was not entirely successful, governing committees of council were amended, and the duties and the authority of standing committees were transferred to the Board of Control, thereby strengthening the Board and effectively redistributing financial control of the municipal government. When the Civic Survey Committee requested the Board’s consent to conduct its survey, municipal reform was already a significant issue. Unlike this internal effort to reorganize government, Bureau researchers shifted their attention away from the moral reform of individual politicians to concentrate on improving government procedures.57 The bmr was a leader in the municipal reform movement, which gained momentum in North America at the end of the nineteenth century as the administrative systems of government were separated from party politics. The bmr relied on political transparency and the availability of data about government. They considered government and a city’s infrastructure to be a work in progress, like a machine that required regular servicing, always in need of maintenance.58 The bmr’s analysis of administrative divisions in Toronto focused on the city treasury and the Departments of Assessment, Works, Fire, and Property. Its physical survey not only looked at slum conditions, but also examined all aspects of the urban environment. Here, the target of reform shifted. While normally the educated middle class focused their efforts on the poor and working classes, in this case a select group of well-off businessmen directed their attention to the government and the physical condition of the city. The Civic Survey Committee and the New York bmr both believed that the improvement of the urban environment was essential for any broad reform of the way cities were run.59 However, the physical survey was the only aspect of the investigation that used photography.

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Fig. 3.7 New York Bureau of Municipal Research, “Report on a Survey of the City Treasury, Assessment, Works, Fire, and Property Departments, with Appendices, Physical Survey” [Need for a General ‘Clean-up’ Day], 1913.

Unsightly conditions, any setting that was a threat to public health, any circumstances that affected real estate values and detracted from the city’s reputation, or any aspect of the city that could negatively affect its inhabitants was photographed as evidence of the need for reform.60 The bmr was an important participant in liberal governmentality because it was a strong advocate for the systematic organization of the social order. Incorporated in 1907, the New York bmr was dedicated to the scientific analysis of municipal problems and quickly gained a reputation as a leader in the emerging field of municipal reform.61 Its founders, Henry Bruere and Drs William Allen and Frederick Cleveland, adapted methods from scientific management and applied them to government.62 Jane Dahlberg’s analysis of the bmr, which emphasizes the organization’s connections to emerging administrative practices and management theory, notes the influence of Frederick Taylor’s efficiency studies and Woodrow Wilson’s and Frank Goodnow’s studies of administration on the Bureau’s scientific method.63 However, Dahlberg has also pointed out that all three founders had backgrounds working for poor relief agencies, in settlement houses, and in other forms of welfare work.64 Following Camilla Stivers’s argument, the bmr may have

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turned to a scientific discourse of efficiency to masculinize municipal research, thus distinguishing it from social work, which was seen at the time as feminine.65 In any case, by focusing on administrative techniques, Bureau researchers concerned themselves with the methods and procedures common to all government divisions, regardless of subject. In contrast to muckrakers who merely criticized government, the Bureau researchers aimed to enlighten citizens to the work of city departments, and thereby “substitute knowledge for indignation.”66 As historian Jonathan Kahn has pointed out, members of the bmr established themselves as the experts best suited to teach ordinary people the principles of good citizenship.67 Their studies were addressed to government officials and to the public, and because the bmr declared itself impartial and non-partisan, both groups tended to trust their results and value their analysis and recommendations.68 The Bureau’s report on Toronto, which was over 250 pages long including appendices and organizational charts, was overseen by the directors of the New York bmr and was carried out by Fred Linders and several specialists on various aspects of administration. The bmr took on the problem of government and improving the social order in a characteristically liberal manner. Rather than focusing on overt modes of establishing order, such as the police, they concentrated on the inconspicuous mechanisms of government, such as budgets and accounting methods, which they considered the foundation of good government and a precondition to solving all other problems.69 Recommendations for Toronto’s Department of Assessment, for example, emphasized the taxation of improvements on land and its effect upon the community. The adjustment of assessment and taxation rates was identified as a beneficial way to address Toronto’s problems with high population density and poor housing conditions. The Bureau’s analysts projected that a reduction in the rate of taxation on improvements would stimulate building and encourage the provision of decent housing. Conversely, if an increased burden of taxation were to be placed upon the land, the owner of property would have more incentive to improve the land in order to reduce the rate of assessment on the total capital value of the property. The report explained how this approach would have helped the city to avoid its current problems with slum conditions and housing shortages. If Toronto had recognized 20 years ago that the way to stimulate building was to subsidize improvements through a reduction in the rate of taxation on improvements, it might not be facing today a condition where the city has been forced to furnish the capital for providing decent housing conditions.70 Pointing out the need to improve living conditions within the city, the Bureau recommended that city council consider distributing the cost of government through the assessment of real estate. A further proposal directed at government accountability and increased citizen awareness called for the publication of land value maps of the city on an annual basis so that property owners and civic groups could verify the work of the Assessment Department.71 With their survey of the Assessment Department, bmr researchers proposed that citizens play a leading role in the regulation of government.

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It was only in the physical survey of the city, however, that bmr employed the kind of scrutiny the camera could offer.72 Because the researchers believed the efficiency and quality of government administration was directly related to the physical urban environment and the well-being of its inhabitants, any attempt at reform necessitated an investigation of social conditions, such as housing and health. The report defined a physical survey in the following terms: It is not confined to the disclosure of the so-called “slum conditions,” but includes these as a part of all the physical conditions in a community requiring change or remedy, whether these conditions operate to make the city unsightly, cause its people inconveniences, endanger their health and lives, affect real estate values, detract from the city’s reputation as a place of residence or business, or lower citizen pride.73 With this broadly conceived definition, the Bureau researchers compared the circumstances in Toronto with the conditions in, and ideals for, numerous European and American cities in order to establish their own standards for improvement. They examined the physical city with the belief that better regulation of the urban environment would produce social subjects who could self-regulate. Thirty-two photographs, some taken by the city photographer, Arthur Goss, and others that cannot be attributed to a particular Fig. 3.8 Right Photograph by Arthur Goss, in New York Bureau of Municipal Research, “Report on a Survey of the City Treasury, Assessment, Works, Fire, and Property Departments, with Appendices, Physical Survey” [Need for ‘follow-up’ of Condemned Conditions], 1913. Fig. 3.9 Opposite Photograph by Arthur Goss, in New York Bureau of Municipal Research, “Report on a Survey of the City Treasury, Assessment, Works, Fire, and Property Departments, with Appendices, Physical Survey” [Need for a General ‘Clean-up’ Day], 1913.

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photographer, were summoned as evidence of poor physical conditions in the city. The images are arranged into eleven groupings to show such things as “the need for a municipal lodging house,” “the need for a house-to-house inspection,” “the need for a follow-up of condemned conditions,” “the need for more playgrounds,” and “the need for eliminating conditions which disfigure the city.”74 The cooperation of the Health Department is apparent in the photographic surveillance of poverty, and the survey on the whole supported the findings of Dr Hastings’s earlier investigation. One photograph, which appears in the survey under the heading “Need for a General ‘Clean-Up’ Day,” shows the enclosed space of a rear yard, which is littered with empty barrels, wooden crates, and other debris. Using a 5 ⫻ 7 inch view camera and a wide-angle lens, Goss, the city photographer, emphasized the confined quality of the squalid yard by taking the photograph from an elevated viewpoint and by framing the yard with the exterior walls of three houses. It is tempting to imagine him balanced on an adjacent roof directing the scene below. The caption described the photograph as providing evidence of conditions found in a backyard at 142 Agnes Street, and as representative of conditions

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found near many dwellings in the Ward. The report established the photograph as a record of slum conditions in an area of the city that was known for its unsanitary conditions, and it noted incidences of sickness, which in this case involved children with scarlet fever. This information, in turn, was used to press for and institute further reform measures, including more frequent visits by inspectors such as those in the photograph. Pictured in their neat suits and hats amidst the cluttered scene, the inspectors appear in stark contrast to a small, scruffy boy, and the disarray of his surroundings. The presence of the inspectors in the photograph signifies the power of civic and governmental groups to intervene and to regulate slum conditions and, at the same time, it provides a positive model of clean and disciplined subjects. By offering the photograph as evidence, the bmr attempted to show a direct and favourable relationship between regulatory procedures and the physical well-being of the city and its inhabitants. As with the images in the Medical Health Officer’s “Report of Slum Conditions,” the photographs in the bmr survey did not merely illustrate the effects of power. Rather, they created the sites where social subjects were produced and power was negotiated. In two photographs intended to show the problems of overcrowding and the “need for a municipal lodging house,” the poor and immigrant men who live in these congested lodgings are the object of a surveillance that constitutes them as problematic social subjects, defined by their difference in class and nationality. In one, six Polish men occupy two small rooms that inspectors had determined were appropriate for only three men. The photograph, therefore, showed a violation of Health Department regulations, but in doing so constructed overcrowding as a distinctly “foreign” way of living. In another, the unsanitary living conditions of a lodging house basement established residents as a group subject to health regulation. However, the charged atmosphere of this lodging reveals the issue of violence and criminality associated with poor, single men. At a time when “the family” was identified as the standard measure for public health work, and the principle social construct for producing responsible citizens, these single men were inherently anomalous and incomplete; however, it was through their unsanitary way of living that they were constituted as a group subject to regulation.75 With these instrumental photographs, social problems and social subjects were identified and produced, and the new knowledge they provided made possible new forms of social regulation. At the same time that the bmr’s physical survey identified unsanitary and unsightly conditions and singled out the occupants who lived in undesirable circumstances as objects of intensive regulation, it also worked to constitute an audience of liberal subjects

Fig. 3.10 Opposite top Photograph by Arthur Goss, in New York Bureau of Municipal Research, “Report on a Survey of the City Treasury, Assessment, Works, Fire, and Property Departments, with Appendices, Physical Survey” [Need to Eliminate Overcrowding], 1913. Fig. 3.11 Opposite bottom Photograph by Arthur Goss, in New York Bureau of Municipal Research, “Report on a Survey of the City Treasury, Assessment, Works, Fire, and Property Departments, with Appendices, Physical Survey” [Need to Regulate Lodging Houses], 1913.

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Fig. 3.12 New York Bureau of Municipal Research, “Report on a Survey of the City Treasury, Assessment, Works, Fire, and Property Departments, with Appendices, Physical Survey” [Need for More Playgrounds], 1913.

who would respond to its calls for action. The physical survey could mobilize this audience because, unlike accounting methods, assessment, and taxation rates, it dealt with conditions that could be photographed. A photograph used to illustrate the “need for more playgrounds” shows children playing near an outdoor toilet, while another used to argue for a “change of methods in existing playgrounds” shows children near Elizabeth Street Playground, the only playground in the Ward, standing around in the street because, the caption explains, the play area was closed on Sundays. By depicting and describing conditions that contemporary middle-class readers would have recognized as threatening to the health and morality of children, the report attempted to motivate readers to push for the kind of reforms that would prevent these situations and create appropriately liberal subjects. Quoting liberally from Dr Hastings’s 1911 report, the bmr study argued that the Health Department must be given the financial support necessary to implement an improved system for the inspection and regulation of lodging houses, and the elimination of unfit dwellings and privy pits. The Bureau’s report specifically recommended the involvement of citizens’ organizations in making the city “more healthful and more sanitary,” and it called for a plan for new housing.76 The conditions depicted in the survey photographs contested the optimistic vision of Toronto conveyed in the numerous illustrated guides to the city and fostered by many in the business community.77 Photographs of the city’s

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unsanitary and unsightly conditions challenged the view of Toronto as a tourist destination and a growing centre for industry and commerce; however, they also helped to generate the impetus to achieve reforms that would transform the city into the kind of modern city that the Bureau researchers hoped to produce.

Shaping Public Opinion Shortly after the founding of a Toronto branch of the bmr a few years later, the Bureau researchers returned to the study of the physical condition of the city. An extensive seventy-five page report, “What is ‘the Ward’ going to do with Toronto?” (1918) focused exclusively on the Ward district, while acknowledging that the undesirable conditions found there existed in other areas of the city, as well as in many other North American cities.78 With this report, the Bureau of Municipal Research aimed to show the economic and social costs of the circumstances in this district. In its characteristically detailed manner, the Bureau researchers looked at the environment through an investigation into the condition of streets and sidewalks, the types of buildings and their state of repair, and real estate values. They also studied the population by taking family histories, and by considering rates of contagious disease and infant mortality. Here again, photographs were presented as proof of substandard conditions. A section of the report on open spaces includes a diagram illustrating a congested streetscape and five photographs of “rear dwellings,” each one showing an enclosed yard and a distinct lack of open space. Paired with a map of “sanitary defects” in the Ward are three photographs of yards and laneways littered with everything from scraps of wood, metal, and clothing to broken furniture. The photographs effectively convey the dull and uninviting environment of the Ward through the clutter they make visible and through their repetitiveness. Of the forty-four photographs in the report, all but a few depict the dismal exteriors of ramshackle houses and grim streetscapes. Through repetition these images also demonstrate that the wretched conditions of 1918 looked much the same as those portrayed in the previous reports of 1911 and 1913. Not only were they evidence of the undesirable state of the Ward, they were also proof that deficient conditions had persisted for years. Because a key component of the Bureau’s work was to publicize the results of their research, 3,000 copies of their study of the Ward were distributed to government officials, businessmen, newspapers, social service agencies, and reform-minded citizens in December of 1918. From there, the publication would have circulated further in the waiting rooms of professionals and public service agencies.79 The study was an expensive undertaking, costing $639 to research and another $1,112 to publish, and with this significant investment, it was particularly important to reach as wide an audience as possible. The press played a crucial role in conveying the results of this and other studies to an estimated 90,000 homes, and the Bureau claimed, “No previous publication of the Bureau has awakened such widespread interest as has the report on the Ward.”80 The Globe and Toronto Star both reported on the bmr’s findings and recommendations, which focused on ways to stop land speculation through various forms of municipal legislation, aimed at encouraging, rather than penalizing, property improvements.

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The newspaper articles on the Bureau’s 1918 report did not include photographs, but by this time the images were evidently so familiar to readers that they were hardly necessary. One article asks readers to recall generic images that any mention of the Ward “conjures up in the mind of the average citizen,” including “pictures of a district where the inhabitants live, move and have their being in ramshackle old buildings, vermin-infested and innocent of paint or whitewash.”81 Another article tried to convey the role photographs played in revealing the problems discussed in the report by mentioning “a suggestive picture” demonstrating the lack of suitable space for recreation.82 While the Bureau admitted that the study did not result in immediate changes to the conditions it discovered, they claimed that their report had “considerable influence in stimulating community interest in housing and town planning.”83 The publicity garnered by the report on the Ward also aroused public interest in municipal research, specifically the bmr’s activities.84 In its studies, photographs not only served as evidence of conditions found during the research process, they were also central to the way the Bureau sought to shape public opinion according to its liberal ideals.

Conclusion Each of the three studies discussed in this chapter relied on photography to generate both new forms of knowledge about, and an affective response to, the Ward, an area of the city that came to symbolize the need for urban reform. Even though the photographs were often ambiguous, and attempts to regulate undesirable living conditions and the people who lived in them were often obstructed by the complexity of implementing change, the photographs did participate in an affective economy that rendered them instruments in a liberal political order. Thus, during the 1910s when these reports were produced, photography figured prominently in the way individual subjects were governed by their relationship to the collective. What photography supplied to the production and organization of knowledge in liberal discourse was a vivid and convincing way to identify specific circumstances that were deemed a challenge to predetermined social norms. As instruments in the creation of a modern city, photographs contributed to the municipal government’s increasing emphasis on the welfare of the population during this period, as well as to the definition of an underclass of people who were regarded as in need of both assistance and regulation. Social welfare became not only a means of assisting the impoverished, it was a way of protecting the interests of the middle class from crime, disease, and other miseries of modern, urban life. Indeed, urban reform was an attempt to re-order a chaotic city according to liberal values.

Fig. 3.13 Opposite top Bureau of Municipal Research, “What is ‘the Ward’ Going to do With Toronto?” 1918. Fig. 3.14 Opposite bottom Bureau of Municipal Research, “What is ‘the Ward’ Going to do With Toronto?” 1918.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Framing Citizenship

Immigration was a major source of anxiety in the early years of the twentieth century. A period of worldwide economic growth coincided with the election of Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal Party in 1896, and the new federal government aimed to attract immigrant workers who would contribute to the country’s burgeoning economy. Immigrants were sought from previously untapped regions, particularly central and eastern Europe, even though many Anglo-Canadians were apprehensive about the ability of people from these areas to integrate into mainstream society.1 A 1911 article in The Presbyterian, an independent weekly journal, argued that the challenge of immigration was to acculturate newcomers unfamiliar with Canadian ways: “A Canadian is not a man born on Canadian soil but a man who shares Canadian ideals of life and citizenship. And a man is to us a foreigner, not because he comes from another land, but because his ideas and ideals are not ours. Our immigration problem then is to Canadianize these vast numbers who come to share our home.”2 While responses to immigration ranged from those who flatly opposed it to those who embraced it as a new supply of labour, liberal reformers generally accepted the idea that immigrants should learn Canadian values in order to become a part of Canadian society. Introducing newcomers to ideals that were considered Canadian was particularly an issue in urban areas, where considerable numbers of central and eastern European immigrants settled. In Toronto, home to significant Jewish and Italian populations, the question of how to integrate non-English speaking immigrants held particular import as many of these newcomers settled in the congested section of the downtown core known as the Ward.3 As we saw in the previous chapter, the physical conditions in this area were unfavourable from the mid-nineteenth century when the district was initially developed.4 As the Ward became increasingly populated and conditions worsened after the turn of the century, government officials, the press, social reformers, and policy-makers increasingly

described it as a slum. Slums in general, and the Ward in particular, came to signify both the surge in immigration and the problems associated with large numbers of foreign-born people settling in the city. Concerns about the Ward and its inhabitants were widespread, and numerous newspaper and magazine articles from the period convey the anxiety Torontonians felt about living in close proximity to culturally diverse groups. In the late 1890s, at the beginning of the surge in immigration, there were few articles in Toronto newspapers on slum conditions, and those that appeared tended to focus on the threat posed by poor living conditions. Within a few years, news reports of unsanitary conditions became more common, and in addition to describing the run-down environment they emphasized the ethnic makeup of the Ward, often associating poor living conditions with particular ethnic groups.5 Photography was one of the new and invasive tactics of investigation that made revealing and sensational narratives about slums possible. One well-known example of its use is when Jacob Riis employed flash photography for his exploration of previously inaccessible slum interiors to great effect in his accounts of life in the tenements of New York.6 Visibility was at the core of new techniques of surveillance and new forms of spectacle. As historian H.J. Dyos explains in his seminal work on the urban history of Victorian London, the appearance of new visual accounts of London in the nineteenth century was “not only to begin to turn the slums into a public spectacle, perhaps even a public entertainment, but to enlarge the scope both for private charity and public social policy.”7 In Toronto, the numerous illustrated reports and news articles showing rundown houses and disorderly streetscapes made the Ward a touchstone for powerful emotions, from anxiety to fascination, frequently expressed towards eastern and central European immigrants. Through these accounts, and their sensational contrasts between liberal and “foreign” values, the Ward and its inhabitants became at once the target of surveillance and a source of spectacle for liberal viewers. On the one hand, press coverage from a range of publications, including Canadian Magazine, the Globe, and Toronto World, positioned eastern and central European immigrants as a source of public anxiety about poverty, moral and biological degeneracy, and disease, while on the other hand, accounts of their lives provoked curiosity and became a source of entertainment. There were also other sites where photography played a role in shaping the identities and the public perceptions of immigrants. This chapter compares photographs in the mainstream press with photographs in the monthly newsletters and annual reports produced by Central Neighborhood House (cnh), a social settlement agency dedicated to integrating new immigrants into Canadian society. These sources offer another view of how photography worked to establish the conditions under which immigrants would become self-regulating subjects. A further comparison with portraits of Jewish immigrants shows how the poverty and unsanitary living conditions emphasized in press photographs contrasted with the middle-class conventions adhered to in portraiture. I use this juxtaposition to illustrate the necessarily complex negotiation of social position and identity undertaken by many immigrants as they adapted to Canada’s liberal political order. Whereas photographs in the press and in cnh literature influenced ideas

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about which immigrants could be acculturated and who should be involved in the process, portraits offered some immigrants a way of negotiating complex issues around difference and belonging. In contrast to social histories of Toronto, which have analyzed the social and demographic changes to the city caused by immigration, and scholarship on immigrant history, which has tended to concentrate on the conditions experienced by various subcategories of immigrant,8 here I focus on how images were used to connect particular groups of immigrants with the Ward, and thus how photographs became the basis for new forms of subjectivity, new ideas about citizenship, and new social relations. Rather than trying to understand immigrants’ experiences or the actual circumstances of their lives, I look at how the association between particular ethnic categories and a particular area of the city made some immigrant groups the target of liberal reform. Focusing on three key venues in which photographs of immigrants from central and eastern Europe circulated – newspapers and magazines, the pamphlets of social services agencies, and studio portraits – I consider the various and frequently conflicting ways immigrants were represented. In doing so, I trace four distinct but related concepts of citizenship. First, we encounter the notion of immigrants as citizens of the Ward, a citizenship constructed as circumscribed and disconnected from the liberal nation-state. Then, we see how citizenship took shape within discourses of betterment and social reform with attempts to turn immigrants into liberal citizens. Next, we look at how citizenship was framed as social responsibility, particularly the idea that middle-class citizens had a duty to help newcomers integrate. Finally, I consider aspirational citizenship, in which immigrants became citizens of the liberal state by identifying with middle-class, Canadian values. I show that with the wide circulation of certain kinds of pictures of immigrants, new aspects of the city were rendered visible to a mass audience, and this new visibility was important in the constitution of a liberal political order.

Exploring the Slums Stories from the time, such as Margaret Bell’s “Toronto’s Melting Pot,” make it clear that the city’s ethnically diverse immigrants were commonly associated with the Ward.9 In this dramatic tale, published in the July 1913 issue of Canadian Magazine, Bell positioned herself as a kind of tourist visiting an unfamiliar part of the city. She described the Ward as an area of the city with distinct ethnic enclaves. In the “Hebrew district,” there were “tawdry youngsters” who would “appear from their respective hovels” to buy ice cream cones.10 The “Italian district,” according to Bell, smelled of garlic and spaghetti, and “barearmed, bare-necked, sturdy, brown” gangs of workmen sprawled on their doorsteps after their day’s labour.11 Chinese and “Negroes” were portrayed as living apart from other ethnicities in a separate quarter of the slums. Bell discussed the Chinese quarter in terms of the exotic goods available there, while she explained that the houses in the “Negro” area of the slum were “more neglected … than those of the other races in the melting pot.”12 Thick with description, Bell’s narrative about her visit to the Ward was meant to inform and entertain the reader.

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Fig. 4.1 Marion Long (Canadian, 1882–1970), reproduction of drawing in Margaret Bell’s “Toronto’s Melting Pot,” Canadian Magazine, 1913.

As cultural historian Seth Koven has shown, literary accounts of the urban poor correspond with the practice of slumming, in which middle- and upper-class men and women ventured into overcrowded, run-down urban neighbourhoods to see first-hand how the poor lived.13 Bell’s excursion into Toronto’s slum district lacked the philanthropic drive of many earlier accounts, and thus it did not contain the complex intersection of benevolent and erotic impulses Koven has identified in many narratives of Victorian London. However, her account does make an effort to titillate the reader and relies on romanticized notions of poverty. This erotic subtext comes from her emphasis on a sensory experience of the Ward, in which she accentuates the unfamiliar sights, sounds, and smells, as well as from her suggestive comments about illicit sexual encounters between, for example, a rag collector and maids working in the houses of the well-to-do.14 Describing Italians as above all pleasure-seekers, she portrayed the behaviour of inhabitants of the Ward as driven by instinct rather than by reason. Bell thus positioned herself and her readers as more rational than the urban poor. Yet, as a spectator of sexual relations and other affective adventures that challenged liberal standards, it appears now that she overlooked the voyeuristic impulse of her own investigation.

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Bell often wrote short, moralizing stories about the commonplace encounters of everyday modern life for Canadian Magazine. This article, more a tawdry tale than a liberal sermon, contrasted her approach to the Ward with the methods of reformers. While she went to mingle, others went with “white gloves and lorgnettes” and “condescension and pity” to “preach sanitation.”15 Aware of how her gender affected her experience, she commented on the way the Italian workmen responded as she passed by: “They do not pay much attention to you as you walk past. They would like to, you can tell by the sideglances which are jerked toward you. But the boss is there in the midst of them.”16 At the same time, Bell distinguished herself from the women who lived in the Ward through her description of their ethnicity. She characterized Jewish women as fat or coarse, with shawls on their heads or as typically carrying babies or chickens. And she clearly differentiated herself from young Italian women working in downtown factories whom she portrayed as having “olive complexions and eyes like glowing, black pearls … look[ing] curiously alien, with their long ear-rings and much-coiffed black hair.”17 Bell also alluded to a criminal element in the Ward, referring to dishonest shopkeepers and petty theft. Writing about this area as an outsider seeking to uncover hidden realities for other curious, middle-class, liberal Canadians, she set up the Ward and its inhabitants as objects for consumption.18 Her article gave the impression that although middle-class interlopers may find the extreme poverty in the slum district distressing, it was an exciting place to visit, precisely because of the predominance of people “of other races” and their lively street life. Bell’s article appealed to readers by offering a compelling yet disconcerting account of the Ward as a “melting pot” where new immigrants struggled to improve their meager existence. The term “melting pot,” as used by Bell and others at the time, implied assimilation as a social process that affected both immigrants and the native-born, and resulted in the acculturation of the immigrant.19 Presented as different from homogenization or miscegenation, this idea of assimilation focused more on how immigrants became citizens. In her article, Bell positioned the ethnically diverse Ward district at the very heart of the important activity of integrating immigrants into a new nation. Recognizing the Ward as a battleground in the struggle between liberal reformers seeking to change the habits and lifestyles of immigrants and the inhabitants themselves, who sought to maintain their cultural identities and to improve their lot in life, Bell’s descriptions of the objectionable traits and strange customs of the immigrants who lived in this run-down area were clearly meant to tantalize her readers. Nonetheless, she suggested that the perpetuation of traditional ways of life within the ethnic enclaves of the Ward was precisely what would make it difficult for immigrants to assimilate. For Bell, as for many earlier writers on urban poverty, the area of the city that was commonly described as a slum was a frontier in which fascination and anxiety converged. Bell’s article in Canadian Magazine belongs to a tradition of illustrated narratives about the urban poor that raised public awareness of their plight, but also entertained and titillated readers. Two well-known examples, Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851) and Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890), were popular publications concerned with revealing the lives of the urban poor to a middle-class audience. Bell’s

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essay is similar to these nineteenth-century works in that it used images and narrative to provide a vivid description of the people living in the Ward, and to present readers with a provocative look at a defining aspect of urban life. Nineteenth-century publications on the urban poor produced before the widespread adoption of the halftone printing process in the late 1890s were frequently illustrated with engravings made from photographs.20 With the new halftone process, reproductions of photographs could be made quickly and inexpensively. As a result, it became very common to illustrate accounts of urban poverty with photographs. However, Canadian Magazine took a different approach. It was a publication aimed at middle-class readers, which attempted to combine aspects of the literary journal with the popular magazine.21 It sought to distinguish itself from other magazines by publishing reproductions of works by celebrated Canadian artists such as Florence Carlyle, Horatio Walker, and Paul Peel, as well as by members of the Royal Canadian Academy, the Ontario Society of Artists, and the Toronto Art Students’ League. Each month some of the articles were illustrated with works of art, and by including art as well as photographs, the magazine stood out from other illustrated news magazines. Its cultural aspirations were also evident in the kinds of stories it published. Essays on issues of national importance – for example, the significance of nation-building and the role of Canadian women in the suffrage movement – were complemented by thoughtful articles on current events or more entertaining pieces on topics such as mental telepathy and what a group of nineyear-old children thought was appropriate behaviour for a lady.22 The magazine sought to at once enlighten and amuse its liberal readership with a diverse range of stories on Canadian subjects. Rather than using either photographs or engravings made from photographs, Canadian Magazine used artwork to illustrate articles about the Ward. Unlike photographs, which were commonly understood as evidence of the poor conditions in the accompanying narrative, readers would have regarded artwork as an artist’s interpretation. Drawings by Toronto artist Marion Long illustrate Bell’s narrative.23 Expressing a view of the Ward that was distinct from the author’s, Long was more sympathetic and less sensational than Bell. Her sketches, drawn from life, focus on the everyday activities of women and children, capturing, for example, women chatting in a doorway and an exchange with a street vendor.24 The figures are not individualized, and thus the drawings are not portraits of particular people, but rather depictions of typical people one would encounter on the streets of the Ward. Instead of exoticizing the figures, Long’s sketches convey the “foreignness” of their subjects through the activity of street life. The lively streets of the Ward appeared much like those in the peasant villages from which immigrants may have (and were assumed to have) come. They differed significantly, therefore, from the streets in other areas of the city, where most of the business and socializing took place indoors. By focusing on the women and children of the Ward, Long distinguished this immigrant quarter from other areas, where migrant workers and poor, single men were known to congregate in overcrowded boardinghouses. She also showed how immigrant women fostered social bonds as they went about their daily affairs. Although there

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Fig. 4.2 Marion Long, reproduction of drawing in Margaret Bell’s “Toronto’s Melting Pot,” Canadian Magazine, 1913.

are significant differences between Bell’s article and Long’s drawings, both appealed to readers interested in the experiences of modern urban life, and both depicted characteristics that were thought to define the Ward. Together, they provided different viewpoints from which readers could draw insight into life in Toronto’s impoverished and ethnically diverse district, conveying the idea that the Ward was a place where habits and behaviours did not adhere to liberal norms.

Entertainment for the Working Class The working-class newspaper Toronto World used a different strategy in its numerous illustrated items on the often-maligned Ward district. Photographs were a significant element in the newspaper’s fierce competition for readers.25 Sensational and alarming stories also played an important role in attracting the attention of, and satisfying, a broad, urban readership. Like other popular newspapers, Toronto World aimed to establish an emotional connection with those who read it.26 A simple and direct way of appealing to readers was through stories that consisted of only a headline and several captioned photographs. These

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visual accounts appeared in a special, illustrated section that was published on Sunday, a day when circulation was higher. As media historian Karin Becker has indicated, such illustrated supplements capitalized on the popularity of photographs while preserving the seriousness of the newspaper’s daily product.27 The illustrated section of the Sunday edition of Toronto World was like other illustrated newspapers of the time in that it aimed to present its readers with images that brought current events, and both familiar and unfamiliar places, to life. In their study of the role of newspapers in the development of American democracy, Kevin Barnhurst and John Nerone have argued that illustrated newspapers could function like travel literature, offering readers a way of encountering the world beyond their daily experience.28 In the case of Toronto World, the illustrated section was where one could find photographs of bird and animal life, as well as wilderness landscapes in distant Canadian provinces and hunting scenes from Northern Ontario. Rather than facilitating armchair travel to foreign lands, however, these photographs transported readers to remote areas of Canada untouched by urban development. City life was defined in relation to rural life, and these wilderness scenes contrasted with photographs of a wide variety of urban subjects, including sports, theatre, and leisure activities. Full-page photographic spreads of current public events in the city were the mainstay of the illustrated section. In late November and early December of 1910, for example, there was extensive photographic coverage of the Canadian rugby championship and the Ontario Horticulture Exhibition. Regular features on theatrical productions included photographs of the cast on stage and portraits of key actors. These were the activities of modern, urban life. The message conveyed through this coverage of current events was unmistakably celebratory. As Paul Rutherford has shown, popular newspapers generated a sense of an urban community.29 Their visual stories invited the reader to participate, even if only vicariously, in the events of the “great” city. Along with its laudatory approach, the illustrated section of Toronto World also conveyed the disparate character of urban life through its contrasting visual accounts of the city. Alongside the attractive images of public events, readers were confronted by alarming aspects of urbanization. Following images of carefully arranged flower displays, depictions of disorder and poverty aimed to convey what life was like in the city’s slums. The extreme and oppositional nature of the urban experience, discussed extensively by modern sociologists such as Georg Simmel, Victorian novelists like Charles Dickens, and also considered in early twentieth-century studies of Canadian urbanism, was surveyed on the illustrated pages of the Toronto World.30 J.S. Woodsworth, a Methodist minister influenced by American progressive-era ideas and an important figure in Canada’s reform movement, explained that underlying the novelty and excitement of the city were “evils of which we had hardly dreamed.”31 Toronto World was a popular forum for exploring both the thrills and fears of modernity. Toronto press photographer William James regularly supplied photographs to Toronto World. James worked on a freelance basis, taking photographs around the city each day, then developing and printing his work in the evening to sell to the local daily and weekly newspapers.32 James himself was an immigrant from Britain and was already forty years

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old when he and his family arrived in Canada in 1906. A self-taught photographer from a working-class background, he held a range of jobs until 1909 when he became able to earn a living from photography.33 His photographs in Toronto World were not specifically commissioned work; rather, their subjects were of interest to James, and he produced images with the intention of selling them. While his photographs of immigrants published in Toronto World focus on the locale of the Ward, he also photographed new immigrants upon their arrival in Toronto. Perhaps taken to support his volunteer work with the British Welcome League, these photographs of newcomers show clusters of people standing on street corners, leaning from the weight of their baggage, or crossing over the bridge at Union Station. In contrast to the photographs in Toronto World, these images depict newly arrived immigrants who seem imbued with potential and vitality. The leaning postures of a group of men and boys suggest energy and enthusiasm. Because of the range of ways James portrayed immigrants, the photographs published in Toronto World should not be seen as an expression of James’s personal views on immigrants. Rather, their role in constituting notions of citizenship and ethnic difference can only be understood in relation to the context created by the newspaper in which they were published. While conventional newspaper reports relied primarily on text to convey information or to articulate a particular point of view to readers, the stories in the Sunday supplements used a headline to unite five to ten images. Titles such as “In the Heart of a Great City – How the Citizens of ‘the Ward’ Live, Move and Have their Being,” and “Picturesque if not Artistic – Glimpses of ‘the Ward,’” promised the reader insight into what was considered a mysterious part of the city.34 By using the phrase “citizens of ‘the Ward,’” the first headline implied that the Ward was a distinct region whose inhabitants had different customs from those of the people in the rest of the city. It also suggested that the Ward operated under different laws and had a different status, so that the people who lived there existed outside, or parallel to, the duly constructed nation-state. The title implies that the people found there had ways of moving and being that were distinct from the codes of respectable, middle-class behaviour. By describing the Ward as “picturesque,” the second headline suggests that the run-down and congested area existed primarily for the visual delight of people who did not live there. The evocative headlines provided a framework through which readers could engage with the photographs and connect stories on the Ward and its inhabitants with other entertaining features covered in the illustrated section of the paper. The photographs of the Ward that accompanied these headlines offered curious readers a chance to scrutinize an unfamiliar area of the city from a safe distance. Many images purport to offer “Glimpses of ‘the Ward’” by picturing the environment of the slum, including exteriors of various stores, junk heaps, and dilapidated buildings. A picture captioned “furniture warehouse in the open street” shows a woman, her head covered by a shawl, standing next to a haphazard assortment of furniture piled outside a building. The caption suggests that business was carried out in peculiar ways in the Ward. Moreover, a photograph of a shop window announcing its second-hand goods for sale indicated that the Ward was the domain of the lower class. Photographs of Jewish subjects, such as

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Fig. 4.3 William James, British Immigrants from Kent, c. 1908.

Yiddish signs on storefronts and women in headscarves, were frequently used to indicate ethnic differences in the Ward. A photograph with the caption “Agnes Street restaurant,” taken by James, shows a two-storey building with the word “restaurant” painted on one of the windows. Below the English sign is Yiddish text. Squeezed in next door to the restaurant in the same building is a sign announcing the services of a jeweler and watchmaker.35 Alongside the building, and in the centre of the photograph, a pile of rubbish obstructs a passageway between two buildings. The only person in the image is a woman standing in shadow on the porch of the poultry warehouse. In the foreground, there is a rundown wooden fence, two barrels lying on their sides in the dirt, a few wooden planks set down as walkways, and two torn and lumpy upholstered chairs next to a gate in the fence.36 In this photograph, James brought together in visual form the key public concerns associated with the Ward: health, immigration, and poverty. The image emphasizes the unsanitary, neglected, and disorganized features of the Ward at the same time that it portrays the area as primarily the domain of Jewish immigrants. Taken together, these “Glimpses of ‘the Ward’” present a story of a slum that was an overwhelmingly chaotic and foreign, but visually interesting, place.

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Fig. 4.4 Top “Picturesque if not Artistic – Glimpses of ‘The Ward,’” Toronto World, 4 December 1910. Fig. 4.5 “In the heart of a great city – how the citizens of ‘The Ward’ live, move, and have their being,” Toronto World, 27 November 1910.

The Toronto World’s visual account of “the citizens of ‘the Ward’” looks at the daily life of the people who lived in the district. James’s photograph of the poulterer’s establishment shows a Jewish man coming out of a gate carrying two fowl struggling wildly in his hands. Behind him is a dilapidated shack, and to his right are tattered slipper chairs that seem out of place in the dirt beside the fence. In this picture, as with the others published in this grouping, everyday business takes place amidst the squalid houses of the Ward. These photographs show the blurring of boundaries between home life and business activities, private and public space, and residential and commercial property, a state of affairs that fell short of the North American middle-class, liberal ideal of separate spheres. They show the Ward, with its immigrant population, as a component of the urban economy, albeit one that operated according to a different set of rules. Rather than providing information suitable for the study and analysis of social ailments – as would a government report, for example, or information concerned with influencing opinion on the need for social reform and assimilation, as a social service agency might – these newspaper accounts simply called attention to the deprived condition of the Ward and of the people who lived there as a spectacle for working-class entertainment. The newspaper was less concerned with changing conditions in the Ward than with offering its readers an intriguing view of unusual and difficult lives. In Toronto World, ethnic difference was formulated as an object of entertainment and visual consumption. The sensational coverage of contemporary issues in the newspaper’s illustrated section offered readers a chance to experience extreme and seemingly contrasting sensations of horror and pleasure. This experience of exaggerated feeling has an important precedence in Victorian sensation fiction, which addressed specifically modern, urban anxieties. Changes caused by contemporary social and economic conditions, perhaps primarily the collapse of traditional class identities but also financial vulnerability and shifting roles for women, all contributed to a general sense of unease. These changes, and the apprehension they produced, were compulsively rehashed in writings published in popular magazines.37 Sensation literature, which was often published in serial form in these inexpensive magazines starting in the 1860s, is characterized by a concern for revealing mysteries and secrets. With its emphasis on intrigue and deviance, contemporary critics likened sensation novels to an addictive drug and a stimulus that appealed to the nervous system rather than to the mind.38 Evidently capitalizing on the modern appetite for sensation, the Toronto World printed photographic features that made the most of the modern fascination with secrecy and scandal by claiming to reveal the hidden dangers of the city. Like the sensation literature that preceded it, Toronto World used a serial format to ration sensational stories in “tantalizing proportions.”39 As some scholars have emphasized, the serial format promoted continued consumption, making it a form of storytelling that was particularly suitable for a capitalist system.40 In addition to the consumption-oriented format, Toronto World blurred the lines between advertising and news. Whether it was by using the same typeface for advertisements and news or by writing copy extolling the merits of a product as if it were news, the paper brazenly went after advertising revenue.41 By adopting a consumerist model of

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Fig. 4.6 “Some of the Little Citizens of Toronto’s Congested Area,” Toronto World, 9 March 1913.

experience, the paper also transformed human misery into entertainment for popular consumption. Various advertisements printed among the photographic features throughout the illustrated section contributed to the commodification of experiences of the Ward, and emphasized the opposition between newness and deterioration. Readers could contemplate new electric light fixtures for their homes at the same time they scrutinized the dilapidated immigrant homes of the Ward. In the pages of the illustrated newspaper, working-class readers could see both the kind of middle-class lifestyle they were expected to aspire to and the impoverished and unfamiliar lives of the city’s “foreigners” against whom they could define themselves. Drawing on the language of citizenship once again, an illustrated feature from March 1913 titled “Some of the Little Citizens of Toronto’s Congested Area” presented young immigrants in the Ward as objects of curiosity.42 This cover feature comprised nine

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photographs of groups of children arranged in a grid articulated with a decorative border. Each image shows a cluster of children bundled up in worn coats and hats in an outdoor setting. Taken in winter, the backgrounds include bare trees, plain buildings, and bland streetscapes. Even though young subjects might have normally been considered full of potential, these children were already embedded in an environment of deprivation and decay. Described as “little citizens,” the children in these pictures are again identified as belonging to a distinct and overcrowded area of the city, rather than as Canadian citizens or citizens of other countries. As urban historian Alan Mayne has pointed out, slums had been characterized as foreign territories since the mid-nineteenth century.43 Because the children were identified with a run-down area of the city, rather than with a country, they were presented as unsettled, problematic subjects existing outside of the nation-state. The children seem to congregate in non-descript locales without any apparent purpose other than to have their photograph taken, and in most cases they appear without adult supervision. The photographs do not show them in conventional family groupings, at school, or in relation to identifiable social or cultural institutions. Although a few of the photographs depict children in front of houses or other structures, the overall lack of discernable features gives the impression that children can be found assembling arbitrarily on the streets of the Ward. The repetition, produced by nine similar photographs, emphasize that this condition was endemic to the area, while the decorative border framing the photographs suggests that the images were intended to provide enjoyment to the newspaper’s readership. The hardships of life in the Ward and the ambiguous status of its residents were displayed on the pages of Toronto World for the shock and delight of its readers. As the Ward and its immigrant inhabitants were transformed into objects of consumption, workingclass readers were offered the chance to participate in a mode of consumerist experience usually reserved for the middle class. Cultural critic Marita Sturken explains the link between consumerism and citizenship as central to modern culture. From the late-nineteenth century, when individual fulfillment became an important aspect of life for many North Americans, citizenship became equated with consumer culture.44 Consumption, as literary theorist Rita Felski has explained, is “the site at which the intricate connections between large-scale social systems and the experiences, desires, and struggles of ordinary individuals are forged.”45 Constituting its readers as consumers, the newspaper empowered members of the working class to take up one of the key roles of modernity. It did so by objectifying another group, one defined by their outsider status.

Social Responsibility and Assimilation Unlike Canadian Magazine and Toronto World, neither of which was affiliated with a particular political party, the Globe was a Liberal Party ally and supported Laurier’s immigration agenda.46 As a result, the newspaper attempted to counteract anti-immigrant sentiment by reminding readers of their social responsibility to help Canadianize nonBritish immigrants. As an “up-market” daily paper with high circulation, the Globe aimed primarily to attract a readership of professionals, businessmen, and the wealthy.47 With a

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different kind of reader in mind than Toronto World, the Globe used the illustrated format for a different effect. Its illustrated Saturday Magazine section aimed to mobilize a Liberal agenda through the emotional appeal of the visual format. Addressing immigration mainly as a national rather than as a municipal issue, the newspaper emphasized how immigrants contributed to the project of building a nation. One example of this is a story titled “New Citizens of Canada – Types of Immigrants Arriving in 1911.”48 Consisting of eight photographs of immigrants from a variety of countries, this spread provides an example of the practice popular at the time of producing full-length portraits of people considered typical of a particular nationality or ethnicity. This convention attempted to construct a visual system of classification that reinforced prevailing beliefs about racial types. With their grid-like layout and frontal poses, the photographs were reminiscent of anthropological “types” that were important to the imperialist project. As James Ryan has argued, anthropological images were one aspect of the “imaginative geography of Empire” that enabled Victorian viewers to understand themselves as undertaking an important civilizing mission through their conquest of other countries.49 To readers concerned with immigration issues in Canada, some of whom would have been in a position to influence public policy, this way of representing immigrants made use of the disciplinary discourse of science in an attempt to make sense of a contentious and potentially threatening issue. The combination of the highly accessible visual format of the article with the more arcane reference to a system of scientific classification can perhaps be explained by the multiple goals of the Saturday Globe. The story about immigrants in the Saturday illustrated section was a compromise between the Globe’s dedication to reporting the news without the sensationalism of many of the other papers, and its wish to appeal to the widest possible readership.50 While some readers might have interpreted the article as a mere compendium of the nationalities of Canada’s immigrants, others may have grasped the implication that assimilating immigrants was an important Canadian mission. In the context of contemporary discussions about Canada’s place in the empire, and the emerging belief that Canada had an important role to play alongside Britain in advancing imperialism, some readers may have even understood this illustrated article as an indication of Canada’s contribution to the broader imperial agenda.51 The photographs illustrating the “New Citizens of Canada” article were initially made to encourage immigration to Canada. W.D. Scott, Canada’s superintendent of immigration, hired John Woodruff, a photographer at the Department of the Interior, to take photographs of immigrants at the Immigration Centre at Quebec. While Superintendent Scott had hoped the images could be used as advertising in Europe, he was not pleased with Woodruff’s “line[s] of immigrants of various nationalities with Immigration Officers intersperced [sic].” Rather, he wanted photographs of “individual types taken for the most part singly.”52 A later series of portraits, likely taken by W.J. Topley, were seen as more suited to the purpose of promoting settlement because they were portraits of individuals and families with whom potential immigrants could identify.53 Although Woodruff’s photographs were deemed unsuitable for promoting immigration, they were apparently appropriate for the Globe’s nation-building agenda.

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Fig. 4.7 “New citizens of Canada – types of various races of immigrants arriving in 1911,” Globe, 23 September 1911.

An earlier mention of types of citizens in the 1910 Dominion Day edition of the Globe Saturday Magazine section used collaged vignettes to evoke narratives of immigrant experiences. The vignettes in “Types of Canada’s New Citizens,” discussed in an accompanying article by esteemed Toronto journalist M.O. Hammond were meant to draw attention to the immigrants’ side of the immigration issue.54 “Their nationality and their history and aspirations may be subject for speculation,” Hammond wrote, “but of them all, we know this: they want to get on in Canada.” He identified the man and woman on the left of the cover as a Russian couple “ready to carry a heavy load in a country that needs burden-bearers,” and the man in the centre as an entrepreneur who might own his

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own business one day. The woman on the right, described as a young mother on her way to the prairies, is “chiefly concerned for the children she has brought to Canada.”55 Like the 1911 article on types of citizens, this feature treats immigration as a national concern. Here, however, the author emphasized that Canadians have a responsibility to assist immigrants settling in Canada because they make important contributions to the nation’s well-being. The vignettes, along with Hammond’s article, portrayed immigrants as individuals with personal histories and aspirations. Meanwhile, the photograph at the bottom of the cover page showing men crowded together at the side of a ship, which is so large it extends beyond the picture frame, suggests the magnitude of the immigration issue. This photograph illustrates Hammond’s claim that “people come in by the shipload.”56 The men in dark coats and hats peer earnestly over the edge, perhaps anticipating a new life in a new country. This feature used the dramatic quality of the immigration narrative, with its vast numbers of people and their expectations, to persuade middle-class readers to consider themselves hosts with a responsibility towards newcomers. Appealing to the sense of obligation that seized many liberal, reform-minded Canadians, the article constituted the reader as a potentially benevolent participant in the acculturation process. From time to time, the Globe did investigate the municipal implications of Canadian immigration, conveying a degree of ambivalence toward it, but ultimately supporting the paper’s ongoing endorsement of the Liberal Party’s views on acculturating immigrants. In an article in the Saturday Magazine section from July 1910 titled “The Italians in Toronto,” Emily P. Weaver described the area of the city where many Italians settled, and discussed their aspirations and accomplishments. At the same time she argued that the best way to help “our new Canadians to feel at home” was through their children, who, “wisely treated, will grow up useful citizens.”57 Weaver’s ambivalence to the challenges immigration posed to the city come through clearly in her treatment of the Italian community. On the one hand, she suggests that Italians were hardworking, but cheerful and child-like, ignorant of the opportunities in Canada, and very modest in their ambitions, with many merely hoping to own a fruit store. On the other hand, she recounts some of the accomplishments of successful Italians, such as studying medicine and owning property, factories, and other businesses, giving the impression that Italian immigrants had already contributed to the city’s growth in significant ways. The three photographs used to illustrate the article likewise depict both potential and need among Italians in Toronto. A picture of a new brick building, identified as the Italian National Clubhouse on D’Arcy Street, demonstrates both the concentration of Italians in one neighbourhood and their success at establishing a community centre. A photograph showing a wide street bordered by ample sidewalks lined with shops seems to defy the author’s description of what she called the “picturesquely foreign quarter known as ‘The Ward,’” in which “old houses and tumble-down cottages” try to accommodate a population too large for what they can provide.58 But the boy and girl standing beside a fruit cart in this image establish the relation between Italians and Jews in the Ward. The caption identifies the boy as Italian and the girl, who is evidently a street merchant, as “a Jewess from Roumania.” The contrast between the children is instructive. The condition

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Fig. 4.8 Left “Types of Canada’s New Citizens,” Globe, Saturday, 2 July 1910. Fig. 4.9 Above Emily P. Weaver, “The Italians in Toronto,” Globe, Saturday, 16 July 1910.

and style of the boy’s clothing, and his role as consumer rather than as the seller of fruit, suggests that the Italian boy is better off and more Canadianized than the Jewish girl. Another photograph, described as “serving the Friday lunch, a feature of the Italian kindergarten,” depicts a group of disheveled young children sitting on the grass together in an outdoor setting while a woman passes out plates of food. Taken from a low vantage point, which focuses on the chaotic but cheerful group of children, the image illustrates the article’s discussion of the Elm Street Mission, and the important work it performs teaching the English language and Canadian customs to Italian children. Although the images and text together present conflicting anecdotes about Italians in Toronto, Weaver’s article ultimately emphasized the importance of acculturating immigrant children so that they

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would become valuable citizens. Thus, more than any other publication, the Globe reminded readers of their citizenship and their social responsibility to help Canadianize nonBritish immigrants. Questions about acculturation and miscegenation were evident in the dual focus of early twentieth-century immigration policy. Policy-makers aimed to accommodate the needs of industry while alleviating public anxiety about foreigners. They were concerned with increasing the population, yet they wanted to control the entrance of “undesirable” types. Immigrants were sought to work in farming and in the country’s burgeoning industrial economy, and many employers seeking to maintain low wages for their workers supported minimal regulation.59 However, the definition of an undesirable immigrant was controversial. Some people voiced opposition to British immigration, arguing that immigrants would take jobs away from Canadians, while many others considered immigrants from central, southern, and eastern Europe not only culturally different, but also biologically inferior. A great many Canadians worried that these latter immigrants would not be able to integrate, while others were more concerned about what would happen if they did.60 The fear of a moral and biological degeneration of the Canadian population was a common theme in the press coverage of the Ward. Illustrated news stories frequently gave visual form to, and reinforced, common prejudices about the inferiority of certain immigrant groups, cultivating stereotypes associated with them. However, news coverage also highlighted other aspects of immigration, including the importance of providing support to immigrants as they attempted to settle in a new place. In addition to illustrated news reports, many daily newspapers, including the Toronto Daily News, the Toronto Star, and the Toronto Evening Telegram, regularly published unillustrated stories on the city’s slums. These stories focused on the people who lived in the Ward, and on what city officials should do about the conditions there. A number of these articles identified the nationalities of inhabitants of the district along with the kinds of problems endemic to the area, and then used turn-of-the-century liberal tropes of degeneration and contagion to convey the threat posed by the slum conditions.61 Both visual and textual newspaper reports played an important role in helping regular readers to gradually accumulate knowledge about the inhabitants of the rundown central district of the city, and to come to identify that area as a slum. News reports turned public attention to the poor living conditions in the Ward, and thus encouraged the municipal government’s transformation of the district into a pathological object of surveillance and reform. Because much of the press coverage played on contemporary appetites for sensation and spectacle, and the press pictured ethnic difference as alluring as well as threatening, press photography did more than merely institutionalize racist stereotypes and validate measures of reform. It also endorsed the interventions of reformers, portraying their involvement as essential to the process of acculturation and the preservation of the liberal political order. Social reformers and, as we have seen, Health Department employees, eager to impose what they described as “Canadian” moral standards, used their constructed need to acculturate non-British immigrants as justification for the colonization of the Ward.

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Settlement Houses and Citizenship Another important source for photographs of immigrants are the pamphlets produced by social settlement agencies. By the 1900s, there were numerous organizations dedicated to social reform work in Toronto, some of which were secular while others had religious affiliations. The “settlement movement” was a facet of the reform movement founded on the belief that the middle class should provide guidance to people of the lower classes, particularly new immigrants. Settlement houses, which were established in urban neighbourhoods and staffed mainly by women and university students, were dedicated to improving urban living conditions for the poor and paid particular attention to integrating new immigrants into Canadian life.62 The work of settlement houses was seen as necessary because, as one contemporary sociologist explained, “In a small community neighbors can care for each other’s needs, but in a city the individual is isolated and helpless when he falls into distress.”63 Central Neighbourhood House (cnh) was established in 1911 by two graduates of Victoria College, George Bryce and Arthur Burnett (whom we met in the previous chapter) and supported by journalist turned child saver, J.J. Kelso. It was the first secular settlement house, and one of only a few non-religious reform organizations in the city. Its purpose was to “embody the spirit of neighbourliness,” and its mission emphasized its role as a social centre where people of all “races, creeds, and stages of culture” could come together for social betterment.64 Using imperial language to convey a belief, common at the time, in different rates of biological evolution for different ethnic groups, cnh’s mission ran parallel to municipal initiatives to clean up the slums. Because many nonProtestant immigrants refused to use the services of evangelical settlements, cnh sought both to distinguish the principles of Canadian citizenship from Christian values and to foreground their secular approach.65 While some of the city’s settlement houses had institutional backing and others had wealthy patrons, cnh had neither and relied almost entirely on individual sponsors to cover its operating costs. Although the director, Elizabeth Neufeld, organized a wide range of fundraising activities, including personal appeals, public speaking engagements, and even publicity stunts – such as a children’s march for a playground that attracted the attention of local politicians and the press – the regular newsletter was particularly important for connecting with potential donors.66 As historian Cathy Leigh James has noted, the lack of a benefactor put cnh in a precarious position and meant its publications had to appeal to a wide variety of possible supporters.67 It was likely because of this need to raise funds from individual sponsors that cnh frequently used photographs in its monthly newsletters and annual reports. The only agency to use photographs in this way, cnh relied on the persuasive potential of photography to convince prospective donors of the significance of their work. Right from the beginning, cnh administrators appear to have realized the importance of representing settlement house work in a positive way. A photograph of the brick house on Gerrard Street West was printed on the cover of the cnh’s first pamphlet and most other pamphlets thereafter. The image shows a large Victorian house with a group of

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children gathered on the sidewalk in front, gazing expectantly at the photographer. By circulating this image on the pamphlet, the house became a recognizable location in the Ward. The photograph showed cnh clients, mainly Jews and Italians, that the settlement house was integrated into the neighbourhood, and that it was a well kept but ordinary “house by the side of the road.”68 Photographs inside the pamphlets showed the kind of activities that were carried out at the settlement house: a maypole dance, the distribution of geranium plants, the girls club making decorations for a spring festival, an old English folk game, the senior boys club meeting, and the baseball team of the boys’ junior league.69 These pictures with descriptive captions supported claims made in the text of the pamphlet, which explained: The people in this neighbourhood do not know our language – our ways – they come to the House to learn. Their children have small opportunity to play, so they come here for games and songs and folk dances, and later on the girls are taught to sew and cook and the boys to play and debate and to appreciate decent literature. It is primarily the children and the young people that the House aims to help, and it is through them that the parents are influenced to adopt better, cleaner, Canadian ways.70

Fig. 4.10 The Central Neighborhood House pamphlet.

As the description makes clear, the work of cnh focused on immigrant children, with the expectation that through their children parents would become acculturated. Children were at the heart of settlement house work because, as Xiaobei Chen has shown, they were crucial to the discourse of nation-building and citizenship.71 Considered vulnerable to neglect and abuse, children were in need of protection, but at the same time, in order to become productive future citizens, they required guidance and supervision. Settlement house workers at cnh offered instruction and neighbourly service through home visits and by lobbing for improvements to the community, such as new playground equipment and better street lighting. Focusing on friendship, play, and socialization, the cnh workers favoured rational arguments and visual evidence to demonstrate their good work. In this, they were unlike Protestant reformers, involved in what historians often refer to as the social purity movement. Groups such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union tended to draw on allegory and imagery such as lightness and darkness to convey their views about morality. The different ways of representing perceived social problems, and particularly what Mariana Valverde has described as the “rhetorical excess” of the social purity movement, provides an instructive contrast to the secular, social science-based approach of the cnh.72 Although both groups of reformers were concerned with regulating behaviour, especially with regard to morality and hygiene, the cnh offered activities and positive models, rather than threatening metaphors, to convey their ideals. In the cnh publicity materials, photographs were used as an important form of evidence both of the settlement house’s work and of the need for that work. The photographs presented positive examples that contrasted with depictions of deprived children in the Ward found in newspapers such as Toronto World. In cnh photographs, children are always

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busy with purposeful activity, and that activity is clearly identified in the caption. The children’s pursuits at the cnh contested an implied idleness they would likely experience without the services of the settlement house. Many images show the children interacting with a settlement house worker, demonstrating that they are supervised and instructed, rather than left to their own devices. A photograph of a group of girls standing with their teacher outside on the grass participating in a traditional English game served as evidence that the children at cnh were learning their place in the Canadian social order. Because cnh was a community organization and not a school, gender roles and moral standards were taught through games and other group activities, such as music concerts and sewing circles, rather than through academic lessons. Numerous images of outdoor activities show children in spacious, public, park-like settings, emphasizing the belief that nature had regenerative potential. Drawing on the trope of happy, active children in rustic settings, which was common in photographs of sick children from the same period, these images contrast with photographs accompanying news reports on the Ward, which consistently pictured congested and dirty streets.73 In addition to demonstrating how health and morality were supervised, photographs in the cnh newsletters showed that gender conventions were taught through citizenship activities. A photograph captioned “senior boys’ club meeting” depicts teenage boys sitting in chairs lining the walls of a room. One boy sits at a table at the head of the gathering. There are so many of them that a few sit in the adjoining room and peer in at the rest of the group. Orderly and attentive, they appear to be in conversation with each other. This organized club offered boys an opportunity to govern themselves by electing representatives, an activity that was meant to show them how democratic governance works.74 By learning discipline, civic responsibility, and the principles of Canadian politics, immigrant children would no longer be considered citizens of the Ward. Instead, the photograph aimed to show how, through the good work of cnh, older boys specifically would become citizens of the liberal state. The absence of images of religious symbols or festivals, and instead the representation of activities such as folk games, dances, and clubs, helped to distinguish cnh from settlement houses with a religious affiliation. The photographs published in the settlement house literature were used as evidence of the education and acculturation of immigrant children that took place there, and addressed many of the common assumptions about the lives of children in the Ward. They implied that cnh offered a solution to the unruly, filthy, and morally corrupt conditions in which immigrants in the Ward were thought to live. Not surprisingly, the settlement house used photographs as calls to action. Donations for cnh came primarily from local businessmen, so the publications and photographs attempted to motivate them to become involved in social betterment. By focusing on programs for children, rather than, for example, evening English classes for adults, the photographs highlighted the potential to influence young lives.75 Through an emphasis on the constructive outcomes of settlement house work rather than potential problems that might occur from the absence of that work, the cnh attempted to instill confidence in their ability to affect positive change. Text in the pamphlet reinforced the visual appeal for

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Fig. 4.11 Left Old English Folk Game, The House by the Side of the Road, August 1913. Fig. 4.12 Senior Boy’s Club Meeting, The House by the Side of the Road, June 1913.

assistance by asking, “Are you doing anything to help on any work of this kind? If you are, is it as much as you should or can? If not, here is an opportunity. we need you with us.”76 Relying on the widely accepted notion that the middle class had both the moral authority and the responsibility to assist in acculturating new immigrants, cnh used photographs to advance two closely linked concepts of citizenship. On the one hand, photographs served as evidence of the cnh’s successful work developing the liberal citizenship of immigrants. On the other hand, images were a means of promoting a concept of citizenship in which liberal subjects had a duty to support the work of Canadianizing newcomers.

Negotiating Acculturation through Portraiture In contrast both to news coverage of immigrants in the Ward and to photographs used to publicize the work of one of the city’s settlement houses, photographs commissioned by eastern European newcomers and photographs for immigrant audiences represented the social and economic ambitions of newcomers themselves. Perhaps one of the best examples of this imagery comes in the form of commissioned wedding portraits taken by professional photographers. Popular since the mid-1860s when inexpensive albumen prints became available in a variety of sizes, portraits of wedding couples from European and North American countries followed a strict set of conventions governing elements such as dress, pose, lighting, and setting. The husband and wife were typically posed in a studio setting resembling a domestic sitting room. Standing side-by-side in their formal attire and illuminated by a flattering directional light, wedding couples gazed solemnly at the camera. The conventions of portraiture meant that no matter to what class a sitter actually belonged, she could be pictured as middle class by imitating the codes that signified that class.77 In a 1908 wedding portrait taken at a studio on Toronto’s Yonge Street, a Jewish couple, Elias Bochner and Fanny Kurtz Bochner, poses in front of a studio backdrop that suggests a domestic interior. Dressed in elegant clothes, the pair look much like innumerable other couples on the day of their union. In presenting themselves this way, these

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immigrants appeared as a respectable middle-class couple, and as very unlike the inhabitants of the Ward depicted on the pages of Toronto newspapers. Yet, the bride, Fanny, who emigrated with her family from Austria as a child, lived on Terauley Street in the Ward where her father worked as a tailor.78 The photograph provides no evidence of the couple’s economic status, and assessment roles and other historical records indicate that Jewish immigrants from different economic backgrounds lived in close proximity to each other in the Ward.79 The wedding portrait challenged the popular representation of immigrant inhabitants of the Ward and allowed the sitters to present themselves according to their ideals. We can consider this an example of what Roland Barthes has described as constituting the self through the act of “posing,” or what Christopher Pinney has called “photography as prophecy.”80 Pinney has shown that in colonial India, photographic selfrepresentation offered a way of imagining oneself in the future. It enabled ordinary people to ask, “Who do I want to be?”81 In a similar manner, the very conventions of studio portraiture seem to have offered these Jewish immigrants a way to conceive of themselves as a middle-class couple. Another portrait offers evidence that Jewish inhabitants of the Ward used photographs to negotiate categories of ethnicity as well as class. Dated approximately 1905, the portrait shows three members of the Goldenberg family dressed to attend a wedding. One of the women, Miss Tilli Goldenberg, worked as a tailor and lived on Armory Street in the Ward.82 Wearing what would certainly have been their best clothes, the two women and one man present themselves as polished, dignified, and acculturated. Lacking overt signs of Jewish identity, the portrait instead displays members of the Goldenberg family wearing moderately fashionable, but not extravagant, tailored daywear. The man wears a neat, well-fitted suit, a white shirt with a high starched collar, and a necktie. Rather than covering his head, as Jewish custom dictates, he holds his hat by his side. Both women wear popular versions of the Edwardian blouse, with its characteristic high stand collar. The seated woman wears a round yoke version of the blouse, edged with lace, and a matching flared skirt trimmed with pleating and lace. The standing woman wears a slightly plainer afternoon dress consisting of a vertical pleated blouse and flared skirt. Both have elbow-length pleated sleeves and long gloves, and large, forward-sweeping hats are perched on top of their upswept hairstyles. While their clothing is up-to-date, neither woman has the distinctive S-shaped figure created by the corsets popular among the middle and upper classes.83 At a time when Jewish ethnicity was associated with recent eastern European immigrants, and Jewish women were commonly represented in the press with ample figures and wearing head scarves while men were shown in traditional black suits and hats, this portrait portrayed a family that preferred to be seen as middle class and acculturated. Art historian Catherine Soussloff has shown that both the ability to identify with one’s ethnic group and the ability to integrate into the mainstream culture were fundamental features of Jewish identity at the turn of the century. However, the inability to be recognized as Jewish was an alienating experience that made it difficult for subjects to claim Jewish identity.84 The complex negotiation between Jewish identity and mainstream culture that was

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Fig. 4.13. Left Elias (Eliakum) Bochner and Fanny Furtz Bochner, wedding portrait, Toronto, 1907 or 1908. Fig. 4.14 Karl Goldenberg, Sarah Goldenberg, and Tilli Goldenberg dressed for wedding, Toronto, 1905 or 1906.

part of an immigrant’s struggle to achieve acceptance was enacted in the portrait studio. Studio portraits offered Jewish immigrants both a way to identify themselves with mainstream culture and a way to produce a positive representation of themselves, which may have helped them to cope with widespread anti-Semitism. Jewish newspapers were another venue where class and ethnic categories were negotiated and stereotypes were challenged, and they also played a role in acculturating new immigrants. The Yiddish press flourished in Canada in the early twentieth century with the influx of Jewish immigrants, many of whom were fleeing anti-Semitism in eastern Europe. Many eastern European Jews had been involved in social movements and struggles against discrimination before emigrating, and some worked to establish trade unions and were active in radical political organizations and socialist movements once they settled in Toronto.85 Jewish newspapers furthered the interests of the immigrant community, sometimes marshaling political support for particular candidates, and sometimes attempting to counteract anti-Semitism.86 Jewish newspapers for sale in Toronto included the city’s Yidisher Zshurnal (Hebrew Journal),87 the Montreal-based papers Kanader Adler (Canadian Eagle) and the English-language Canadian Jewish Times, and several Yiddish New York dailies. Among the New York papers available in Toronto were Forverts (Jewish

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Daily Forward), which was a successful paper with wide appeal, and Jüdisches Tageblat ( Jewish Daily News), a socially conservative, orthodox paper, which was less popular and had a lower circulation. The Hebrew Journal, founded as a weekly paper in 1912 and published daily from 1917, served the needs and interests of the immigrant community in Toronto by reporting local news and publishing opinion pieces and entertaining literature. While its news stories were typically translations of reports from mainstream local papers such as the Toronto Star, other content, such as editorials, reviews, and fiction, as well as the language in which The Hebrew Journal was written (Yiddish), distinguished it from mainstream papers.88 Local Jewish writers, who were often excluded from the mainstream press, contributed serialized novels, a feature of the paper that attracted readers.89 Yiddish literary scholar Ellen Kellmen has argued that the serialized novels published in the New York-based Jewish Daily Forward shaped the values of the Jewish immigrant working class in America and played an important role in their acculturation.90 The stories published in The Hebrew Journal were formulaic romances that likely functioned in a similar way, teaching Jewish immigrants about Canadian life. Like many English-language dailies, The Hebrew Journal was a text-based publication, with few illustrations or photographs. Ordinarily the paper only numbered about six pages, and was often in financial difficulty. Images were a luxury The Hebrew Journal could not generally afford.91 The small number of images that were published in the paper included portraits of men in the news, or images accompanying advertisements. However, there were a few exceptions. Portraits of the newly appointed Board of Control were published after elections at the beginning of January each year.92 The paper tended to support socialist or pro-labour candidates in local politics, and Liberal candidates at the provincial or national level.93 By using photographs to introduce local politicians to the readership, the paper’s editor, Harry Weinburg, aimed to engage the immigrant community in local affairs and urban politics. In the process, the newspaper ushered Jewish immigrants into the political process of the liberal state. In another instance, a large photograph of three renowned musicians, Leo, John, and Michael Tchernovsky, was published on the occasion of a well-received performance at Massey Hall, and in advance of another concert in honour of a distinguished guest, Shmuryahu Levine, who was evidently an important figure in the Jewish community.94 This photograph, a flattering portrayal of three well-dressed men with sheet music and musical instruments, demonstrates the complex negotiation of Jewish identity and mainstream culture through its presentation of acculturated Jewish musicians. It follows contemporary conventions of studio portraiture, conveying both a likeness of the sitters and suggesting their individuality. However, there is nothing in the image to indicate these men were Jewish; rather, it is the context in which the photograph is encountered, in the pages of a local Jewish newspaper, which makes their Jewish identity evident. Soussloff argues that while it was common for portraits of modern Jewish subjects to indicate social and economic aspirations, “Portraits of Jews in modernity signify a desire not to signify religious identity pictorially.”95 This photograph conveys the ambiguous nature of Jewish identity. In order to achieve acceptance in mainstream culture, it was important not to

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Fig. 4.15 Musicians, Leo, John, and Michael Tchernovsky, The Hebrew Journal, 21 November 1915.

signify Jewishness through clothing or accoutrements; however, in order for Jewish subjects to avoid experiencing painful feelings of loss and alienation, it was essential for them to be able to identify with, and be identified by, members of their ethnic group. German sociologist Max Weber defined ethnic groups as “human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent because of similarities of physical type or of customs or both, or because of memories of colonization and migration.”96 Jews migrating to Canada from eastern Europe at this time shared an experience of anti-Semitism, which would have fostered their identification as an ethnic group, even as it demonstrated the advantages of acculturation.97 The photographs in The Hebrew Journal show that the newspaper itself played a limited but important role in mediating the tension associated

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with identification and integration. For it was within the pages of a Jewish newspaper that it was possible to encounter someone represented as an acculturated subject who was, at the same time, identified with Jewish ethnicity.

Conclusion Because of their wide circulation and broad readership, illustrated newspapers were particularly significant in shaping ideas about Jewish and Italian immigrants, and in associating these ethnic groups with the Ward. In middle-class publications such as Canadian Magazine and the Globe, immigrants were framed in relation to the national project of acculturation. In the pages of the working-class newspaper Toronto World, immigrants were treated as objects of entertainment and spectacle. Their images were offered up for consumption alongside other features of modern, urban life. Building on the middle-class idea of responsible citizenship, settlement house publicity further contributed to the public discourse on acculturation, which identified these immigrants as targets of liberal reform. Perhaps most significantly, cnh encouraged a concept of citizenship in which the responsibility to help immigrants acculturate rested with middle-class Canadians. Meanwhile, portraits commissioned by Jewish immigrants presented a personal counterpoint to the objectification offered in the mainstream press, and a means for negotiating social position and ethnic identity. Jewish newspapers also provided another forum through which to negotiate the struggle of integrating into mainstream culture. The Hebrew Journal and other Jewish papers were significant in cultivating an ethnic community, even one that participated in various ways in the acculturation process. Photographs positioned Jewish and Italian immigrants as different from other Canadians through sensational imagery as well as through more apparently objective images. In this way, photography was important in validating the idea that acculturating immigrants was essential to the nation’s well-being. Photography was used both to assert the moral authority of the middle class and to make acculturation their responsibility. It was important in producing the “immigrant” as a social subject and in associating that subject with a particular part of the city, but it also functioned to consolidate the liberal political order and to secure the influence of reformers on the modern city. Toronto is known today as a city of immigrants. With a significant percentage of new Canadians settling in the city, and with one of the most diverse populations in the world, the city’s immigrant population has come to be seen as one of its defining characteristics. With this chapter, I hope to offer a new perspective on the historical roots of a city of immigrants by showing how photography was used to consolidate concepts of ethnic difference and citizenship, even as it advanced political agendas. By understanding how, historically, photographs were used in promoting acculturation and advancing the ideals of a political rationality, we may be able to better reflect on contemporary attitudes towards immigrants and current expectations of acculturation.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Arthur Goss and the Portraiture of Modern Subjectivity

This last chapter returns to Arthur Goss to elaborate further on why photography figured prominently in the making of modern Toronto and to explore connections between instrumental and artistic photography and their association with urban modernity. I develop links between the two sections of the book, which examine, respectively, how photographs were used in attempts to shape the built environment of the modern city and how photography participated in constituting liberal subjectivity. Drawing on a selection of photographs from Goss’s broad ranging practice of photography, I elaborate on Goss’s interest in the modern city and his concern with the formation of modern subjects to consider photography of the modern city and liberal subjectivity as mutually constitutive. In a Goss photograph taken around 1915, Toronto is pictured as a bustling, modern metropolis. Looking north up Yonge Street from Melinda Street, and taken from an elevated viewpoint, likely the top of an office building, the photograph focuses on the space and activity of the city. Goss emphasized the height of the structures, which had been made possible by modern steel-frame construction methods introduced in the 1890s. The deep perspective accentuates the length of the roadway, while the expansive view draws attention to the teeming vehicle and pedestrian traffic on the street below. Melinda Street, located between King and Wellington Streets, was in an area of the city populated by office buildings, banks, wholesale warehouses, and newspaper and printing companies. The skyscrapers and busy downtown streets symbolize growth and modernization. The photograph celebrates the city as the site of modernity. In a similar way, images such as Goss’s prize-winning photograph of 1906, Child with Nurse (also called Portrait of a Child ), address the constitution of modern, liberal subjectivity.1 This soft-focus portrait shows a young child wearing a white dress holding the hand of an adult. The nurse is depicted as an anonymous figure offering comfort and guidance to the child. The photograph represents the paradigmatic relationship between child and caregiver as it was constructed under liberalism, in which individuals are expected to care

for and regulate themselves. Children were thought to be capable of growing into disciplined adults and good citizens if they received appropriate guidance from a parent or caregiver. As child-rearing practices therefore became a matter of interest to the collective, mothers and female caregivers were considered responsible for children’s moral training.2 Goss’s photograph affirms the liberal humanist view of children as future citizens. The implied opposite to this image, discussed later in the chapter, would point to the absence or neglect of the female parent, which was understood to cause criminality and to produce failed citizens. Although Goss’s photograph about modern subjectivity differs in appearance from his photographs of the modern city discussed earlier in this book, they are thematically linked by their focus on liberal values. The city, considered the site of modernity, established the conditions of possibility for the formation of liberal subjectivity.

Fig. 5.1 Arthur Goss, View up Yonge Street, north from Melinda Street, c. 1915.

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Fig. 5.2 Arthur Goss, Child and Nurse, 1906, gelatin silver print, 20.9 x 16 cm.

In addition to drawing connections between the site and subjects of modernity, this chapter examines associations linking subject formation with different modes of portraiture. Studies by John Tagg and Allan Sekula in the 1980s have been especially important for demonstrating how photography constitutes social subjects. By mapping the connections between forms of portraiture that revere individual sitters, and photographs of individual subjects, such as those found in police archives, which inscribe sitters into a disciplinary framework – what Sekula called the “honorific and repressive poles of portrait practice” – these studies have demonstrated how seemingly disparate approaches to portraiture do more than merely produce likenesses; together, they inscribe social identity and work to define and regulate a new social domain.3 As Shawn Smith has shown in her work on the tensions between American family portraiture and police mug shots in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, photography has shaped racialized and gendered middle-class subjects.4 It is therefore important to consider how portraiture participated in shaping modern subjectivity.

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Building on the well-established claim that apparently dissimilar practices of picturing subjects are in fact intrinsically linked, this chapter examines how Goss’s photography worked to produce modern social subjects. Comparing a selection of portraits from his personal practice with photographs he took as city photographer, I analyze how Goss’s photographs constituted different subject positions, and how these new kinds of subject categories related to the liberal political order being constructed at the time. To put it plainly, both practices should be seen as fundamentally related responses to urban modernity. By looking at the breadth of Goss’s photographic practice, we can better understand how middle-class professionals were constituted as subjects in the liberal political order and how reformers aimed to establish the conditions under which immigrants and the working class would develop their own mechanisms of self-regulation. Goss’s photography shows that he was a proponent of liberalism who worked across discursive fields to affirm and reproduce the liberal order.

Pictorialism and Liberal Subjectivity While the pictorialist movement is commonly recognized as the first concerted attempt to legitimize photography as an art form, pictorialism should also be seen as a response to the industrialization and urbanization of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Walter Benjamin commented on this connection when he suggested pictorialism was a reaction against the industrialization of portrait photography in the 1860s. He claimed that photographers working in the pictorialist style sought to reclaim the aura of early photographs, after advances in technology “overcame darkness and recorded appearances as faithfully as any mirror.”5 Pictorialists responded to formulaic commercial portraiture by asserting the individuality of their photographic subjects. Although pictorialists photographed a range of subject matter, portraits were an important part of their practice. Leading figures in the New York Photo-Secession, including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Alvin Langdon Coburn, developed a style of portraiture influenced by the principles of symbolist aesthetics. A late-nineteenth-century literary and artistic movement, symbolism emphasized spirituality and personal expression over mimetic representation. Its proponents, literary and artistic figures such as Charles Baudelaire, Gustav Moreau, and Odilon Redon, reacted to industrialization by espousing a romanticized return to a mythical past. In pictorialist portraiture, sitters were often idealized as elegant, meditative figures. Soft, diffuse lighting was used to define a sitter’s unique facial features and produce subtle tonalities, indicating the sitter’s rich inner character. At times, figures were shown fading into darkness or dissolving into soft-focus grounds, but even when this was not the case, sitters were customarily positioned in indeterminate settings rather than in precise locations.6 In addition to its artistic effect, the diffuse backgrounds helped to distinguish pictorialist portraiture from commercial portraits, in which studio furniture, painted backdrops, and props were still common. The Photo-Secession photographers, in particular, placed a new emphasis on “poetic feeling” in photographic portraiture. Art critic and supporter of the Photo-Secession, Sadakichi Hartmann, described this new style of artistic portraiture as one in which the

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Fig. 5.3 Edward Steichen (American, 1879–1973), Sadakichi Hartmann, c. 1903, published in Camera Work, 4 July 1904, photogravure, 11.9 x 15.1 cm.

individuality of the sitter, as well as the individuality of the photographer, was manifest in the work.7 Responding to a shift in the late-nineteenth century, when a subject’s individual essence became a key factor in determining the artistic merit of a portrait photograph, pictorialists attempted to assert their creative mastery in producing the work of art.8 Pictorialists struggled to locate photography within the realm of art, and to validate the humanist notion that middle-class subjects, artists, and viewers were imbued with coherent interior identities. Just as the symbolist movement responded to the changes resulting from modernization by idealizing a pre-industrial past, pictorialists reacted to these changes by reifying the individual. Goss was a dedicated member of the Canadian pictorialist movement. He began showing his artistic photographs at Toronto Camera Club exhibitions in 1902, and he formally joined the group in 1904.9 He won awards for several of his photographs, and his style was described in most complimentary terms as “simple and dignified, yet full of poetic feeling.”10 Along with fellow member Sidney Carter, Goss attempted to introduce pictorialist principles to his associates at the Toronto Camera Club. The two men re-

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Fig. 5.4 Unknown photographer, Toronto Camera Club Exhibition, 1906.

decorated the club, using neutral coloured burlap, pottery, and flowers, in an endeavour to replicate the style and atmosphere of Gallery 291, the gallery at the centre of the New York Photo-Secession.11 To the consternation of their colleagues, they replaced club members’ photographs with selections from Stieglitz’s journal Camera Work.12 Goss lamented the lack of a pictorialist group in Canada and worked towards building a network of art photographers across the country by helping to organize exhibitions of pictorial photography in Toronto in 1919–20. Goss hoped that Canadian photographers would follow the example then being set by the Group of Seven painters and would define a uniquely Canadian style in photography.13 The level of his ambition, both for pictorialism in Canada and for his own diverse exploration of photography, sets Goss apart from many of his contemporaries. During the 1920s, as Goss sought a collegial group with whom to pursue his artistic interests, he became active in the Toronto arts community and less involved in the Camera Club. In 1920, he became a member of the Arts and Letters Club, an organization, founded in 1908, which was dedicated to providing a friendly social setting for like-minded men interested in visual art, music, and literature. The club was open to both professionals and amateurs interested in the arts, and Goss belonged to the club’s inner circle, a group called “birds of a feather,” which held monthly weekend poker retreats.14 He was friendly with members of the Group of Seven and went with them on sketching expeditions. A.J. Casson, a Group of Seven painter, described Goss as “a good woodsman and camper” and “a wonderful companion and friend,” who was kind, modest, cheerful, and helpful, with “unfailing good humour.”15 His association with the club and his participation in artistic endeavours is a measure of his commitment to, and his identification with, the arts and letters community. Although Goss was listed as a painter in the Arts and Letters Club’s roster, he also took photographs at the club and made portraits of several prominent club members. Working in the pictorialist style, Goss conveyed the penetrating character and intellect of his sitters, even as he did what a good pictorialist photographer was supposed to do and expressed his

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Fig. 5.5 Arthur Lismer (Canadian, born England, 1885–1969), Arthur Goss, pencil on paper, Arts and Letters Club, 1938. Fig. 5.6 Opposite left Arthur Goss, Professor James Mavor, c. 1925, gelatin silver print, 24.2 x 19.1 cm. Fig. 5.7 Opposite right Arthur Goss, Dr. Frederick Banting, c. 1920–25, gelatin silver print, 25.4 x 18.3 cm.

own artistic vision. In his portrait of James Mavor, a journalist and professor of political economy at the University of Toronto as well as a reformer and an advocate for the arts and civic improvement in the city, Goss focused on his sitter’s piercing eyes for dramatic effect.16 He used the contrast between the dark, soft-focus background and the sharp, well-lit facial features to express the professor’s strong, discerning character. Goss’s personal stamp, visible in the lower right corner of the photograph, asserts, like a signature would, that this is an artistic work, the expression of a creative individual. Similarly, in a portrait of Dr Frederick Banting – the University of Toronto professor who, with his assistant, medical student Charles Best, discovered insulin – Goss used a light-coloured, diffuse background to focus on Banting’s concentrated gaze.17 The portrait subordinates detail so attention is directed to the face. The three-quarter view, traditionally used to convey the social status of the sitter, is a flattering pose that was also considered subtle and artistic.18 Goss’s portrait is sensitive to his sitter and offers a distinctive perspective on his character. In the 1920s, these portraits were considered accurate portrayals of notable individuals and significant works of art. Goss’s pictorialist portraits celebrated the sitters’ status, intellect, and contributions to the civic community. As works of art, they reinforced ideas about the character and interiority of middle-class identity by picturing model citizens. In other words, these portraits produced idealized liberal subjects, against whom other subjects could be measured. A notable feature of Goss’s pictorialist portraits is the proximity of the camera to his subjects. As Hartmann told his readers, “One of the most, if not the most, important factor in arranging the composition for a portrait is the correct placing of the head … We all know that every pictorial composition should have one point of interest, to which everything else is subordinated. In a portrait, this is naturally the face.”19 Goss used the conventions of pictorialism to concentrate on the faces of his sitters through lighting, focus, and careful placement of the head. The physical closeness he achieved in these portraits suggests a degree of comfort and respect between the photographer and sitter. In this way, the photograph signifies the nature of the interaction between photographer and subject and validates the subjective interiority of both. We know from scholarship on the social impact of nineteenth-century portrait photography that photographs played an important role in shaping a newly modern form of subjectivity. As Allan Sekula has noted, some nineteenth-century treatises on photography commented on its social and moral effects. For example, American portrait photographer Marcus Aurelius Root described how, in a country populated by immigrants, family photographs were an effective way to maintain emotional bonds with far-away relatives, while photographs of unfamiliar people and places helped to educate the working classes.20 Alan Trachtenberg has shown that a new way of seeing oneself “in the eyes of others,” or “seeing oneself as an image,” emerged with the introduction of daguerreotype portraits in nineteenth-century America.21 Geoffrey Batchen has explained how inexpensive photographic formats such as the carte-de-visite produced generic subjects who had learned how to pose and how to present themselves according to middle-class conventions.22 As this research has shown, both seeing oneself and presenting oneself in a photograph as a

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member of a particular class or social group inevitably shaped the way people conceived of themselves and others. While portrait photographs themselves contributed to new forms of modern subjectivity, the process of making these portraits was also important. Catherine Soussloff has maintained that turn-of-the-century discourse on art photography relied on attributing distinctive characteristics to the artist and to the collaboration between artist and sitter. In pictorialist photography, it was understood that an artist’s formal technique could be used for its expressive potential and to reveal the interiority of the subject at the same time.23 Accordingly, pictorialist portraiture relied on a new form of subjectivity in which the interaction between artist and sitter resulted in a photograph that “pulses with life.”24 In other words, art photography was valued for its affective potential. A good photographic portrait could convey the emotional interaction between the photographer and the sitter, thereby acknowledging the humanity of both. Viewers were invited into this intersubjective relationship, and in the process were likewise validated as subjects possessing interiority, which is a precondition for liberal subjectivity. In Goss’s portraits of the professors, he used proximity to his sitters’ faces to convey the essence of his subjects and the quality of his interaction with them. He subordinated background detail and got close to his sitters to emphasize the vitality in their faces, thus encouraging viewers to experience an intensely subjective interaction. This interaction also validated viewers as liberal citizens

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Fig. 5.8 Right Arthur Goss, Self-portrait, 1928. Fig. 5.9 Opposite left Arthur Goss, Ethel Goss, seated with Enid and John, 1910. Fig. 5.10 Opposite right Arthur Goss, Mary Goss, age 2, 1913.

engaged in the same kinds of discussions, the same morality and intellectuality, as men making contributions to modernity in fields such as medicine and economics. Typical of any avid photographer, Goss also made self-portraits and pictures of his family. In these, he likewise employed pictorialist techniques to produce emphatically individual, yet conventionally gendered, liberal subjects. In a self-portrait from 1928, he used selective focus and a deep black background to bring the viewer’s attention to his face and to meet his intense gaze. By accentuating his head and face, the background also serves to convey rationality and masculinity. In a photograph from 1910 of Goss’s wife, Ethel Ross Munro, and their two eldest children, Enid and John, he depicted his family in a summery garden setting. The soft-focus background and the emphasis on lightness, conveyed through the sitters’ white clothing and the delicate play of light on the leaves of the plants, is characteristic of the pictorialist style. Here, the overall effect is one of luminosity and virtue. The pensive expressions on their faces suggest quiet contemplation.

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Pictorialism used sentiment, a social ideal of domesticity, which was a powerful force in late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century North America, to call up an idealized preindustrial era when middle-class, white womanhood symbolized purity and civility. By representing a certain model of domesticity, photography became a way of “seeing sentiment,” and thus of structuring familial relationships and governing family life.25 Using formal techniques to convey sentiment, specifically composition, light, and colour, the portrait of Goss’s wife and children equates lightness with femininity, maternalism, and virtue, portraying his family as signifiers of a middle-class model of domesticity. This earlier photograph effectively collaborates with the later portrayal of Goss as an exemplar of masculine rationality to establish an image of his family as a model of liberalism. Although Goss used pictorialist techniques in a consistent manner, he approached each portrait as a unique encounter. In another portrait, his daughter, Mary Goss, is pictured with the defiant gaze of a strong-willed two-year-old. Settled in a substantial armchair and holding a large picture book, Mary’s small size is evident, but because of the low vantage point of the photograph, the viewer does not look down on her. Goss portrayed his child as a subject with agency and influence. At the same time, he evoked her child-like perspective through the whimsical images in her book of fairy tales, presented upside-down

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to the viewer. Using the contrast between the light colour of Mary’s face and clothing and the dark hue of the chair and background, he focused on her vitality rather than on conveying innocence, which would have been a more conventional way for a pictorialist to depict a child. Goss’s intimate portrait of his youngest daughter portrays her with affection and respect. In this photograph, Goss used the same techniques he employed in the later portraits of Mavor and Banting. The confident, penetrating look made more prominent through composition, lighting, and the selective use of soft-focus, defines the subject by suggesting her interiority. Familiarity and tenderness between father and daughter is conveyed through physical proximity. Here, the relationship between father and daughter is also the relationship between photographer and subject. The portrait relies on the interaction between artist and sitter to produce affect, to “pulse with life,” thereby producing artist, sitter, and viewer as subjects with the status of individuals. Unlike the mainly uninspired studio portraits widely available at the time, Goss’s pictorialist portraits are the result of carefully considered interactions that utilize a set of stylistic techniques to specify the distinctive qualities of his subjects. These portraits are different, for example, from the wedding photographs discussed in the previous chapter, in which sitters performed middle-class conventions. In this way, Goss rejected the staged and unimaginative portrayals of commercial portraiture and their depictions of status. Instead, his portraits seek to produce affect and recall longingly the kind of personal interactions that would have occurred between an artist and a sitter in a pre-industrial mode of representation.

Social Subjects in City Work In his amateur, artistic practice, Goss concentrated on portraiture and landscapes and worked in the pictorialist style, while in his professional assignments he focused on recording the activities and people of the city. Although he photographed a wide array of subjects in his official capacity, the people of the city feature prominently in his work. Instead of the well-established, prominent men and family members pictured in his pictorialist portraits, his city work mainly depicts marginalized subjects, including women, children, immigrants, and working-class men often pictured as labourers and slum dwellers. Whereas Goss’s pictorialist portraits focus on and honour individuals, the photographs he produced in his official capacity tend to identify and consolidate specific social groups. In this way, the city photographs participate in the larger reform project: they transform a diverse and unstable accumulation of bodies into a stable and governable group. If we compare Goss’s photographs of his family with those of poor and immigrant mothers and children in the care of social services, we can see how his photographs constructed different kinds of encounters with different subjects. Whereas the soft-focus, luminous, close-up portraits of his family produce the idea that photography can capture the essence of individual subjects and constitute the sitters as autonomous subjects, many of the photographs produced for government departments connect the sitters to the newly defined social problems that preoccupied liberal reformers. Take, for example, a photograph of a young child Goss made for the Health Department in 1916, which shows a boy

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Fig. 5.11 Arthur Goss, Child Frank Ellerby, 69 Leslie Street (Children for Adoption), 1916.

sitting on the edge of a plain wooden porch outside a residence. Dressed in a clean white outfit, the child looks cared for, but the pained expression on his face suggests he is uncomfortable or unhappy. Unlike pictorialist photographs, here it is not the interaction between the photographer and the sitter that gives this image its vitality. The child is portrayed at a distance, which in this context implies a dispassionate relation between photographer and subject. Rather, the affective element comes in the description of the image: this child is up for adoption. For middle-class, English viewers, the affect produced by a photograph of an orphaned child, especially one with an English name, might be shock or pity, rather than sentimentality. Scholars have shown that photographic portraits of young children are far from benign. In particular, a number of important studies have looked at how photographs of babies and children have been mobilized in the constitution of racial hierarchies and the construction of nationhood. With the widespread availability of daguerreotypes in the 1840s, family

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photographs quickly became an important way for the middle class to record and celebrate familial relationships and genealogy, and by the end of the nineteenth century new photographic techniques had only made family photographs all the more ubiquitous. By this time, photographs of children and babies had become central to what Smith has called “the social reproduction of the middle-class family.”26 With the widespread acceptance of the ideas of Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, portraits of children were commonly understood as conveying the biological basis of their character, because, as Galton believed, this hereditary character was thought to be legible in a person’s facial features.27 Photographs of children functioned as signifiers of ancestry, and were also taken up in narratives of nationhood. For instance, as Carol Williams has shown in her analysis of Hannah Maynard’s studio portraits of babies and children in Victoria, British Columbia, photographs were used to validate the idea that European settler women were racially and culturally superior to Aboriginal women, as well as to affirm the pivotal place they held in constituting the new nation through their biological role as mothers.28 Defined by what he lacks (a family), the child up for adoption was photographed precisely so that he might be inscribed into a family. In contrast to the photograph of Mary Goss, which celebrates a familial relationship by generating vitality and affect, the photograph of Frank Ellerby marks the child’s lack of family and his disconnection from his ancestry, producing a picture that mobilizes an affect of distress to function as both a document and a solicitation. We might consider the difference between the photographs of Mary Goss and Frank Ellerby as similar to what Walter Benjamin described as the difference between information and storytelling. Benjamin characterized information, a product of capitalist modernity, as a form of communication in which the content appears self-evident and promptly verifiable, whether it is or not. Information is therefore distinct from storytelling, which he explained as a craft, an “artisanal form of communication.” Storytelling, he suggested, “submerges the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again. Thus, traces of the storyteller cling to a story the way the handprints of the potter cling to a clay vessel.”29 Whereas “half the art of storytelling [is] to keep a story free from explanation as one recounts it,” information is always already thick with explanation and seems to require no interpretation.30 In a comparable manner, the portrait of Mary is imbued with traces of her relationship with her father; the artist effectively shaped the expressive photograph, and he leads the viewer to interpret the sitter’s character. In contrast, the portrait of Frank Ellerby is only explained by the description of the image. This photograph of a child up for adoption was taken as a record and as a means of finding a family for the child. Where the photographic record constitutes Ellerby as a child in need of protection, the family photograph of Mary Goss relied on sentiment to portray a citizen in the making. As distinct modes of communication, information and storytelling have different connections to the culture of modernity. While information is an essentially consistent form of communication that embodies the capitalist principles governing modern life, no matter who conveys it, storytelling nostalgically recalls a pre-modern mode of communication. It evokes a time when it was up to each specific narrator to skillfully engage an audience

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and to make a story come alive. This is not to suggest that Benjamin would have preferred one image over the other. He was neither a proponent of pictorialism nor a champion of the instrumental image, even though he did acknowledge the power of portrait photographs to recall the sitter.31 Rather, my point is to reinforce what Benjamin recognized: photographs of all kinds, both the auratic and the instructive, are fundamentally connected to modern culture, only in different ways.32 Whereas information transmits cultural knowledge, story works to consolidate cultural values. We might consider Goss’s pictorialist practice as a kind of storytelling in which he reinforces liberal principles by engaging the viewer in an inter-subjective relationship as a liberal subject. Similarly, we might then consider his work for the city as information in which he transmits the assumptions of liberal governmentality in a seemingly neutral form. The informational mode naturalizes social conventions. In Goss’s work for the city, women were frequently depicted fulfilling their social role as mothers. Motherhood was central to the liberal reform project, and women, especially mothers, were seen as a measure of the cultural refinement of the nation and were expected to have a civilizing influence.33 Like many other images of mothers by Goss, his photograph of the Woman’s Dispensary Baby Clinic works to conceive of mothers as a social group. Rather than focusing on the individual identities of the women, or on constituting the mothers as a community, the photograph consolidates poor and immigrant mothers as a social category, one that requires certain kinds of interventions and certain forms of state assistance.34 By defining a social category, the photograph establishes which reform measures were needed to address the problems associated with it. In this case, the involvement of the municipal government came in the form of health and education programs for mothers. Well-baby clinics attempted to address high infant mortality rates, which were one aspect of a perceived broader public health crisis. Mothers were instructed on how to feed and otherwise care for their babies. Babies were weighed, as demonstrated in the photograph, to ensure they were growing appropriately. Because mothers were perceived as playing such a central role in the production of liberal subjects, it was considered especially important that immigrant mothers were taught how to raise their children according to Canadian conventions. In a photograph taken at University Settlement House, a group of mothers are pictured with their babies clustered together in the corner of a large, sparsely furnished room. Here, Goss portrayed these poor and immigrant women, at some distance from the camera and dwarfed by the decorative wallpaper and the physical space of the room, as the objects of social intervention. The character of the room stands out more than any individual feature that may be attributed to the people in it. The programs for immigrant women offered by settlement houses were one of the primary means of acculturating immigrants, which was believed to be essential for producing a strong stock of future citizens. Mothers were expected to learn and apply appropriate parenting strategies, which included guidance and supervision, in order to teach children to become self-regulating citizens.35 Thus, the photograph demonstrates and reinforces women’s social roles – both procreative and educational – in producing citizens.

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Fig. 5.12 Above Arthur Goss, Woman’s Dispensary Baby Clinic, Seaton Street, 1914. Fig. 5.13 Opposite Arthur Goss, University Settlement, 467 Adelaide Street West, 1913.

In a similar way, Goss’s photographs of school children are particularly interesting because they show how he negotiated the discourses of evidence and art, or information and storytelling, even as he consistently emphasized liberal subjectivity. In a photograph taken for the Parks Department of the tennis doubles champions from Keele Street School, Goss conveyed the individual character of his sitters through proximity and careful renderings of their facial expressions and posture. The tilt of their heads, their hand gestures and leg positions, and the way the girls rest their tennis rackets, are all attributes that suggest character and agency. Yet, rather than record the girls’ names to individualize them, the caption notes only the name of their school. Unlike Goss’s pictorialist and family photography, the photograph does not idealize the sitters as liberal subjects. Instead, by

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marking the girls’ social role as school children, and by recognizing their achievement at an organized, recreational activity, the photograph emphasizes the critical process of subject formation and the role of state institutions in it. This photograph is based on the same notion of liberal subjectivity as Goss’s pictorialist portraits, but it depicts subjects who are in the process of learning how to cultivate self-knowledge with the supervision and guidance of government programs. Goss’s photograph affirms the value of liberal education as the way to develop character and the moral and physical discipline necessary to become a self-regulating liberal subject. Goss, a city employee for most of his life and a committed member of the city’s art community, skillfully combined liberalism with his dedication to the expressive possibilities of art. Whether he was using sharp or soft focus, or whether he was making photographs for work or leisure, Goss relished the descriptive potential of photography, and much of his portraiture is characterized by the interaction he established with his subject. In a photograph of pupils at Orde Street School (figure 5.15), Goss conveyed the humanity and individuality of the children by focusing on their distinctive features and

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Fig. 5.14 Above Arthur Goss, Keele Street School, Tennis Doubles Champions, 1923. Fig. 5.15 Opposite left Arthur Goss, Orde Street School Pupils, 1921. Fig. 5.16 Opposite right Arthur Goss, Orde Street School Pupil, 1921.

through their smiling faces. However, these photographs, taken for the Health Department, were also instruments of liberal governmentality. Orde Street was a public school with an open-air classroom for children in the early stages of tuberculosis. Based on the sanatorium method of treatment, the fresh air was believed beneficial for people with the disease.36 The girl seated at a desk outside is pictured in the distinctive hooded coat that these students wore (figure 5.16). Positioned in the middle of the frame, with the porch and school building in the background, her warm smile and open book suggest she enjoyed her outdoor lessons and was happy to pose for the photograph. Even though Goss showed compassion and sensitivity towards his subjects, it is their status as social subject – not some individual interior essence – that the photographs must convey to function as evidence of a theory of education in which improving physical health was seen as a means to mental and moral development. Goss’s nuanced and committed practice of photography was similar in some ways to the practice of American photographer Lewis Hine. Hine, a passionate crusader for the

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rights of the disadvantaged worker, described his work as “social photography.” He explained, “The greatest advance in social work is to be made by the popularizing of camera work, so these records may be made by those who are in the thick of the battle.”37 Although Hine did not develop an artistic practice, scholars have noted the aesthetic power of his photographs. Critic Max Kozloff, for instance, has described Hine’s social photography as both investigative and interpretive.38 Both Hine and Goss certainly engaged viewers in the important social issues of the day through their photographs. Trachtenberg has noted that Hine’s work prompted “participatory viewing” because of the contexts in which they appeared, such as in reports, magazines, and newspaper articles, and in exhibits and public lectures on social issues, such as the damaging effects of child labour.39 But whereas Hine was a social activist with a camera, Goss was a government photographer with a liberal agenda. Goss’s photography for the city makes a powerful case for liberal reform precisely because of the way he combined informative and interpretive modes of communication to consolidate the values of liberalism. The closest Goss came to engaging with the kind of work Hine is best known for was in his photographs of Toronto’s immigrants, slum dwellers, and labourers. These photographs rely on the settings in which the men are pictured to fix these designations. In direct contrast to the diffuse and non-specific backgrounds of pictorialist portraiture, these

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Fig. 5.17 Above Arthur Goss, Slum house on the north side of King Street, 1912. Fig. 5.18 Opposite Arthur Goss, Playground Supervisors, 1925.

photographs offer detailed renderings of the places this category of men inhabit. In Slum house on the north side of King St, a group of Bulgarian immigrant labourers clusters together for the camera. By including the walls and ceiling of the room, Goss emphasized that this was an overcrowded, cramped space. If we compare this photograph to a similar image discussed in an earlier chapter (figure 3.10), we get the impression this slum house on King Street was much like other overcrowded rooms in lodging houses all over the city. The problem of overcrowding was meant to appear self-evident in these images, and Goss’s photographs for the Health Department were expected to provide information that could be used in addressing the problem. This photograph served sociological and political purposes even as it contained within it a refusal to simply represent overcrowding. Here, many of the men in the picture hold up family photographs, both foregrounding their displacement and their desire to be reunited with their families, as they effectively resist the discourse of liberal reform, which problematized single men for their apparent lack of a

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family. Also, incidentally, these family photographs within this Health Department photograph draw attention to the role of photography in identifying the social problems that came to define them in their new lives. The photographs Goss produced for the city of Toronto constituted new and specifically modern, urban subject categories. On the one hand, they demarcated social groups that were regarded as problematic, while on the other hand they identified the agents of reform who would attempt to implement solutions to specifically urban problems. Playground supervisors, for example, pictured sitting in a large group on rows of wooden bleachers at the edge of a play area, were responsible for organizing and overseeing activities on the city’s playgrounds.40 Playgrounds themselves were important sites in the reform movement because they offered productive play as an alternative to children loitering in the streets. Because they were supervised, they became sites of improvement and liberal governmentality. The streets of the congested downtown district were frequently

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Fig. 5.19 Arthur Goss, Dr. Hastings, Medical Health Officer, in his office, 1925.

characterized as unsanitary and were even described as providing the conditions through which children could be lured into immoral and criminal behaviour. The organized recreation that took place in playgrounds, on the other hand, was regarded as preparation for good citizenship, and supervisors played an important role as teachers and managers of the playground and the children. Perhaps picturing them together as a group even helped the men and women who were playground supervisors to identify with the principles of reform they were expected to promote. In any case, the group photograph is a demonstration of the important lessons of cooperation and self-regulation the supervisors were meant to teach. Goss photographed reformers working in other municipal departments as well. A key figure in Toronto’s reform movement, Dr Charles Hastings (discussed in chapter 3), the Medical Health Officer from 1910 to 1929, was a driving force for health-related improvement initiatives in Toronto. Photographed at his desk holding a letter, adjacent to stacks of paper, filing cabinets, a telephone, and a set of books, Goss pictured Hastings with many of the contemporary accoutrements of communication and knowledge. While the office setting in which he was photographed indicates his position as an administrator, the portrait also conveys the force of his character through physical gestures and an incisive

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look. However, instead of using the close-up view that characterized many of his pictorialist portraits, Goss maintained a certain distance from this sitter and used the realist style that epitomized his professional work. Even so, this photograph, which portrays Hastings as a strong and authoritative character, is an honorific portrait. Suspended between what Sekula has described as the “romanticism and scientism” that saturates photographic discourse,41 the photograph recalls a notion of individualism that pre-dates photography at the same time that it employs the informational mode of communication that characterizes modernity. This portrait blurred the lines between Goss’s artistic and professional work, his role as storyteller and informant, his artwork and his instrumental photography. The activity of photographing reformers, as well as those subject to reform, was part of the ongoing attempt to respond to the changing conditions in early twentieth-century Toronto. Goss’s work for the city was one component of the city’s urban reform movement, and this portrait of Hastings is a compelling example that is at once an instrumental image of a social subject and an attempt to convey the character of the man who came to both symbolize and define liberal reform in Toronto. Informed by the conventions of both discourses – the artistic and the evidentiary – Goss’s work is important precisely because it shows how apparently divergent photographic practices were linked, shaped by attempts to mitigate the potentially harmful aspects of modern urban life.

Conclusion From the worker to the bureaucrat to the photographer, reformers of all ranks were involved in managing the perceived threats of modernity. Photographic subjects were constituted differently in Goss’s artistic portraits than in his professional work. On the one hand, his artistic, pictorialist portraits emphasize the symbolist values of reflection and introspection, principles that were adapted by pictorialists in order to constitute idealized subjects. His sitters included his friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances, many of whom were privileged, white, male subjects well-known for their intellectual achievements. On the other hand, his city work is indebted to the conventions of evidentiary photography. These photographs were meant to serve as records, and here, Goss focused on lower-class subjects, especially women, children, and labourers, who were the targets of many reform initiatives. He also photographed some of the middle-class agents of reform, such as playground supervisors and visiting nurses. Where Goss’s artistic portraits celebrated individualism, his work for the city served as evidence of the positive impact of the new reform policies that were instituted at this time. Privileged members of the elite were celebrated, and their social status confirmed, through their portraits. Marginalized groups were also constituted, and their social identities consolidated, through portraits, which made them subject to the interventions of the state and perhaps complicated their own efforts to represent themselves. Yet, even as Goss approached his subjects in different ways, moving between the artistic and the instrumental, his distinctive treatment of sitters was supported and sustained by the same liberal epistemological structure. Therefore, both aspects of Goss’s photographic production should be seen as a reaction to the sense of crisis that accompanied the

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urbanization of Toronto. Writing about the experience of modernity, Marshall Berman claimed, “We might even say that to be fully modern is to be anti-modern: from Marx’s and Dostoevsky’s time to our own, it has been impossible to grasp and embrace the modern world’s potentialities without loathing and fighting against some of its most palpable realities.”42 The impulse to escape the challenges of modern urban life by returning to a romanticized bygone era, and the drive to manage the perceived threats of urban life, were inextricably linked. Where Goss’s pictorialist portraits were an attempt to escape the crisis by means of a reification of an idealized past through an individualized subject, the portraits he produced for the city were an attempt to assert control over the subjects implicated in the crisis. Goss’s work is significant in the history of photography because it helps us to rethink both the relationship between pictorialism and instrumental photography, and, more generally, how photography was mobilized in negotiating the changing conditions of modern urban life. For Goss, “the event of photography” was a way of mediating and structuring social encounters.43 Despite the important differences that distinguish his artistic and professional practices, a common feature of Goss’s photographs of people is that he was consistently engaged with his subjects. Whether he was producing portrait photographs as works of art or photographs of people as records for a city department, Goss grappled with the tension between individualizing, idealizing, and categorizing his sitters. Whereas his pictorialist portraits explored the principles of the movement to establish the interiority of his middle-class subjects, his photographs of people in the city use the environments in which they lived and worked to constitute social categories and forms of subjectivity. His photographs are important to our understanding of how Toronto became a modern city because they manifest the very negotiation between rationality and affect that was at the heart of the production of modernity. Goss’s overall project was to participate in, not reflect, urban modernity, and the stories he told about the modernizing city were consistent in their liberal optimism that photography could contribute to the creation of a new, modern and progressive world. Goss was a technically skilled and inventive photographer, taking on some of the most difficult challenges, including photographing wriggling babies, dimly lit interiors, and large groups – sometimes all of these at once. His city work resisted and went beyond the instrumental uses for which it was produced, and his pictorial photography experimented with stylistic conventions and expressive potential. Like the city in which he worked, photographic discourses were being shaped and re-imagined in unforeseen ways in response to the challenges of modernity and urbanization. Goss’s work, both the artistic and the evidentiary, is about the reconfiguration of social relations and the reshaping of the urban environment in modernity.

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Conclusion

My aim in this book has been to explore the intersections between photography and urban modernity and to come to a new understanding of how photography participated in the making of modern Toronto. While my claim is not that photography is what made the city modern, neither is it that photography merely reflected the process of modernization. Rather, I have argued for a more nuanced interpretation of the intersection between photographic image making and viewing and attempts to produce both a modern city and liberal subjects. In considering how photography figured in the liberal order, my intention is not to pass judgment, either on its use or on this mode of governance. Instead, I have been interested in exploring the complexities of the interaction between photography and liberalism, of investigating both what photography shows us about how liberalism works and, conversely, what liberal governmentality helps us to recognize about photography. I have argued that photography was especially important in early twentieth-century Toronto because it offered a discursive realm in which a modern city could be imagined and, at the same time, it became an instrument for producing the knowledge necessary to enact that transformation. As we have seen, just as the city changed a great deal during the first two decades of the twentieth century, so too did practices of photography. It was during this crucial period that instrumental photography became closely linked to the campaign to reform the city of Toronto. The use of photography as a bureaucratic apparatus intersected with efforts to modernize the urban environment, eliminate slums, and target certain social groups with reform measures. As photography was instated as a new procedure and mechanism of government, photographs also became important in negotiating changes to public policy. Both Medical Health Officer Dr Charles Hastings and Works Commissioner R.C. Harris recognized their potential. Photographs were useful to Hastings’s crusade for public health reform, which emphasized the elimination of poor living conditions and the prohibition of particular kinds of conduct. Harris used them to build the city’s infrastructure. Whether it was photographs depicting the run-down shacks and muddy back lanes of the Ward in

a government report, or photographs of streetscapes for a survey of an area that was under development, these civic officials employed photographs as evidence of physical conditions in their respective campaigns for civic improvement. The evidentiary status of the photographs is what rendered them convincing and in turn generated affective economies that shaped social norms. Photographs of a different sort played a key role in producing a vision for a modernized city and in rallying public support for that ideal. Images that embodied features of the modern, planned city offered an immersive experience and developed modes of perception suited to liberal subjectivity. In addition, as images circulated in newspapers, reports, and other media, photography figured prominently in mediating social encounters and shaping ideas about newcomers to the city. With the emergence of new ideas about how photography could be used and how new formats and ways of circulating them could bring images to a wide array of viewers, photographic discourses figured prominently in the liberal political order. However, by the early 1920s, the motivation for reform had largely diminished. In fact, histories of Toronto characterize the 1920s as a decade of restraint.1 Both the ideals of liberalism and strategies of governance had begun to change. The reform movement, with its emphasis on human betterment, and what Mayor Horatio Hocken (1912–14) called “welfare work,” fragmented as the standards of liberal rationality seemed increasingly unattainable, and those involved in reform began to focus more on specialized issues.2 The focus of public health initiatives shifted away from regulating unsanitary environments and towards preventative strategies such as immunization, education, and physical examinations by public health nurses.3 With this change, photography was used less as a form of evidence and more as a tool for publicity. While photographs continued to be published in the reports of government departments and civic organizations in the following decades, increasingly, a range of experts took on important roles in managing specific aspects of governance and, as a result, photography was expected to work in different ways in the emerging professional spheres. There were other social and political changes. City planning and social work became distinct professions, and instead of investing in ambitious city-building schemes, politicians tended to focus on keeping the tax rate low. Rather than attempting to unify and order the urban environment and regulate the behaviour of the people in it, civic officials focused on maintaining the existing city infrastructure. Rationality, efficiency, and professionalism became the order of the day. Instrumental photography remained important, and the systems implemented in the 1910s governing its production and use became entrenched. However, the pace of growth in the city slowed and the projects in which photography was mobilized changed. Arthur Goss, who continued to work as the city photographer throughout the 1920s and 1930s, spent much of his time photographing established practices, such as school hygiene programs and dental visits, even as calls for fiscal restraint limited spending on education and public health. While there was a dramatic shift toward an automobile culture, there was also a lack of political will to engage in major infrastructure development, in part stemming from a sense that the city had been

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modernized and was no longer in a state of crisis. Likewise, because of the new infrastructure and major initiatives by the Health Department, the overall health of citizens had improved, infant mortality rates had dropped, and outbreaks of infectious disease were less frequent and less severe. A growing awareness of how photography could persuade viewers, gained from advertising and the wider culture of commercial capitalism, led to greater skepticism of photographic evidence and less reliance on photographs to do the work of establishing order. In the 1920s, photography still played an important role in liberalism, but the growth of increasingly sophisticated networks for producing knowledge meant that the epistemological underpinnings of liberal governmentality relied more on information management such as statistics than on photographs. Now, in the twenty-first century, with our ubiquitous, sophisticated image culture, and in an age when global corporations gather personal data in order to sell products and services and generate revenue, photography plays a different role in a changed social and political order. Even though it is now more common to consider photography as a

Fig. 6.1 Arthur Goss, Canadian National Exhibition Grandstand, Broken Railing, 1928.

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mode of communication than as a transformative force, it continues to play a part in constituting collectives and mediating social encounters. As we look back upon the ways photography worked to produce the modern, early-twentieth-century city, liberal reformers might appear naive. Today, their quest for order may seem like a utopian dream of modernism. Changes to our perception of photography show that practices of photography do not serve the same function they once did. How photographs are made, how they circulate, who makes them, and a host of other factors have changed radically in the approximately one-hundred years since Arthur Goss and William James took to the streets of Toronto with their speed graflex cameras. This change in the way photography works reveals a discursive field that was once invested with the desires and fears of modernity. And in knowing how photography was once meant to work in picturing the liberal order, perhaps we are able to better understand both photographic discourses and the effects of a modern political rationality.

Fig. 6.2 Opposite Arthur Goss, Dental clinic, Edith L. Grove School, 1930.

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Illustration Credits

1.1 Unknown photographer, Lou Turofsky and others outside the Alexandra Studios, 338 Queen Street West, 1920s. Fonds 1257, series 1057, item 9437, City of Toronto Archives (cta). 22 1.2 William James (Canadian, born England, 1866–1948), Group of bathers being photographed at Hanlan’s Point, 1913. Fonds 1244, item 160A, cta. 22 1.3 William James, Bank Messengers, King Street West, 1912. Fonds 1244, item 134A, cta. 23 1.4 William James, “The House That Jack Built” Midway Game, Canadian National Exhibition, 1913. Fonds 1244, item 0279G, cta. 24 1.5 William James, Newsreel and Press Photographers, Queen’s Park, 1911. Fonds 1244, item 8012, cta. 24 1.6 G.G. Powell, Annual Report of the City Engineer, 1910. Toronto: Carswell Co., 1911 [232b]. Fonds 2, series 60, box 225049, cta. 27 1.7 Requisition Form, Department of Works, Photography and Blue Printing Section, c. 1910s. Series 372, subseries 100, item 775, cta. 27 1.8 James Cane, Topographical Plan of the City and Liberties of Toronto in the Province of Canada, 1842. T1842/4Mlrg, Toronto Public Library (tpl). 28 1.9 Charles Goad Atlas, 1910 revised to 1912. Volume 1, plate 27, cta. 29 1.10 Edgar Gariépy (Canadian, 1881–1956), Montréal: Tramway sur la rue Saint-Denis, c. 1914. BM42, G1227, Archives de la Ville de Montréal. 30 1.11 Eugene de Salignac (American, 1861–1943), Queensboro Bridge, template of 10-foot car at first tower Manhattan shore, on north outside track, template on present track line and 1⬘11⬙ above present grade, 1914. Department of Bridges/Plant and Structures, bps, iv 1155, New York City Department of Records, Municipal Archives. 32 1.12 Arthur Goss (Canadian, 1881–1940), Gasoline Motor Flusher, 1922. Fonds 200, series 372, subseries 70, item 113, cta. 33

1.13 Bloor Viaduct Survey, copy of tracing of general survey, 4 June 1913. Fonds 200, series 372, subseries 10, item 180, cta. 35 1.14 Arthur Goss, Bloor Viaduct Survey, no. 19, 17 October 1912. Fonds 200, series 372, subseries 10, item 19, cta. 36 1.15 Arthur Goss, Bloor Viaduct Survey, no. 25, 17 October 1912. Fonds 200, series 372, subseries 10, item 25, cta. 38 1.16 Arthur Goss, Bloor Viaduct Survey, no. 13, 16 October 1912. Fonds 200, series 372, subseries 10, item 13, cta. 39 1.17 Arthur Goss, Bloor Viaduct Survey, no. 166, Castle Frank Road, 3 July 1913. Fonds 200, series 372, subseries 10, item 166, cta. 40 1.18 Arthur Goss, The Bluffs, c. 1918, gelatin silver print. pa-127371, Library and Archives Canada (lac). 43 1.19 Arthur Goss, Bloor Viaduct Survey, no. 105, 650–658 Parliament Street, 8 April 1913. Series 372, subseries 10, item 105, cta. 44 1.20 Arthur Goss, Bloor Viaduct Survey, no. 48, 18 October 1912. Fonds 200, series 372, subseries 10, item 48, cta. 47 1.21 Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864–1946), The Hand of Man, 1902, photogravure, ⫻ 8.3 ⫻ 11.3 cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. 47 2.1 Plan of the Suggested Development of the City of Toronto, 1905, Proceedings of the Ontario Association of Architects, 1906. oaa, n.p. [90a]. 52 2.2 Toronto Guild of Civic Art, Plan of Improvements to the City of Toronto accompanying the Report on a Comprehensive Plan for Systematic Improvements in Toronto, 1909. Plan mt-00334-2, cta. 55 2.3 Jules Guérin (American, 1866–1946), View of the City from Jackson Park to Grant Park, Looking towards the West (plate 49). Daniel Hudson Burnham (American, 1846– 1912) and Edward Herbert Bennett (American, born England, 1874–1954), Plan of Chicago, 1909, 1905–1909. Watercolor and graphite on paper, 103.5 ⫻ 480 cm. On permanent loan to The Art Institute of Chicago from the City of Chicago, 2.148.1966. Permission of The Art Institute of Chicago (aic). 60 2.4 Jules Guérin, Proposed Boulevard to connect the North and South sides of the River; View Looking North From Washington Street (plate 112). Daniel H. Burnham and Edward H. Bennett, Plan of Chicago, 1909, 1905–1909. Watercolor and graphite on paper. Permission of Chicago History Museum (chm). 61 2.5 Jules Guérin, View, Looking West, of the Proposed Civic Center Plaza and Buildings, Showing it as the Center of the System of Arteries of Circulation and of the Surrounding Country (plate 132). Daniel H. Burnham and Edward H. Bennett, Plan of Chicago, 1909. Watercolor and graphite on paper, 75.4 ⫻ 105.5 cm. On permanent loan to The Art Institute of Chicago from the City of Chicago, 28.148.1966. Permission of the aic. 64 2.6 Plan of Chicago, Meeting in Daniel Burnham’s Office, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, 1908. Edward Bennett Collection, Ryerson and Burnham Archives, The Art Institute of Chicago. Permission of the aic. 65

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2.7 “A boulevard and arcaded sidewalk,” Report on a Comprehensive Plan for Systematic Improvements in Toronto, 1909. Fonds 1015, box 146634, file 3, cta. 67 2.8 “The dignity of harmony,” Report on a Comprehensive Plan for Systematic Improvements in Toronto, 1909. Fonds 1015, box 146634, file 3, cta. 67 2.9 “Another view of an inshore waterway,” Report on a Comprehensive Plan for Systematic Improvements in Toronto, 1909. Fonds 1015, box 146634, file 3, cta. 69 2.10 “A riverside drive, both useful and beautiful,” Report on a Comprehensive Plan for Systematic Improvements in Toronto, 1909. Fonds 1015, box 146634, file 3, cta. 69 2.11 “Fronting on Toronto’s only parkway,” Report on a Comprehensive Plan for Systematic Improvements in Toronto, 1909. Fonds 1015, box 146634, file 3, cta. 69 2.12 “A central part of our city in need of improvement,” Report on a Comprehensive Plan for Systematic Improvements in Toronto, 1909. Fonds 1015, box 146634, file 3, cta. 69 3.1 Charles Hastings, “Report of the Medical Health Officer dealing with the Recent Investigation of Slum Conditions in Toronto, embodying Recommendations for the Amelioration of the Same,” 1911, 21. Fonds 200, series 365, box 224856, file 14, cta. 76 3.2 “Detail Map of ‘The Ward,’” Bureau of Municipal Research, “What is ‘the Ward’ Going to do With Toronto,” 1918, 7. Fonds 1003, series 973, subseries 8, box 148824, file 4, cta. 82 3.3 Charles Hastings, “Report of the Medical Health Officer dealing with the Recent Investigation of Slum Conditions in Toronto, embodying Recommendations for the Amelioration of the Same,” 1911, 5. Fonds 200, series 365, box 224856, file 14, cta. 82 3.4 Lawren S. Harris (Canadian, 1885–1970), In the Ward, Toronto, 1917. Oil on wood pulp board 26.8 3 34.8 cm. The Thomson Collection, Art Gallery of Ontario. Permission of Art Gallery of Ontario. 83 3.5 Charles Hastings, “Report of the Medical Health Officer dealing with the Recent Investigation of Slum Conditions in Toronto, embodying Recommendations for the Amelioration of the Same,” 1911, 15. Fonds 200, series 365, box 224856, file 14, cta. 85 3.6 Charles Hastings, “Report of the Medical Health Officer dealing with the Recent Investigation of Slum Conditions in Toronto, embodying Recommendations for the Amelioration of the Same,” 1911, 27. Fonds 200, series 365, box 224856, file 14, cta. 86 3.7 New York Bureau of Municipal Research, “Report on a Survey of the City Treasury, Assessment, Works, Fire, and Property Departments, with Appendices, Physical Survey” [Need for a General ‘Clean-up’ Day], 1913. Fonds 1002, box 148699, file 3, cta. 90 3.8 Photograph by Arthur Goss, in New York Bureau of Municipal Research, “Report on a Survey of the City Treasury, Assessment, Works, Fire, and Property Departments, with Appendices, Physical Survey” [Need for ‘follow-up’ of Condemned Conditions], 1913. Fonds 1002, box 148699, file 3, cta. 92 3.9 Photograph by Arthur Goss, in New York Bureau of Municipal Research, “Report on a Survey of the City Treasury, Assessment, Works, Fire, and Property Departments, with Appendices, Physical Survey” [Need for a General ‘Clean-up’ Day], 1913. Series 372, subseries 32, item 259, cta. 93

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3.10 Photograph by Arthur Goss, in New York Bureau of Municipal Research, “Report on a Survey of the City Treasury, Assessment, Works, Fire, and Property Departments, with Appendices, Physical Survey” [Need to Eliminate Overcrowding], 1913. Series 372, subseries 32, item 254, cta. 95 3.11 Photograph by Arthur Goss, in New York Bureau of Municipal Research, “Report on a Survey of the City Treasury, Assessment, Works, Fire, and Property Departments, with Appendices, Physical Survey” [Need to Regulate Lodging Houses], 1913. Series 372, subseries 32, item 252, cta. 95 3.12. New York Bureau of Municipal Research, “Report on a Survey of the City Treasury, Assessment, Works, Fire, and Property Departments, with Appendices, Physical Survey” [Need for More Playgrounds], 1913. Fonds 1002, box 148699, file 3, cta. 96 3.13 Bureau of Municipal Research, “What is ‘the Ward’ Going to do with Toronto?” 1918, 10–11. Fonds 1003, series 973, subseries 8, box 148824, file 4, cta. 98 3.14 Bureau of Municipal Research, “What is ‘the Ward’ Going to do with Toronto?” 1918, 26–7. Fonds 1003, series 973, subseries 8, box 148824, file 4, cta. 98 4.1 Marion Long (Canadian, 1882–1970), reproduction of drawing in Margaret Bell’s “Toronto’s Melting Pot,” Canadian Magazine 41, no. 3 (July 1913): 239. 103 4.2 Marion Long, reproduction of drawing in Margaret Bell’s “Toronto’s Melting Pot,” Canadian Magazine 41, no. 3 (July 1913): 237. 106 4.3 William James, British Immigrants from Kent, c. 1908. Fonds 1244, item 107, cta. 109 4.4 “Picturesque if not Artistic – Glimpses of ‘The Ward,’” Toronto World, 4 December 1910, illustrated section, 7, lac. 110 4.5 “In the heart of a great city – how the citizens of ‘The Ward’ live, move, and have their being,” Toronto World, 27 November 1910, illustrated section, 2, lac. 110 4.6 “Some of the Little Citizens of Toronto’s Congested Area,” Toronto World, 9 March 1913, illustrated section, 1, lac. 112 4.7 “New citizens of Canada – types of various races of immigrants arriving in 1911,” Globe, 23 September 1911, magazine section, 3. Fonds 70, series 655, box 274210, file 16, cta. 115 4.8 “Types of Canada’s New Citizens,” Globe, Saturday, 2 July 1910, magazine section, 1, lac. 117 4.9 Emily P. Weaver, “The Italians in Toronto,” Globe, Saturday, 16 July 1910, magazine section, 3, lac. 117 4.10. The Central Neighborhood House pamphlet. Fonds 1005, series 8, box 149153, file 5, cta. 120 4.11 Old English Folk Game, The House by the Side of the Road, August 1913, 4. Fonds 1005, series 8, box 149153, file 6, cta. 122 4.12 Senior Boy’s Club Meeting, The House by the Side of the Road, June 1913, 3. Fonds 1005, series 8, box 149153, file 6, cta. 122

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4.13 Elias (Eliakum) Bochner and Fanny Furtz Bochner, wedding portrait, Toronto, 1907 or 1908. Item 3524, Ontario Jewish Archives. 124 4.14 Karl Goldenberg, Sarah Goldenberg, and Tilli Goldenberg dressed for wedding, Toronto, 1905 or 1906. Item 519, Ontario Jewish Archives. 124 4.15 Musicians, Leo, John, and Michael Tchernovsky, The Hebrew Journal, 21 November 1915, 5. The Klau Library, Cincinnati Hebrew Union College, Jewish Institute of Religion. 126 5.1 Arthur Goss, View up Yonge Street, north from Melinda Street, c. 1915. Ontario Archives. 129 5.2 Arthur Goss, Child and Nurse, 1906, gelatin silver print, 20.9 ⫻ 16 cm. pa 126977, lac. 130 5.3 Edward Steichen (American, 1879–1973), Sadakichi Hartmann, c. 1903, published in Camera Work, 4 July 1904, photogravure, 15.1 ⫻ 11.9 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Permission of Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource. 132 5.4 Unknown photographer, Toronto Camera Club Exhibition, 1906. pa 134948 lac. Permission of Toronto Camera Club. 133 5.5 Arthur Lismer (Canadian, born England, 1885–1969), Arthur Goss, pencil on paper, Arts and Letters Club (1938). Fonds 1229, item 18-N, cta. 134 5.6 Arthur Goss, Professor James Mavor, c. 1925, gelatin silver print, 24.2 ⫻ 19.1 cm. pa-126982, lac. 135 5.7 Arthur Goss, Dr. Frederick Banting, c. 1920–25, gelatin silver print, 25.4 ⫻ 18.3 cm. pa-123481, lac. 135 5.8 Arthur Goss, Self portrait, 1928. Fonds 200, series 372, subseries 41, item 607, cta. 136 5.9 Arthur Goss, Ethel Goss, seated with Enid and John, 1910. Fonds 200, series 372, subseries 41, item 574, cta. 137 5.10 Arthur Goss, Mary Goss, age 2, 1913. Fonds 200, series 372, subseries 41, item 586, cta. 137 5.11 Arthur Goss, Child Frank Ellerby, 69 Leslie Street (Children for Adoption), 1916. Fonds 200, series 372, subseries 32, item 415, cta. 139 5.12 Arthur Goss, Woman’s Dispensary Baby Clinic, Seaton Street, 1914. Fonds 200, series 372, subseries 32, item 339, cta. 142 5.13 Arthur Goss, University Settlement, 467 Adelaide Street West, 1913. Fonds 200, series 372, subseries 32, item 234, cta. 143 5.14 Arthur Goss, Keele Street School, Tennis Doubles Champions, 1923. Fonds 200, series 372, subseries 52, item 1159, cta. 144 5.15 Arthur Goss, Orde Street School Pupils, 1921. Fonds 200, series 372, subseries 32, item 625, cta. 145 5.16 Arthur Goss, Orde Street School Pupil, 1921. Fonds 200, series 372, subseries 32, item 624, cta. 145

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5.17 Arthur Goss, Slum house on the north side of King Street, 1912. Fonds 200, series 372, subseries 32, item 58, cta. 146 5.18 Arthur Goss, Playground Supervisors, 1925. Fonds 200, series 372, series 52, item 1230, cta. 147 5.19 Arthur Goss, Dr. Hastings, Medical Health Officer, in his office, 1925. Fonds 200, series 372, subseries 32, item 749, cta. 148 6.1 Arthur Goss, Canadian National Exhibition Grandstand, Broken Railing, 1928. Fonds 200, series 372, subseries 1, item 771, cta. 153 6.2 Arthur Goss, Dental clinic, Edith L. Grove School, 1930. Fonds 200, series 372, subseries 32, item 835, cta. 154

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Notes

1 2

3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

int rodu ct ion Because I am interested in the historical specificity of ideas, I have used the past tense when referring to texts authors have written or to talk about how a photographer made a photograph. I use the present tense when directly analyzing an image. Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 510–12. Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” 35. Nadar is the pseudonym of Félix Tournachon, the French photographer who invented a way to use electric light to illuminate the sewers and catacombs of Paris, which he photographed in 1864–65. Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life.” Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century”; Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”; Kracauer, “The Cult of Distraction.” The scholarship on modernity is extensive. Some of the works on art and cultural history most relevant to this study are: Berman, All that Is Solid Melts into Air; Clark, The Painting of Modern Life; Donald, Imagining the Modern City; D’Souza and McDonough, eds., The Invisible Flâneuse?; Felski, Doing Time; Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity”; Tagg, “The Discontinuous City.” For example, see Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism.” On liberalism and freedom, see Rose, Powers of Freedom; Joyce, The Rule of Freedom. McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework,” 622. Perry, “Women, Racialized People, and the Making of the Liberal Order in Northern North America.” Curtis, “After ‘Canada.’” Constant and Ducharme, “Introduction: A Project of Rule Called Canada – The Liberal Order Framework and Historical Practice,” 4. Jessup, Morton, and Robertson, eds., Negotiations in a Vacant Lot, 11. Otter, The Victorian Eye, 12–18. Woodsworth, My Neighbor, 26–7. For an excellent history of the relation between freedom, liberalism, and modern cities, see Joyce, The Rule of Freedom. On the relation between smell and the social order see Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant.

16 Careless, Toronto to 1918. 17 Middleton, The Municipality of Toronto, 371; Careless, Toronto to 1918, 125. 18 The reform movement in Canada has been discussed in historical literature using the terms urban reform and moral reform. Histories of urban reform tend to focus on issues such as government corruption and the regulation of utility corporations, along with concerns about slum conditions and the urban environment, while histories of moral reform have focused more on notions of purity, and issues such as prostitution and physical care concerns, including hygiene, which are seen as intrinsically connected to morality. While recognizing that different aspects of reform are linked by their connection to the liberal political order, I use the term urban reform because this study focuses less on issues related directly to morality and more on the physical environment of the city and its impact on urban subjects. On the urban reform movement, see Rutherford, ed., Saving the Canadian City. On moral reform and governmentality, see Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap, and Water. On child welfare reform, see Chen, Tending the Gardens of Citizenship. Also related to the reform movement are histories on the connection between religion and reform, such as: Gauvreau and Hubert, eds, The Churches and Social Order in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Canada; Opp, “Re-imaging the Moral Order of Urban Space,”; and studies of morality and the law, such as Loo and Strange, Making Good; Strange, Toronto’s Girl Problem; and Weaver, Crimes, Constables and Courts. 19 On the British origins of the moral philosophy that prevailed among Toronto social reformers, see Burke, Seeking the Highest Good, 3–27. 20 For example, see: Careless, Toronto to 1918; Harris, Unplanned Suburbs; Spragge, “A Confluence of Interests”: Goheen, “Currents of Change in Toronto, 1850–1900.” 21 Bruce Curtis suggests how Foucault’s work is useful for developing McKay’s concept of liberal order governance in “After ‘Canada.’” 22 Foucault, “Governmentality.” Foucault’s 1978 lecture “Governmentality” outlines the parameters of his investigation of the relation between power and the subject, and many of his lectures, writings, and interviews from the late 1970s and early 1980s concentrate on various aspects of this theme, which as James Faubion points out, relate to the political climate of the 1970s when conservatives diagnosed a “crisis of governability” in Western Europe. See Foucault, Power, xxiii. Also see: Poovey, Making a Social Body; Donzelot, L’Invention du Social; Donzelot, “The Mobilization of Society.” 23 Foucault, “The Subject and Power”; Curtis, “After ‘Canada’”; Rose, O’Malley, and Valverde, “Governmentality.” 24 On freedom as a key feature of liberalism, see: Rose, Powers of Freedom; Joyce, The Rule of Freedom. 25 Rose, O’Malley, and Valverde, “Governmentality,” 99. 26 Foucault, Power/Knowledge. On the way mechanisms of power affect physical bodies, see Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 27 Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 133. 28 McKee, “Post-Foucauldian Governmentality: What does it offer critical social policy analysis?” 474. 29 Rose, O’Malley, and Valverde, “Governmentality,” 100.

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30 Foucault, “Space, Knowledge, and Power,” 350. Also see: Joyce, The Rule of Freedom; Otter, The Victorian Eye; Osborne and Rose, “Governing Cities,” 5–10. 31 On statistics, the census, and state formation, see Curtis, The Politics of Population. On statistics and cartography, see Joyce, “Maps, Numbers and the City: Knowing the Governed,” 20–61. 32 Dagenais, “The Municipal Territory.” 33 See, for example: Trachtenberg, The American Image; Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life. 34 Marien, Photography. 35 On urban experience see Rice, Parisian Views. On new modes of visual experience, see Crary, Techniques of the Observer. 36 Hales, Silver Cities. Many general histories of photography attempt to trace aesthetic development through technical innovations. The classic example of this approach is Newhall’s The History of Photography. 37 For instance, Miles Orvell has argued that, in contrast to the nineteenth-century focus on description, Stieglitz, Strand, and others practised a new, modern approach to photography, in which the camera offered a new way of seeing, and a way of mediating the alienating environment of modern life. See Orvell, “The Camera and the Verification of Fact.” 38 Payne and Kunard, “Writing Photography in Canada.” 39 Ibid., 232–5. A number of excellent studies on representations of First Nations people are published in the anthology The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada, including those by Lynne Bell, Robert Evans, Andrea Kunard, Sherry Farrell Racette, and Jeff Thomas. 40 Payne, The Official Picture. 41 Welch and Long, “Introduction: A Small History of Photography Studies.” 42 Tagg, The Burden of Representation; Sekula, “The Body and the Archive.” 43 Ryan, Picturing Empire. 44 Kelsey, Archive Style. 45 Sandweiss, Print the Legend. 49 Williams, Framing the West. 47 Lalvani, Photography, Vision, and the Production of Modern Bodies; Brown, The Corporate Eye. 48 On the materiality of photographs, see Edwards and Hart, eds, Photographs Objects Histories. On the viewer as witness see: Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography; Batchen, Gidley, Miller, and Prosser, eds, Picturing Atrocity. On witnessing and spectatorship see: Reinhardt, Edwards, and Duganne, eds, Beautiful Suffering; Sliwinski, Human Rights in Camera. For a number of sources on performativity and photography, see Levin’s review essay, “The Performative Force of Photography.” 49 Langford, Scissors, Paper, Stone, 246. 50 Edwards and Morton, Photography, Anthropology and History, 4. 51 Azoulay, Civil Imagination, 11–27. 52 Clough with Halley, eds, The Affective Turn. 53 Welch and Long, “Introduction: A Small History of Photography Studies,” 12–15; Barthes, “The Rhetoric of the Image.”

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54 Brown and Phu, “Introduction,” in Feeling Photography, 1–6. Victor Burgin’s edited volume Thinking Photography began to map out a theory of photography that struggled against the conventional art historical emphasis on biography and aesthetic judgment. Susan Sontag’s On Photography recognized the emotional impact of photographs, although she was uncomfortable with its potential to overwhelm viewers. 55 A few examples include: Batchen, Forget Me Not; Hirsch, Family Frames; hooks, “In Our Glory,” Spence and Holland, eds, Family Snaps. 56 Barthes, Camera Lucida; Batchen, ed., Photography Degree Zero; Smith, “Photography Between Desire and Grief ”; and other essays in Brown and Phu, Feeling Photography. Also see the special issue, “Affecting Photographies,” Photography and Culture, including my own essay, Bassnett, “Archive and Affect in Contemporary Photography,” which looks at how the work of photographers Greg Staats and Arnaud Maggs produce affect and offer ways of negotiating individual and cultural loss. 57 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 23–45. 58 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 5–8, 11. 59 Mazzarella, “Affect: What Is It Good For?” 299. 60 Clough, The Affective Turn, 18–19. 61 On discursive formations, see Foucault, “The Discourse on Language.” 62 On this method of analysis, see Foucault, “On the Archaeology of the Sciences: Response to the Epistemology Circle,” 309. ch apt er one 1 cta, Toronto Board of Control Minutes, fonds 200, series 779, box 144681, Board of Control Minute Book, volume 22, July to December 1911, 2313. 2 Russell and Price, Arthur S. Goss, City Photographer, 3. 3 cta, Arthur Goss Employment Records compiled by Peter MacCallum in Arthur Goss information file, 1988. Death certificate, which indicates that he died from progressive muscular atrophy, can also be found in the Goss information file. In 1910, while he was a draughtsman for the City Engineer, he designed a new manhole cover for the city. See Barmak, “Under the Covers,” 11. 4 In 1914, Arthur Beales was hired as the Harbour Commission’s official photographer, where he worked for thirty years. See Mackinnon, Official Photographers. 5 cta, Harris, “Report on Photographic and Blue Printing Work,” 25 June 1912, Board of Control Communications, fonds 200, series 783, box 144001. 6 cta, Administrative History, City Engineer’s Department photographs, fonds 200, series 376; Mackinnon, Teeple, and Dale, Toronto’s Visual Legacy, 87. 7 cta, Powell, Annual Report of the City Engineer, 1910, fonds 2, series 60, box 225049, 95; Mackinnon, Teeple, and Dale, Toronto’s Visual Legacy, 87. 8 cta, Harris, “Report on Photographic and Blue Printing Work,” 25 June 1912. On Harris’s appointment, see: Board of Control Communications, 23 May 1912, fonds 200, series 783, box 144000. 9 cta, Harris, “Report on Photographic and Blue Printing Work,” 14 June 1912, Board of Control Communications, fonds 200, series 783, box 144000. Harris was elected to membership in the Toronto Camera Club on 27 February 1906. lac, Toronto Camera Club records, reel 2, 348.

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10 cta, Memorandum and Procedures Binder, Photography and Blue Printing Section, fonds 200, series 373, subseries 3, box 145224, file 2, 1. 11 cta, Department of Works, Photography and Blue Printing Section, Schedule of Prices, January 1915, Goss information file. 12 cta, Department of Works Manual of Procedure No. 1, Head Office, Photographs, fonds 200, series 373, subseries 3, box 145224, file 1. 13 cta, Department of Public Works, fonds 200, series 372, subseries 8 and subseries 15. 14 On filing systems and the material basis of governmentality, see Joyce, “Filing the Raj.” 15 For example, see: Harley, “Deconstructing the Map,” in Writing Worlds, 232, 244; Edney, Mapping an Empire. 16 Joyce, “Maps, Numbers and the City: Knowing the Governed,” in The Rule of Freedom, 20–61. 17 Dunbabin, “Motives for Mapping the Great Lakes.” In 2010, the federal government reached a land claims settlement worth $145 million with the Mississaugas of the New Credit relating to the Toronto Purchase (1787 and 1805) and the Brant Tract Purchase of 1797. 18 Freeman, “‘Toronto has no history!’” 19 Hayes, Historical Atlas of Toronto, 16–21, 41. 20 In the 1880s, Charles E. Goad, a civil engineer, began to produce these plans for insurance companies in cities and towns across the country. On fire insurance plans, see: Hayward, Fire Insurance Plans in the National Map Collection; Goad, preface by Booth Martyn, Mapping of Victorian Toronto. 21 Hall, Dodds, and Triggs, The World of William Notman; Skidmore, “‘All that is interesting in the Canadas’”; Parsons, William Notman. See lac, Samuel McLaughlin fonds, R10674-0-2-E. 22 Lessard, Montréal métropole du Québec; Lessard, Allaire, Brault, Gagnon and Lauzon, eds., Montréal au XXe siècle. 23 Jones, Imagining Winnipeg; Opp, “Re-imaging the Moral Order of Urban Space.” 24 Borcoman, 19th-Century French Photographs from the National Gallery of Canada, 106. Also see: Hambourg, Charles Marville. 25 Lorenzini, New York Rises, 7–21. 26 On the social history of Toronto, see: Armstrong, A City in the Making; Harney, ed., Gathering Place; Careless, Toronto to 1918; Russell, ed., Forging a Consensus; Glazebrook, The Story of Toronto; Middleton, The Municipality of Toronto. 27 On the city’s public works, see Cuthbertson, Toronto Above and Below. 28 For more on the new modes of transportation see Filey and Russell, From Horse Power to Horsepower, Toronto. In 1917, another photographer, Alfred Pearson, joined the Works Department. In 1922, he was appointed the first official photographer for the Toronto Transit Commission (ttc), which was created in 1920, and thereafter until 1944, he produced thousands of photographs of the city’s transit projects and facilities, including photographs of ttc vehicles. See MacKinnon, Official Photographers. 29 Otter, “Locating Matter”; McFarlane and Rutherford, “Political Infrastructures.” 30 Spragge, “A Confluence of Interests,” 248. Also see Harris, Unplanned Suburbs. 31 cta, Jacobs and Davies Inc., “Report on Transit to the Mayor and Council of the City of Toronto,” 1910, fonds 2, series 60, item 22.

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32 cta, Harris, “Report No. 25 of the Committee of Works,” City Council Minutes, appendix A, 1912, 1787-8; cta, Mayor Hocken’s Inaugural Address, 13 January, City Council Minutes, appendix C, 1913, 12. 33 cta, “Annual Report of the Assessment Commissioner,” 1913, fonds 200, series 768, subseries 1, box 224924, file 1. 34 The voters were asked to approve debentures of $2.5 million for the project in the municipal election on 1 January 1913. cta, Report No. 25 of the Committee of Works, City Council Minutes, appendix A, 1912, 1787–8. 35 cta, Report No. 21 of the Committee on Works, City Council Minutes, appendix A, 1909, 1672; cta, Mayor Geary’s Inaugural Address, City Council Minutes, appendix C, 1912, 7. Also see Taylor, “The Bloor Street Viaduct, Toronto, Ontario,” 485. 36 The Civic Guild of Art opposed the straight route of the earlier proposals on aesthetic grounds, but they came to promote the idea of constructing a bridge and were in favour of a design by architect John Lyle. In order to convince the public not to support the city’s preferred route, the Civic Guild sent drawings, cost assessments, and letters to various city newspapers in 1909. See “Bloor St. Dearest Route Some Other Should be Chosen,” and “Why the Bloor St. Viaduct By-law should be Beaten,” The Evening Telegram, 30 December 1913, 13; “Guild Opposes Viaduct Scheme,” Toronto Star, 27 December 1910, 5. Also see trl, William Langton’s letter dated 29 December 1909, Toronto Guild of Civic Art Papers, sr 48, box 1, letters 1907–10. For more on the Civic Guild’s involvement, see Carr, Toronto Architect Edmund Burke, 165–6. On John Lyle’s involvement, see McArthur, A Progressive Traditionalist, 58–62. 37 The Board of Control granted $8,000 for the preliminary work. cta, Report No. 14 to the Council of the Corporation of the City of Toronto, City Council Minutes, appendix A, 1912, 911; cta, Report No.16 of the Committee on Works, City Council Minutes, appendix A, 1912, 1118. 38 The labour involved in the preparations of designs was extensive, and according to the Board of Trade, there were sixty-eight contract drawings for the main section of the bridge. See “Bloor Street Viaduct,” Board of Trade of the City of Toronto Yearbook, 70. 39 Taylor, “The Bloor Street Viaduct,” 487. 40 Ibid., 486. Even though Lyle’s design for the layout of the viaduct was adopted, Burke, and not Lyle, was selected as the architectural consultant. 41 Ibid., 487. 42 Stanford, To Serve The Community. 43 “Bloor Street Viaduct,” Board of Trade of the City of Toronto, Yearbook, 71–2. 44 “Progress on Bloor Street Viaduct, Toronto,” The Canadian Engineer 31 (28 September 1916): 244. 45 Dennis, Cities in Modernity, 18. 46 Sekula, “The Body and the Archive.” Also see Tagg, “The Pencil of History.” 47 cta, Department of Public Works, Bloor Viaduct, fonds 200, series 372, subseries 10. Goss worked on the survey of streets in the area around the Don Valley between March and July 1913. 48 Taylor, “The Bloor Street Viaduct,” 487. 49 Ibid., 487. A by-law was passed on 19 May 1913 that allowed a notice of expropriation to be given to occupants and owners of the property. 50 To offer a few examples: Robin Kelsey’s study of Timothy O’Sullivan’s photographs N OT E S TO PAG E S 34–9

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for the Wheeler Survey has shown how photographs depicting bleak, apparently unpopulated land were used to justify territorial expansion to the United States Congress in the 1870s. Martha Sandweiss has demonstrated that landscape photographs were crucial to a vision of the West as an empty region in which the blossoming American nation could expand and prosper. In a similar vein James Ryan’s study of British colonial photography in Africa has explained how photography was used to produce geographical knowledge and to establish and protect the interests of those in power. See: Kelsey, Archive Style, 75–141; Sandweiss, Print the Legend, 207–73; Ryan, Picturing Empire, 28–44. trl, Civic Guild, “Report of the Plan Committee to the annual meeting of the Guild of Civic Art upon the question of the Bloor St. Viaduct,” n.d. (c 1909); trl, Minutes of Plan Committee, 18 November 1909. Toronto Guild of Civic Art, sr 48, box 1. McKay, “Canada as a Long Liberal Revolution,” 376. Ibid., 385. “Bloor Street Viaduct and the City Debt,” The News, 18 December 1909. trl, Toronto Guild of Civic Art, sr 48, box 1, letters 1907–10. Liz Lundell discusses the ownership of this estate in Estates of Old Toronto, 96–7. cta, Assessment Roll 1911, Ward 2, Division 4, 145–6. The property was owned by Maunsell Jackson, who lived in the Drumsnab House, which was on an adjacent lot. Lots fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen were valued at $1,385, $1,650, and $1,575 respectively. cta, Assessment Roll 1921, Ward 2, Division 4, 79. By 1921, their value had risen to $5,525, $5,610, and $6,300. cta, Building Permit no. 14289, 19 March 1909, issued to C.H. Fleming, lists the cost of the house as $7,000. In 1912, the land value was assessed at $4,177 and the building at $8,000. cta, Assessment Roll 1912, Ward 2, Division 4, 61. In 1921, two years after the bridge was completed, the property had been sold to a new owner, and the land value had increased significantly to $7,831. cta, Assessment Roll 1921, Ward 2, Division 4, 77. cta, Mayor Hocken‘s Inaugural Address, City Council Minutes, appendix C, 1914, 4. This area, often referred to as “the Ward,” is discussed at length in chapter 3. Joyce, The Rule of Freedom, 70. cta, Notes from an interview with Goss’s daughter, Enid Lowe, conducted by city archivist Scott James, 10 March 1980, Arthur Goss information file. Goss purchased a Press Graflex, a reflex camera designed for news photographers, which produced a large negative but was quicker to use and easier to handle than a bulky view camera. However, he continued to rely on his view camera in his day-to-day work. Mortimer, ed., Photograms of the Year 1919: The Annual Review of the World’s Pictorial Photographic Work, 31, plate LII. cta, Goss information file. Goss was the secretary of the Salon Committee for the fifteenth Salon and twenty-seventh annual exhibition of the Toronto Camera Club in affiliation with the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, held at the Art Museum of Toronto from 15–31 May 1918. See information file on Goss at cta. On Goss and pictorialism, also see Kolton, ed. Private Realms of Light, 38. I discuss his pictorialist practice in greater depth in chapter 5. Edwards, The Camera as Historian, 84–97.

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66 Russell and Price, Arthur S. Goss, City Photographer. 67 Just two examples of exhibits that used Goss’s photographs are: Toronto Above and Below: Public Works in Toronto, 1910–1953, Market Gallery of the cta, 26 October 1996–23 February 1997; and Playing by the Rules: Organized Children’s Leisure in Toronto, 1897–1934, Market Gallery of the cta, 7 March–21 June 1998. See Adele Freeman’s review of the Goss exhibit, “A Fine Focus on Early Toronto from its Sewers to its Schools,” Globe and Mail, 18 March 1980, entertainment section, 15. 68 Russell and Price, Arthur S. Goss, City Photographer; Steve MacKinnon, Official Photographers; Peter MacCallum, Arthur Goss: Selected Photographs. Also, Toronto photographer Michel Lambeth produced a book on Goss’s work, Made in Canada. 69 See Bassnett, “Arthur S. Goss: Photography and the Modernization of Toronto,” and the essay by exhibition curators, Blake Fitzpatrick and John Bentley Mays, “Arthur S. Goss: Works and Days,” in Arthur S. Goss: Works and Days. 70 Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion. On the connections between the photographs and the novel, see: Dennis Duffy, “Furnishing the Pictures.”

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ch apt er t wo Langton, Proceedings of the Ontario Association of Architects, 90. Also see Simmins, Ontario Association of Architects, 67. On the concept of the “social city,” see: Osborne and Rose, “Governing Cities,” 15–17; Joyce, The Rule of Freedom, 171–8. Howland, “Improvements for the City of Toronto,” 110–11. Howland, “The Beautifying of Cities,” 34. Also see Christopher Armstrong’s overview of the origins of Toronto’s plan and its piecemeal development in Making Toronto Modern, 23–5. See Bassnett, “Visuality and the Emergence of City Planning in Early TwentiethCentury Toronto and Montreal,” 21–38. For more on the professionalization of planning in Canada, see Bassnett, “Picturing the Professionalization of Planning in Canada, 1901–1927,” 21–32. On the formation of an international planning movement, see Sutcliffe, Towards the Planned City. Ontario Association of Architects, “Every Man to His Profession,” 262. Visual materials continued to play an important part in city planning, although the nature of the materials changed with the push to develop the planning profession during the late 1910s and into the 1920s. In Canada, a specialized visual discourse developed in order to lay claim to planning, and to distinguish the profession from women’s organizations and other amateur groups. See “Picturing the Professionalization of Planning in Canada, 1901–1927.” trl, Toronto Civic Guild, “The Guild and Its Aims,” Toronto Civic Guild Monthly Bulletin 1, no. 1 (1 May 1911): 1. trl, Toronto Civic Guild, “The Guild and Its Aims” and “Guild History,” Toronto Civic Guild Monthly Bulletin 1, no. 1 (1 May 1911): 1–2; trl, Toronto Guild of Civic Art, “Description of Plan of Improvements for the City of Toronto,” n.d., sr 48, box 1. On the City Beautiful movement, see, for example, Hall, “The City of Monuments.” On its Canadian rendition see: van Nus, “The Fate of City Beautiful Thought in Canada, 1893–1930”; Lemon, “Plans for Early 20th Century Toronto,” 13. An article in the country’s leading architectural journal, Canadian Architect and

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Builder, noted that architect J.P. Hynes’s paper on civic improvements was criticized for advocating a grand, ornamental entrance to the city. The idea was denounced as merely a “Beaux-Arts project” when what was required was city planning rather than merely beautification. See “A Plan for Toronto,” 33. “Toronto Chapter,” Proceedings of the Ontario Association of Architects, 28. On the early campaign for city planning, see “Guild History,” Toronto Civic Guild Monthly Bulletin, vol. 1, no. 1 (May 1911): 2–3. For the text of William Langton’s presentation, along with a reproduction of and explanation of the plan, see Proceedings of the Ontario Association of Architects (1906). On the arrangement between the oaa and the Civic Guild, see trl, “Report of Plan Committee,” Toronto Guild of Civic Art Annual Meeting, 30 March 1906, Toronto Guild of Civic Art, sr 48, box 2. trl, Advisory Board Minutes, 26 January 1906, Civic Guild Minutes 1897–1914, sr 48, unboxed; Burke, “Ontario Association of Architects Annual Convention,” 5; trl, Advisory Board Minutes, 3 March 1905, Civic Guild Minutes 1897–1914, Toronto Guild of Civic Art, sr 48, unboxed. Early sponsors of the Civic Guild included Sir Henry Pellatt and Byron Edmund Walker. Langton noted that he thought there would not be any problem raising even $10,000 for an improvement scheme for the city. See Proceedings of the Ontario Association of Architects, 1905, 108–9. On fundraising, see: trl, “Report of Plan Committee,” Toronto Guild of Civic Art Annual Meeting, 30 March 1906; Advisory Board Minutes, 10 October 1906; Executive Meeting, 19 September 1907; “Report of the Plan Committee,” 21 November 1907, Toronto Guild of Civic Art, sr 48, box 2. On the arrangement with Sir Aston Webb, see: trl, Correspondence between William Langton and Aston Webb, March to December 1907, Toronto Guild of Civic Art, sr 48, box 1, letters 1907–1910; trl, Advisory Board Meeting, 7 April 1908, Civic Guild Minutes 1897–1914, sr 48, unboxed; trl, Executive Committee Meeting, 1 October [1908?], Civic Guild Minutes 1897– 1914, Toronto Guild of Civic Art, sr 48, unboxed. Another $5,000 was raised through subscription to pay for the architect’s services. Webb was known for designing a new building for the Victoria and Albert Museum (formerly the South Kensington Museum) (1899–1909), for his commission for the Queen Victoria Memorial and the redesign of the mall in front of Buckingham Palace (1901–11), as well as for earlier work with partner Ingress Bell. trl, General Meeting, 19 February 1907, Civic Guild Minutes 1897–1914, sr 48, unboxed; “Report of the Plan Committee,” 21 November 1907, Toronto Guild of Civic Art, sr 48, box 2. cta, “Report on a Comprehensive Plan for Systematic Civic Improvements in Toronto,” 1909, fonds 1015, box 146634, file 3. The report is also in the trl, Toronto Guild of Civic Art Papers. trl, “Report of the Plan Committee,” 21 November 1907; “Report of the Plan Committee,” 4 December 1908; Executive Committee Minutes, 17 October 1907, Toronto Guild of Civic Art, sr 48, box 2. Ibid. Also Toronto Civic Guild, “Guild History,” in Toronto Civic Guild Monthly Bulletin, 2. “Toronto the Beautiful: A Suggestion for the Coming Year,” Toronto World, 3 January 1909, 1, 10.

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23 Bennett later worked on a plan for Ottawa and Hull. See Gordon, “A City Beautiful Plan for Canada’s Capital.” 24 chm, “Report of Committee on Plan of Chicago,” delivered by Edward B. Butler, Chairman of the Committee, 19 February 1910, Commercial Club Papers, box 3, folder 2. For a good overview of the process and a more detailed discussion of the circumstances under which the plan was prepared, see Schaffer, “Fabric of City Life,” vii. 25 chm, Charles Norton, Proceedings of the 201st regular meeting of the Commercial Club of Chicago, 25 January 1908, Commercial Club Papers, box 2, folder 4. 26 The Chicago proposals are outlined in more detail in Chappell, “Chicago Issues: The Enduring Power of a Plan,” 7–8. 27 Crary, Techniques of the Observer; and Suspensions of Perception, 2–3, 11–12. 28 Otter, The Victorian Eye, 24–5, 46–7. 29 Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 4. 30 See Otter’s The Victorian Eye for more on the visual capacities of liberal subjectivity. In a comparative study of Montreal and Brussels, Nicolas Kenny connects physical experiences of urban space with social and cultural constructions of the modern city to argue that different kinds of spaces – from the factory to the private home – shaped subjectivity in different ways. See The Feel of the City. 31 Hynes, “Paper and Slides on Civic Improvement.” The practice of comparing Toronto with other cities continued through the 1920s. In 1929, the City Surveyor produced a drawing in which the geographic boundaries of Toronto were superimposed on Chicago. See cta, series 372, subseries 15, item 63. 32 chm, Burnham, “History of the Chicago Plan,” 26 October 1906, Commercial Club Papers, box 26, folder 2. For example, there is a letter from the US embassy in Berlin dated 20 November 1907 that explains that old maps of the city may be difficult to obtain, but that they would oblige with whatever was available. aic, Edward Bennett Papers, box 57, folder 3. In February and October of 1907, correspondence between Burnham and his business associate, Huntington Wilson, includes requests for historical and contemporary plans of European cities. A letter from the American Consul General in Paris, Frank Mason, mentions sending city plans and charts of municipal works in Paris, as well as the much treasured Les Travaux de Paris 1789–1889. aic, Daniel Burnham Papers, box 3, folder 70. 33 The first edition of 1650 deluxe copies of the Plan of Chicago was released 4 July 1909. chm, Minutes of Meetings of General Plan Committee, 7 June 1909, Commercial Club Papers, box 26, folder 8. 34 Peterson, The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 1840–1917, 146–7. 35 Even with advances in bacteriology in the 1870s, belief in miasmatic theory was common through the end of the nineteenth century. See Rosen, A History of Public Health, 263–6. 36 See Peterson’s discussion of the relationship between City Beautiful planning and the progressive reform era in “The Origins of the City Beautiful, 1897–1902,” 98–122. 37 Voigt, “‘Portrait Painters of Buildings,’” 16; Hewitt, Jules Guérin, Master Delineator, 5. 38 Charles Moore recalling McKim’s comments in Moore, Daniel H. Burnham: Architect, Planner of Cities, 165. In 1901, Jules Guérin was one of several artists commissioned by Charles McKim to produce architectural renderings for the Senate Parks Commission Plan for Washington, dc. It was through his work for McKim that Guérin met N OT E S TO PAG E S 55–8

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Burnham and was called on to prepare renderings for the Plan of Chicago. See Hewitt, Jules Guérin, 5. Jules Vallée Guérin (1866–1946) was born in Saint Louis, Missouri, and studied mural painting and watercolour in the Parisian ateliers of Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant and Jean-Paul Laurens. See Swales, “Jules Guerin,” 63; van Buren Magonigle, Architectural Renderings in Wash, 140. Draper, “Paris by the Lake: Sources of Burnham’s Plan of Chicago,” 108–9. Of sixteen perspective renderings prepared for the Plan of Chicago, eleven are signed by American painter and illustrator, Jules Guérin. Two others are attributed to Christian Bagge, and three are unattributed. Whereas Bagge was a local draughtsman who was paid a weekly salary of $54, Guérin was hired expressly to render particular aspects of the plan, and was paid amounts ranging from $75 to $450 for each rendering. chm, Commercial Club Papers, account book 2, 139, 145. The plan also includes three ink drawings by Fernand Janin, a friend of Bennett’s from the École des Beaux-arts, which articulate an elaborate neo-classical design for the civic center. Swift, “The Pictorial Representation of Architecture – The Work of Jules Guerin,” 180. Ibid., 177. chm, Mr. Glessner, 201st regular meeting of the Commercial Club on 25 January 1908, Commercial Club Papers, box 2, folder 4. Voigt, “‘Portrait Painters of Buildings,’” 15–16; Lever and Richardson, The Architect as Artist, 18–19. Reps, “Urban Viewmaking: Artists and Publishers of the American Scene,” 7–11. Stamp, The Great Perspectivists, 9. Ibid., 7,14. Peterson, The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 1840–1917, 126–7, 289. Elliot, The City in Maps, 12–19. See Rebecca Solnit’s discussion of Eadweard Muybridge’s panorama of San Francisco in Solnit, “Skinning the City,” 153–76. Burnham and Bennett, Plan of Chicago, 50. See Joyce on modern maps and the visual rhetoric of modernity in The Rule of Freedom, 35–6, 190–3. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, 67–8. Otter, The Victorian Eye, 47–8. On the effect of the elevated viewpoint on the experience of the modern city, see Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, 92–3. Others have noted the powerful effects of the elevated perspectival view used in Guérin’s renderings. For example, David Dunster has described it as an “Olympian” view that situates the viewer as “a prince of the city.” Dunster, “The City as Autodidact,” 32–8. Burnham and Bennett, Plan of Chicago, 100. On the sanitary reform movement in relation to city planning, see Peterson, “The Impact of Sanitary Reform upon American Urban Planning, 1840–1890.” On circulation, see Didier Gille’s essay “Maceration and Purification.” Gille analyzes the notion of circulation as a crucial link between public health, sanitation, traffic, and finance in the modern city. Also see Sennett, “Moving Bodies.” Burnham and Bennett, Plan of Chicago, 99. Ibid., 100. Ibid.

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Ibid. Ibid., 118. Ibid., 116–17. Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920, 254. Marin, “The City’s Portraits in Its Utopics,” 207. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 94–5. Anderson, “Affective Atmospheres,” 77–81. cta, Civic Guild, “Report on a Comprehensive Plan for Systematic Civic Improvements in Toronto,” 1909, fonds 1015, box 146634, file 3. It is likely that members of the Civic Guild used many of the photographs reproduced in the 1909 “Report on a Comprehensive Plan” to illustrate lectures on civic improvement in Toronto. Gideon, Space, Time and Architecture, 739. Rice, Parisian Views, 43. Ibid., 45–59. Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” 120. See Bachrach, The City in a Garden, 7–9, 93. Anderson, “High Bridge,” in The Crossings of Metro New York, 2009, accessed 3 January 2011, http://www.nycroads.com/crossings/high/. Civic Guild, “Report on a Comprehensive Plan,” 19. See, for example, Howland, “Improvements for the City of Toronto,” 111. Boyer, “In Search of an Order to the American City: 1893–1945,” 127. For her extended discussion of these issues, see Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City. cta, “Report No. 4 from the Board of Control to the Council of the Corporation of the City of Toronto,” City Council Minutes, appendix A (1909), 187. Armstrong, Making Toronto Modern, 55. On the civic improvement committee’s work in 1911 and the Advisory City Planning Commission’s plans of 1929, see Osbaldeston, Unbuilt Toronto, 22–9. Civic Guild, “Report on a Comprehensive Plan,” 2, 17.

ch a pt er th ree 1 cta, Hastings, “Report of the Medical Health Officer,” fonds 200, series 365, box 224856, file 14, 3, 21. “The Ward” is usually defined as the area bounded by College Street to the north, Queen Street to the south, Yonge Street to the east, and University Avenue to the west. It was the poorest neighborhood in the former St John’s Ward. 2 cta, “Report No. 19 of the Local Board of Health,” City Council Minutes, appendix A, 1911, 1819–1822. See newspaper reports: “Terrible Tales of Toronto Slums,” Toronto Daily Star, 5 July 1911, 2; “Slum Conditions Here M.H.O. Inspectors Found Them,” Toronto Evening Telegram, 5 July 1911, 19. 3 My use of the term “slum” follows historic usage. As urban historian H.J. Dyos has shown, slum is a relative term that has been used “for a whole range of social and political purposes.” See Dyos, “The Slums of Victorian London,” 132. For a more recent analysis of the term slum as a complex territorial and demographic construct, see Rao’s review essay, “Slum as Theory.” 4 Chadwick, Report from the Poor Law Commissioners on an Inquiry into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain; Hamlin, Public Health and N O T E S T O PA G E S 63–7 7

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Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick; Rosen, A History of Public Health, 263–6. Rosen outlines the three most common theories of disease in the nineteenth century: miasmatic theory, where infectious disease is caused by the environment; contagion theory, where disease is caused by bacterial infection; and a compromise position, called contingent contagionism, that attempted to reconcile the two theories. cta, William Canniff, “Annual Report of the Local Board of Health,” 1886, fonds 200, series 365, box 225021, file 3. For a general history of early sanitary inspections, see MacDougall, Activists and Advocates, 70–80. cta, Canniff, “Annual Report of the Local Board of Health,” 1885, fonds 200, series 365, microfilm 15, role 1; cta, “Annual Report of the Local Board of Health,” 1886. Also see, for example: cta, Norman Allen, “Report on the Sanitary Condition of the City of Toronto also an account of the operations of the Board of Health and the Vital Statistics for the year 1891,” fonds 200, series 365, box 224963, file 6; cta, Charles Sheard, “Report on the Sanitary Condition of the City of Toronto also an account of the operations of the Board of Health and the Vital Statistics for the year 1893–99,” fonds 200, series 365, box 225021, file 12. Allen, introduction to My Neighbor, vii–viii. cta, “Central Neighbourhood House: The Story of Its Origins and Establishment – Its First Workers - The Stated Objects of cnh,” The Ward Graphic, 1917–18, Central Neighbourhood House, fonds 1005, series 8, box 149153, file 10. Also see Irving, Parsons, and Bellamy, Neighbours, 40–4. Jacob Riis’s photographs (along with work by other amateur photographers) were published with titillating narratives about the poor in his popular books, How the Other Half Lives; The Children of the Poor; and The Battle with the Slum. For a social history of Jacob Riis’s work, see Stange, “From Sensation to Science: Documentary Photography at the Turn of the Century,” in Symbols of Ideal Life. Irving, Parson, and Bellamy, Neighbours, 47. The pamphlet text is reprinted in Rutherford’s edited collection, Saving the Canadian City, 165–70. Bartlett, “The Social Survey and the Charity Organization Movement,” 331. Booth, Life and Labour of the People of London. For a social history of Booth’s study see Bales, “Charles Booth’s survey of Life and Labour of the People of London 1889–1903,” in The Social Survey in Historical Perspective, 1880–1940. In the same collection, also see Bulmer, Bales, and Sklar, “The Social Survey in Historical Perspective,” 21. Booth’s study was used as a model for a number of American surveys, including Jane Addams’s Hull House Maps and Papers (Chicago: T.Y. Crowell and Co., 1895) and W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Philadelphia: Published for the University, 1899). On the Pittsburgh Survey, see Greenwald and Anderson, eds., Pittsburgh Surveyed. Eastman, Work-Accidents and the Law. On Lewis Hines’s and Joseph Stella’s work for the Pittsburgh Survey, see Greenwald, “Visualizing Pittsburgh in the 1900s: Art and Photography in the Service of Social Reform,” in Pittsburgh Surveyed, 124–52. Maren Stange discusses the publicity methods for the Survey in Symbols of Ideal Life, 47–87. On Hastings’s survey see, “To Investigate ‘Slums’ of City,” Toronto Daily News, 18 January 1911, 11. On the adaptation of the survey method by municipal research agencies, see Stivers, Bureau Men, Settlement Women, 76–80. For an indication of his views, see: Hastings, “Report on Slum Conditions,” 24–5;

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“The Significance of Sanitary Housing,” 1284–6; and “The Modern Conception of Public Health Administration and its National Importance.” Hastings, “Report of Slum Conditions,” 24. For an analysis of the body as the object of study and reform in modern governance, see Sekula, “The Body and the Archive.” Hastings, cta, “Report No. 1 of the Board of Control to the Council of the Corporation of the City of Toronto,” City Council Minutes, appendix A, 1911, 47. The Board of Control was the executive branch of municipal government, which controlled the city’s finances. It was comprised of the mayor and four controllers elected by the voters annually. After years of struggle over forming an executive board for better government, the Board of Control was established in 1896 with changes to the provincial government’s Municipal Act. Board members were elected at large following revisions to the Act in 1903. See Petersen, “The Evolution of the Board of Control. Hastings, cta, “Report No. 1 of the Board of Control to the Council of the Corporation of the City of Toronto,” City Council Minutes, appendix A, 1911, 47. In relying on women inspectors, Hastings followed Charles Booth in his social survey of London. In Booth’s survey, the investigators included Booth’s wife Mary, and her cousins, Kate, Teresa, and Beatrice Potter (later Webb). On the role of gender in approaches to social reform, see Stivers, Bureau Men, Settlement Women, 7–11. On gender-based assumptions of the period, see: Guildford and Morton, ed., Separate Spheres; Bradbury, Wife to Widow. Hastings, “Report of Slum Conditions,” 6–7. Approximately twelve per cent of the population in “the Ward” was Jewish or Italian. The remaining majority of inhabitants were either English or Irish, with a small number of Polish, German, Chinese, “Colored,” French, Armenian, Macedonian, Swedish, Greek, and Assyrian families. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 64–6. Hastings, “Report of Slum Conditions,” 5. I discuss a selection of William James’s photographs and other press photographs of the Ward in chapter four. As an example of an illustrated newspaper article on the Ward, see “Will Toronto take Lesson from Cities of Old Land,” The Evening Telegram, 10 November 1909, 7. Lawren Harris, quoted in Harris and Colgrove, Lawren Harris, 26. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 64. Hastings, “Report of Slum Conditions,” 22. Investigations of slum conditions were also conducted during the late-nineteenth century in many other cities. On a Health Department study in Sydney, Australia, for example, see Max Kelly, “Picturesque and Pestilential.” The mortality rate in Toronto between 1905 and 1910 was approximately fourteen people per 1,000. By 1914 it had been reduced to 11.2 per 1,000, a rate which was lower than in any British or American city in 1913, and which translates to a saving of approximately 2,000 lives. See Hastings, “Toronto’s Record is an Enviable One,” Health Bulletin 5, no. 1 (January 1915): 4. For an account of the changes brought about during Dr Hastings’s tenure as Medical Health Officer, and comparative mortality rates for other cities, see Yorke, “Saving Lives on Wholesale Plan,” 20–1, 93–6. Hastings, “Report of Slum Conditions,” 23. In one instance, a reverend of the Presbyterian Church of Canada wrote to the Mayor

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and council to express his appreciation for the important work and effective leadership of the Medical Health Officer. cta, Letter from J.G. Shearer to the Mayor and Board of Control, 6 July 1911, Board of Control Communications, fonds 200, series 783, box 143991. On the role of inspection in liberalism, see Otter, “The Age of Inspectability: Vision, Space, and the Victorian City,” in The Victorian Eye, 99–134. Hastings, “Report of Slum Conditions,” 15. Ibid., 18. Contemporary scholarship suggests the situation was more complex. Richard Dennis explains that property ownership in the Ward changed in the first decade of the twentieth century, and the proportion of Jewish landlords rose from 5 per cent in 1899 to 62.5 per cent in 1909. Whereas non-Jewish landlords nearly all lived outside the area, Jewish landlords were much more likely both to live in the Ward and to take an interest in their community. See Dennis, “Property and Propriety,” 381. Hastings, “Report of Slum Conditions,” 32. Ibid., 26. The photographic discourse through which the slum survey was negotiated in Toronto seems to follow international precedents. In How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis describes the impossibility of taking photographs of certain conditions, such as a room in which a family lived, which was too small to photograph (5). In the slum clearance scheme in the Quarry Hill area of Leeds, England, in the 1890s, for example, what the photographs do not show was also made to function as evidence. See Tagg, “God’s Sanitary Law: Slum Clearance and Photography,” in The Burden of Representation, 117–52. “Slum Conditions Here. M.H.O. Inspectors Found Them,” Toronto Evening Telegram, Wednesday, 5 July 1911, 19. “Terrible Tales of Toronto Slums,” Toronto Daily Star, Wednesday, 5 July 1911, 2. cta, Russell Nesbitt, “Report No. 7 of the Local Board of Health,” City Council Minutes, appendix A, 1918, 727. cta, Letter from Charles Hastings to the Board of Control, 14 July 1911, Board of Control Communications, fonds 200, series 783, box 143991. cta, H.A. Rowland, “Report No. 19 of the Local Board of Health,” City Council Minutes, appendix A, 1911, 1820; Smith, “Health, Un-Ltd.,” 45. cta, H.A. Rowland, “Report No. 19 of the Local Board of Health,” City Council Minutes, appendix A, 1911, 1821–2. cta, Hastings, “Monthly Report of the Medical Health Officer,” March 1913, fonds 2011, series 365, box 225021, file 15, 71–2. Hastings, Health Bulletin (May 1911): 1; Health Bulletin (December 1912): 1. cta, Hastings, “Monthly Report of the Medical Health Officer,” December 1913, fonds 2011, series 365, box 225021, file 15, 2. cta, Correspondence from the Board of Control to Dr. Charles Hastings, 4 July 1912, Board of Control Communications, fonds 200, series 783, box 144001. Smith, “Health, Un-Ltd.,” 43–5. On Hastings’s campaign to improve public health, see Bator, “‘Guarding a City’s Health’”: Dr. Charles Hastings and Toronto’s Department of Public Health,” in “‘Saving Lives on the Wholesale Plan’: Public Health Reform in the City of Toronto, 1900 to 1930,” 112–39.

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50 cta, Mayor Horatio Hocken, “Inaugural Address,” City Council Minutes, appendix C, 1913, 15. Papers by Hastings that addressed the need for adequate finances for public health include: “Are we Receiving Satisfactory Dividends for Money Invested in Public Health Work?”; “The Modern Conception of Public Health Administration and its National Importance”; and “Democracy and Public Health Administration.” 51 On public health and liberal governmentality, see Lupton, The Imperative of Health: Public Health. 52 Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” 121. 53 See: cta, Civic Survey Committee Minutes, April-May, fonds 1002, box 0148699; cta, “Report No. 24 from Board of Control to the Council of the Corporation of the City of Toronto,” City Council Minutes, appendix A, 1913, 1465–66; cta, “The Bureau of Municipal Research: An Opportunity for Practical Citizenship” (Toronto: 1919), fonds 1003, series 973, subseries 8, box 148824, 1–2. 54 cta, Communication dated 26 September 1913, from John Macdonald to the Mayor, Board of Control, and City Council, “Report No. 24 from Board of Control to the Council of the Corporation of the City of Toronto,” City Council Minutes, appendix A, 1913, 1466. Secondary sources on the New York Bureau of Municipal Research include: Dahlberg, The New York Bureau of Municipal Research; Gill, Municipal Research Bureaus; Kahn, Budgeting Democracy; Haber, Efficiency and Uplift; and Stivers, Bureau Men, Settlement Women. 55 The existing structure of city council consisted of the mayor, four controllers, and three aldermen per ward for a total of twenty-one aldermen. In the proposed system, city council would consist of the mayor, seven controllers, and fourteen aldermen. Each controller would be responsible for the operations of one department. The Board of Control argued that the new scheme more satisfactorily separated the administrative and legislative functions of city council, and the increased responsibility would result in more efficient administrators. Although the proposed changes to the structure of city council were not passed, the governing committees of council were amended, transferring authority to the Board of Control. See: cta, “Report No. 1 of Committee on Legislation and Reception,” City Council Minutes, appendix A, 1912, 89; cta, “Report No. 2” and “Report No. 3 of Committee on Legislation and Reception,” City Council Minutes, appendix A, 1912, 159, 229; cta, “Report No. 16 from Board of Control to the Council of the Corporation of the City of Toronto,” City Council Minutes, appendix A, 1912, 1075; cta, “Report No. 34 from Board of Control to the Council of the Corporation of the City of Toronto,” City Council Minutes, appendix A, 1912, 1924; cta, “Report No. 30” and “Report No. 32 from Board of Control to the Council of the Corporation of the City of Toronto,” City Council Minutes, appendix A, 1912, 1795, 1867. 56 Weaver, “Municipal Reform: The Corporate Ideal and New Structures of Government,” in Shaping the Canadian City, 56–7. Less apparent methods of gaining contracts were also used. Weaver cites an example where a lobbyist arranged for an uncooperative alderman to be called to the telephone just as a crucial vote was being held. 57 Williams, “Measuring Government in the Early Twentieth Century,” 644–5. 58 On problems as a feature of liberalism see Joyce, The Rule of Freedom, 71. 59 See cta, “Civic Survey Programme for 1914,” Civic Survey Committee Minutes, April–May, fonds 1002, box 148699, file 1. N OT E S TO PAG E S 88–9

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60 cta, New York Bureau of Municipal Research, “Report on a Survey of City Departments,” appendix E, “Report on Physical Survey, with illustrations,” part 2, fonds 1002, box 148699, file 3, 1. 61 Dahlberg, The New York Bureau of Municipal Research, 16. 62 Allen and Cleveland were both influenced by Simon Patten, the economist and professor who had been their doctoral supervisor at the University of Pennsylvania. Following Patten, they viewed social and economic planning by the state as the best means to achieve harmony between the working class and the elite, as well as to foster efficient production and greater abundance, and to bring about social improvements for all citizens. Another of Patten’s students was Rexford Tugwell, the economist turned administrator who advanced the Farm Security Administration photography project under Roosevelt’s New Deal government. On Patten, see: Fox, The Discovery of Abundance; Tugwell, “Notes on the Life and Work of Simon Nelson Patten.” In Henry Bruere’s 1913 publication, New City Government, he outlined his philosophy, explaining that, “Only through efficient government could progressive social welfare be achieved, and that so long as government remained inefficient, volunteer and detached effort to remove social handicaps would continue a hopeless task.” Bruere, New City Government, 100. Cited in Dahlberg, The New York Bureau of Municipal Research, 32. 63 Dahlberg, The New York Bureau of Municipal Research, 5–17, 39–43. 64 Ibid., 77–80. 65 Stivers, Bureau Men, Settlement Women, 10–11, 78–80. 66 cta, John Firstbrook, Executive Committee Minutes, 27 October 1913, Civic Survey Committee Minutes, fonds 1002, box 148699, file 1. 67 Kahn, Budgeting Democracy, 42–4. 68 cta, Civic Survey Committee Minutes, 28 May 1913, fonds 1002, box 148699, file 1. 69 Dahlberg, The New York Bureau of Municipal Research, 55. 70 cta, New York Bureau of Municipal Research, “Report on a Survey of the City Treasury, Assessment, Works, Fire, and Property Departments, with Appendices,” “Report on a Survey of the Department of Assessment,” part 1, fonds 1002, box 148699, file 2, 4. 71 Ibid., 7. A land value map shows streets and lots of land, and the value per square foot of the lots can be calculated from the information. 72 A later study of the administration of the Department of Public Health conducted by the newly formed Toronto Bureau of Municipal Research in 1915 did incorporate photographs of its object of study. The report was published as a series of articles in The Public Health Journal (later renamed Canadian Public Health Journal) between July and September of 1915. 73 cta, New York Bureau of Municipal Research, “Report on a Survey of City Departments,” appendix E, “Report on Physical Survey, with illustrations,” part 2, fonds 1002, box 148699, file 3, 1. 74 Ibid., 2. 75 The Health Department used the family as a unit of measure because it found that a family often presented a range of related problems, and it was necessary to address many issues at once in order to affect change. cta, “Report of the Medical Officer of Health for the Month of December, 1913,” fonds 2011, series 365, box 225021, file 15, 4. 76 cta, New York Bureau of Municipal Research, “Report on a Survey of City Departments,” N OT E S TO PAG E S 90–6

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6–7; cta, “Report No. 1 of the Local Board of Health,” City Council Minutes, appendix A, 1913, 121. The Health Department’s spring inspection of 1913 found that there were over 600 lodging houses in the city, and most were six or seven room houses of the “ruinous class.” More than 95 per cent of the occupants were foreigners. See also cta, “Report of the Medical Officer of Health for the Month of March, 1913,” fonds 2011, series 365, box 225021, file 15, 70–1. As examples of illustrated guides, see: Toronto, Canada’s Queen City (Toronto: Industrial Publishing Co., 1912); cta, “The Hand book of Toronto, Dominion Coach Line,” 1911, fonds 2, series 1099, item 609, box 390137, folio 11. cta, Bureau of Municipal Research, “What is ‘the Ward’ Going to do with Toronto?” 1918, fonds 1003, series 973, subseries 8, box 148824, file 4. cta, “Fifth Annual Report of the Toronto Bureau of Municipal Research,” 1919, fonds 1003, series 973, subseries 9, box 148827, 6; cta, “The Bureau of Municipal Research: An Opportunity for Practical Citizenship” (Toronto: 1919), fonds 1003, series 973, subseries 8, box 148824, 11. cta, “Fifth Annual Report of the Toronto Bureau of Municipal Research,” 1919, 8, 13; cta, “Sixth Annual Report of the Toronto Bureau of Municipal Research,” 1920, fonds 1003, series 973, subseries 9, box 148827, 7. “Stop Speculation in Land to Remove Toronto’s Slums,” The Globe, Saturday, 4 January 1919, 8. “Tax Buildings Lower, Improve Slum Areas,” Toronto Daily Star, 3 January 1919, 8. cta, “The Toronto Bureau of Municipal Research, 1914–1922. Eight Years of Service to the Community,” 1922, fonds 1003, series 973, subseries 8, box 148824, 12. “Reviews Work of the Bureau,” The Globe, 29 May 1919, 9.

ch apt er f our 1 Avery, Reluctant Host, 10–11, 60. 2 “The Problem of the Immigrant,” The Presbyterian, 324. This publication was edited by Presbyterian minister and journalist, Reverend J.A. Macdonald, who later became editor-in-chief of the Globe. The article cited was one in a series published in 1911 that considered the church’s role in solving urban problems. Also see Irving, Parsons, and Bellamy, Neighbours, 11, 70–1. 3 Careless, Toronto to 1918, 202. The Jewish population was over 18,000 and the Italian population was over 4,000. Social histories have shown that Jewish and Italian immigrants settled in this area because of its proximity to employment and cheap accommodation. See: Zucchi, The Italian Immigrants of the St. John’s Ward, 1875–1915; Speisman, “St. John’s Shtetl.” On the impact of economics and land speculation in the creation of the slum see Dennis, “Private Landlords and Redevelopment.” 4 Speisman, The Jews of Toronto, 83. Also see Tulchinsky, Canada’s Jews, 93–125. 5 See, for example: “Crowded Housing, its Evil Effects: The conditions in Toronto a menace to the public and a grave source of danger,” Daily Mail and Empire, 18 September 1897; “The Lot of the Census Taker in the Ward is anything but an easy one,” Toronto Star, 1 June 1911, 1, 3. 6 Gandal, The Virtues of the Vicious, 6–15. 7 Dyos, “The Slums of Victorian London,” 135.

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8 For example, see Stelter and Artibise, eds, The Canadian City. On immigrant history, see Iacovetta, The Writing of English Canadian Immigrant History. 9 Bell, “Toronto’s Melting Pot,” 240. 10 Ibid., 240. Also see Harney and Troper, Immigrants, 24–5. 11 Bell, “Toronto’s Melting Pot,” 234, 242. 12 Ibid., 242. 13 Koven has suggested that passion and desire were important motivating factors in Victorian philanthropy. In analyzing the social and sexual implications of nineteenth-century studies of poverty, Koven has emphasized the erotics of cross-class encounters. For example, drawing attention to the homoerotic descriptions in James Greenwood’s 1866 essay, “A Night in a Workhouse,” he insists that reformers were motivated by their own sexual desires as well as by altruism. Koven, Slumming, 138. 14 Bell, “Toronto’s Melting Pot,” 238. 15 Ibid., 242. 16 Ibid., 234. 17 Ibid., 236, 242. 18 For an analysis of the way 1880s Victorian London was portrayed to a middle-class, male audience as a geographical landscape available for their consumption, see Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 15–39. 19 For an excellent discussion of Progressive-era melting pot discourse, see Wilson, Melting-Pot Modernism, 2–8, 14–27. As Wilson notes, in practice, it was difficult to maintain a distinction between the biological process of miscegenation and the social process, which was often termed “assimilation” (19). 20 On developments in printing technology, see Carlebach, “Dry Plates and Halftones,” 161–5. On the introduction of photographs in the illustrated press, see Craig, “Fact, Public Opinion, and Persuasion,” 45–9. 21 Sutherland, “The Transitional Canadian,” 97–8. The magazine was published under a variety of names from 1893 to 1939. 22 Duckworth, “The New Britains and the Old,” Canadian Magazine 41, no. 3 (July 1913): 245–52; Skelton, “Canadian Women and the Suffrage,” Canadian Magazine 41, no. 2 (June 1913): 162–5; Cowper, “Are we Developing a Sixth Sense? An Article Dealing with the Practical and Scientific Sides of Mental Telepathy,” Canadian Magazine 41, no. 2 (June 1913): 166–70; Fraser, “How Ladies Should Behave,” Canadian Magazine 41, no. 4 (August 1913): 383–4. 23 Another article on the Ward from 1909 was illustrated with drawings by T.G. Greene, a graphic designer and member of the Ontario Society of Artists. See Bridle, “The Drama of the ‘Ward,’” 3–8. 24 Pringle, “Miss Marion Long, arca, osa. A Gifted Canadian Artist.” For more on Marion Long, see the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative at http://cwahi. concordia.ca. 25 Fetherling, The Rise of the Canadian Newspaper, 66. 26 Rutherford, A Victorian Authority, 141. 27 Becker, “Photojournalism and the Tabloid Press,” 296. 28 Barnhurst and Nerone, The Form of News, 117. 29 Rutherford, A Victorian Authority, 136.

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Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” 174–86. Woodsworth, My Neighbor, 11. The going rate was two dollars a print. Hume, William James’ Toronto Views, 7. Hume, William James’ Toronto Views, 5–11; Price, William James, Pioneer Press Photographer. “In the Heart of a Great City – How the Citizens of ‘The Ward’ Live, Move and Have their Being,” Toronto World, 27 November 1910, 2; “Picturesque if Not Artistic – Glimpses of ‘The Ward,’” Toronto World, 4 December 1910, 7. Gerald Tulchinsky has identified the restaurant as the Warshawer Kosher Restaurant. See Tulchinsky, Canada’s Jews, [180b]. The small building on the left side of the image is the same poulterer’s establishment that appears in other photographs by press photographer William James, also published in the paper (one of which is discussed in the following paragraph). Wynne, The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine, 2–3. H.L. Mansel, “Sensation Novels,” Quarterly Review 113 (April 1863): 483–6; Margaret Oliphant, “Sensational Novels,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 91 (May 1862): 564–80, discussed in Radford, Victorian Sensation Fiction, 11–14. Geraldine Jewsbury, unsigned review of “The Moonstone,” Athenaeum, 25 July 1868, 106, quoted in Wynne, The Sensation Novel, 4. Hagedorn, “Technology and Economic Exploitation.,” Also see: Feltes, Modes of Production of Victorian Novels; Hayward, Consuming Pleasures. Sotiron, From Politics to Profit, 63–4. “Some Little Citizens of Toronto’s Congested Area,” Toronto World, illustrated section, Sunday, 9 March 1913, 1. Mayne, The Imagined Slum, 157. Sturken, Tourists of History, 14–15. Felski, Doing Time, 68. On the Globe’s allegiance with the Liberal party, see Sotiron, From Politics to Profit, 110–12. Rutherford, A Victorian Authority, 101. “New Citizens of Canada – Types of Immigrants Arriving in 1911,” Globe, 22 September 1911, magazine section, 3. Ryan, Picturing Empire, 214. On anthropological types see Edwards, ed., Anthropology and Photography, 1860–1920. On visuality and empire in Canada, see for example: Clayton, Islands of Truth; Nelles, The Art of Nation Building: Pageantry and Spectacle at Quebec’s Tercentenary. Rutherford, A Victorian Authority, 74. On Canada’s place within the British Empire, see Buckner, ed., Canada and the British Empire. lac, “Memorandum on Photographic Surveys,” W.D. Scott to J.D. Page, 29 June 1910, rg 76, vol. 457, file 696173-2, quoted in Greenhill and Birrell, Canadian Photography, 1839–1920, 145. On Woodruff and Topley, see Brian Osborne’s analysis of the photographs in immigrant dossiers developed by the Canadian National Railway as a means of tracking the migration of continental Europeans to Canada in the period between 1925 and 1930. He has argued that the photographs were produced as tools of governance, but that

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65 66 67

68 69 70 71

they might also be understood as expressions of immigrant cultural identity. Osborne, “Constructing the State, Managing the Corporation, Transforming the Individual: Photography, Immigration and the Canadian National Railways, 1925–30,” 164–89. “Types of Canada’s New Citizens,” Globe, 2 July 1910, magazine section, 1; M.O. Hammond, “Canada’s Newcomers,” Globe, 2 July 1910, magazine section, 2. Hammond began supervising the production of the Globe’s Saturday magazine section in 1906 and was also literary editor. Like Goss, he was a member of both the Toronto Camera Club and the Arts and Letters Club. See Sutnik, Photographs by Charles Macnamara and M.O. Hammond. M.O. Hammond, “Canada’s Newcomers,” Globe, 2 July 1910, magazine section, 2. Ibid. Emily P. Weaver, “The Italians in Toronto,” Globe, 16 July 1910, magazine section, 3. Ibid. Kelly and Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic: A History of Canadian Immigration Policy, 132–3. Also see: Zucchi, Italians in Toronto; Iacovetta, Such Hardworking People; Stanger-Ross, Staying Italian. Kelly and Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic, 123, 131; Avery, Reluctant Host, 60–2. See, for example, “Slum Conditions Here. mho Inspectors Found them,” Toronto Evening Telegram, 5 July 1911, 19. On the settlement house movement in Toronto, see: James, “Gender, Class and Ethnicity in the Organization of Neighbourhood and Nation: The Role of Toronto’s Settlement Houses in the Formation of the Canadian State, 1902–1914”; Irving, Parsons, and Bellamy, Neighbours. Bartlett, “The Social Survey and the Charity Organization Movement,” 333. cta, “Central Neighbourhood House. The Story of Its Origin and Establishment – Its First Workers – The Stated Objects of Central Neighbourhood House,” The Ward Graphic, 1917–18, fonds 1005, series 8, publications 1912–1977, box 149153, file 9. J.J. Kelso, the chairman of the organization committee, described the purpose of the house as, “to bring enjoyment and benefit to hundreds of young people, nearly all of them ‘of foreign extraction.’” See: cta, cnh Yearbook 1912, fonds 1005, series 8, publications 1912–1977, box 149153, file 1. On Kelso, see Chen, Tending the Gardens of Citizenship. James, “Gender, Class and Ethnicity in the Organization of Neighbourhood and Nation,” 122–3. Ibid., 234–6, 284–5, 294–301. Ibid., 284–7. Other sources of income were fees from clients, but as James notes, this did not amount to much. For example, in 1912, cnh collected $51.35 in fees, which went toward operating costs of $2,178.20, and it collected $65 out of $5,516.84 in 1913 (285). There were six settlement houses in Toronto by 1913, which was half of the total in Canada. For background on Toronto’s settlement houses, see 3–12. The House by the Side of the Road was the name of the newsletter. cta, fonds 1005, series 8, box 149153, file 6. See June and August 1913 for examples noted. cta, fonds 1005, series 8, box 149153, file 6. cta, The House by the Side of the Road, June 1913, fonds 1005, series 8, box 149153, file 6, 2. Chen, Tending the Gardens of Citizenship, 3–18.

N OT E S TO PAG E S 115–20

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72 Valverde, “The Work of Allegories,” in The Age of Light, Soap, and Water, 34–43. On the social purity movement, also see Loo and Strange, Making Good. On the complex ways children have been represented in art and visual culture, see Lerner, ed., Depicting Canada’s Children. 73 Adams, Theodore, and McKeever, “Pictures of Health,” 259–70. 74 cta, The House by the Side of the Road, June 1913, fonds 1005, series 8, box 149153, file 6, 3. 75 On cnh programs, see Cumbo, “Blazing the Trail and Setting the Pace: Central Neighbourhood House and its Outreach to Italian Immigrants in Toronto: 1911–1929,” 74. 76 cta, The Central Neighbourhood House leaflet, fonds 1005, series 8, box 149153, file 5. 77 Batchen, “Dreams of Ordinary Life: Cartes-de-visite and the Bourgeois Imagination,” 87. 78 cta, The City of Toronto Directory, 1908, 264730-54, reel 54, 748. 79 Hiebert, “Jewish Immigrants and the Garment Industry of Toronto, 1901–1931: A Study of Ethnic and Class Relations,” 265. 80 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 10; Pinney, “Photography as Prophecy,” 138–43. 81 Pinney, “Photography as Prophecy,” 146. 82 cta, The City of Toronto Directory, 1905, 264730-51, reel 5, 511. 83 Peacock, 20th-Century Fashion, 12–32; Ewing, History of Twentieth Century Fashion, 8–12; Rolley and Ash, Fashion in Photographs 1900–1920, 16–48. 84 Soussloff, The Subject in Art, 58. 85 Avery, Reluctant Host, 66; Frager, Sweatshop Strife, 6–7, 11–13. 86 The Canadian Jewish Times was particularly known for the latter. See “Introductory” editorial, Canadian Jewish Times (Montreal), 10 December 1897, 8, quoted in Levendel, A Century of the Canadian Jewish Press, 1880–1980s, 1–2. Also see “Jewish Longevity,” Canadian Jewish Times, 18 December 1908, 22. This article sought to refute common stereotypes by explaining that Jews live longer on average than Christians, because they are less frequently infected with epidemic diseases, they eat better and drink less, and take better care of themselves. It accounts for these differences by saying that hygienic tendencies in Jews are passed down through religious customs. 87 The newspaper is known by several variations of the title Der Yidisher Zshurnal, but in English it was known as The Hebrew Journal or The Daily Hebrew Journal, even though it was written in Yiddish, not Hebrew. 88 Kayfetz, “Recollections and Experiences with the Toronto Jewish Press,” 228–9; Speisman, The Jews of Toronto, 240. 89 Levendel, A Century of the Canadian Jewish Press, xx. 90 Kellman, “Entertaining New Americans.” Also see: Kellman, “The Newspaper Novel in the Jewish Daily Forward (1900–1940),” 1, 9; Manor, Forward, 14. 91 On the paper’s finances, see Kayfetz, “Recollections and Experiences,” 228. 92 See, for example, lac, “The Newly Appointed Board of Control,” The Hebrew Journal, 3 January 1915, 8, and Tuesday, 2 January 1917, 1. Many thanks to Stephen Levitt for Yiddish translations. 93 Speisman, The Jews of Toronto, 240. Donald Avery has noted the socialist orientation of the Jewish Daily Forward and Canadian Jewish newspapers, including the Hebrew Journal. See Avery, Reluctant Host, 262n31. Also see Frager, Sweatshop Strife, 37–8. N OT E S TO PAG E S 120–5

184

94 95 96 97

lac, The Hebrew Journal, 21 November 1915, 5. Soussloff, “The Subject at Risk,” 76, 81. Weber, Economy and Society, 389. Tulchinsky, Canada’s Jews, 126–45.

cha pter f ive 1 This photograph was exhibited in July 1906 at the Hove Camera Club in England where it received favourable notice. See Kolton, ed., Private Realms of Light. It also won a bronze medal for portraiture at a Toronto Camera Club exhibition. cta, Toronto Camera Club pamphlet, Goss information file. 2 Chen, Tending the Gardens of Citizenship, 8–10. 3 Sekula, “The Body and the Archive”; Tagg, The Burden of Representation, 34–59. 4 Smith, American Archives and Photography on the Color Line. 5 Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 517. 6 Kozloff, The Theatre of the Face, 61–2. 7 Hartmann, “The Unconventional in Portrait Photography,” reprinted in Sadakichi Hartmann, Critical Modernist, 179. 8 Smith, American Archives, 60–1. 9 Goss’s application for membership was approved 14 April 1904. lac, Toronto Camera Club records, reel 2, 293. Also see Kolton, Private Realms of Light, 38. 10 Carter, “Pictorial Work in Canada,” 79. 11 Greenhill and Birrell, Canadian Photography, 128. Carter became an Associate member of the Photo-Secession in 1904. 12 Kolton, Private Realms of Light, 38. 13 Goss, “Pictorial Photography in Canada,” in Photograms of the Year 1920, 16. 14 McBurney, The Great Adventure, 1–4, 70. Until 1985, it was exclusively a men’s club, with women only occasionally invited to dinners and functions. 15 Casson, “Foreword,” in Russell and Price, Arthur S. Goss, City Photographer, n.p. [1]. 16 On James Mavor, his commitment to British idealism, and his work at the University of Toronto, see Burke, Seeking the Highest Good. 17 Banting, in addition to his professional achievements, was a landscape painter and club member from 1925 to 1941. 18 Hartmann, Composition in Portraiture, 47. 19 Ibid., 21. 20 Root, The Camera and the Pencil, 413–14, quoted in Sekula, “Photography Between Labour and Capital,” 220. 21 Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 29. 22 Batchen, “Dreams of Ordinary Life,” 87–8. Looking at a different cultural context, Christopher Pinney has argued that in colonial India, there was a great deal of anxiety about photography from the elite classes because of its “aesthetics of the same.” The equalizing quality of photography, in which the rich and the poor could be photographed in the same studio space, and where portraits of people with differing social status could be placed on the same page of a photographic album, threatened social hierarchies. Pinney, “Photography as Prophecy,” 107, 112–14. Photography is of course only one of the ways subjects are inscribed in social hierarchies. In his study of castes in colonial India, Nicholas Dirks has shown how caste became a system for categorizing N OT E S TO PAG E S 125–34

185

23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43

diverse forms of social organization under British colonial rule. See Dirks, Castes of Mind. Soussloff, The Subject in Art, 96–9. Fritz Loescher, Die Bildnis-Photographie: Ein Wegweiser für Fachmänner und Liebhaber [Portrait Photography: A Guide for Experts and Connoisseurs] (Berlin: Gustav Schmidt, 1910), x, quoted in Soussloff, The Subject in Art, 102. Wexler, “Seeing Sentiment,” 65. Smith, American Archives, 120. Ibid., 129–30. Williams, Framing the West, 125–37. On white women as mothers of empire, also see Perry, On the Edge of Empire. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 149. Ibid., 147–8. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Reproducibility,” 108. Ibid., 101–33. Wexler, “Seeing Sentiment,” 60. Also see Chen, Tending the Gardens of Citizenship, 14–17. On how photography can set subjects in relation to each other in new ways to produce forms of community, see Kaplan, American Exposures, xxi–xxv. Chen, Tending the Gardens of Citizenship, 8–17. Goldring, Report on Open Air Schools, Part A: Development of Movement for Fresh Air Schools, 1. Also see W.A. Craick, “Open Air Classes for Tubercular Children: Distinctive Feature of Orde Street School,” Toronto Star Weekly, 9 December 1916, 14. Hine, “Social Photography,” 112. Kozloff, The Theatre of the Face, 53–4. Trachtenberg, “Camera Work / Social Work,” in Reading American Photographs, 197. On the playground movement and the design of parks, see Cranz, The Politics of Park Design, 61–99. Sekula, “Photography Between Labour and Capital,” 218. Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air, 14. Azoulay, The Civil Imagination, 11–27.

conc lu sion 1 See, for example, Lemon, Toronto Since 1918. 2 Hocken, “The New Spirit in Municipal Government,” 197. 3 cta, C.A. Risk, “Report No. 2 of the Local Board of Health,” City Council Minutes, appendix A, 1922, 225–31.

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Index

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations.

aesthetic, 44–6, 53, 58, 71, 83, 166n54; approaches and conventions, 10–11, 46, 66; changes and reforms, 51, 62–3, 66, 145, 165n36; experience, 48, 51, 66; features and qualities, 16, 36–7, 46, 51–2, 62, 66, 168n36; strategies, 4, 25, 32, 48, 51 affect, 66, 81, 84, 88, 138–40, 150; Ahmed, Sara, 14, 66, 88; ambition, 16–17, 48, 133; anxiety, 4, 10, 16–17, 75–8, 100–1, 104, 118, 185n22; defined, 14; desire, 4, 10, 14, 16–17, 33, 45, 53–8, 61–71, 125, 146, 181n13; fascination, 16-7, 78, 101–4, 111; fear, 4, 16–17, 77–84, 118. See also sensation; sentiment Alexandra Studios, 22 anti-Semitism, 124–6 architectural rendering, 58–9 Arts and Letters Club, 133–4 Banting, Frederick, 134–5, 135, 138, 185n17 Barthes, Roland, 14, 123 Batchen, Geoffrey, 14, 122, 134 Baudelaire, Charles, 4, 131 Bell, Margaret, 102–6 Benjamin, Walter, 3–4, 131, 140–1 Bennett, Edward, 55, 172n23 bird’s-eye view, 59–60, 65 Bloor Viaduct, 25, 34, 37, 40, 49, 168n36; Castle Frank, 38, 40, 41, 45–6; Don Valley, 33–6, 41, 168n47; survey, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 44, 47 Booth, Charles, 80, 176n21. See also reformers

Bruce, Josiah, 26 Bureau of Municipal Research, 79, 89–99, 179n62, 179n72; “Report on a Survey of the City Treasury, Assessment, Works, Fire, and Property Departments with Appendices, Physical Survey,” 90, 92, 93, 95, 96; “What is ‘the Ward’ Going to do with Toronto?” 82, 98 Burke, Edmund, 36, 53, 70, 168n40 Burnham, Daniel, 55, 57–65, 65, 172n32 Canadian Magazine, 102–6, 103, 106 Canniff, William, 77 capitalism, 4, 41, 111, 140–1, 153; consumers, 113 Carter, Sidney, 132, 185n11 cartography, 4, 9, 27–30 Casson, A.J., 133 Central Neighbourhood House, 101, 119–22, 120, 122, 127. See also settlement house Chicago, 50–65, 68–70; Bennett, Edward, 55, 172n23; Burnham, Daniel, 55, 57–65, 65, 172n32; Commercial Club of Chicago, 55, 59; Jackson Park, 60, 65, 68–9; Guérin, Jules, 59–65, 172n38, 173n40; Olmstead, Frederick Law, 68; Plan of Chicago, 1909, 55–65; World’s Columbian Exposition, 53, 68 citizen, 77, 91–2, 99; citizenship, 100–27, 140, 148 city engineer, 26, report of, 27 city photographer. See Goss, Arthur Scott city planning, 10, 50–71, 86, 152, 170n8, 170n12; Burke, Edmund, 36, 53, 70, 168n40; comprehensive city planning, 52–3, 56, 68-71; City Beautiful movement, 53–8, 170n11; Civic

Survey Committee, 76, 78, 88–9; garden cities movement 85–7; Langton, William, 50, 53–4; Lyle, John, 70, 168n36, 168n40; Unwin, Raymond, 86; Webb, Aston, 54, 171n17 Civic Guild. See Toronto Guild of Civic Art Crary, Jonathan, 56 Curtis, Bruce, 5 de Salignac, Eugene, 31–2, 32 evidence, photographs as, 10, 12, 16–17, 48–9, 142, 152–3; in development decisions, 25, 35, 70, 152; of the impact of reform measures, 144, 149; of the need for reform, 90–9; of the need for settlement houses, 120–2; of slum conditions, 75– 6, 79–85 family, 94, 97; photography of, 14, 130, 134, 136– 40, 146–7 fire insurance plans, 29–30. See also Goad, Charles E. Foote, Lewis Benjamin, 31 Foucault, Michel, 7–9, 12, 164n22. See also power, and knowledge Gariépy, Edgar, 30, 31 Goad, Charles E., 29, 167n20 Goss, Arthur Scott, 9–10, 16, 31–2, 166n3; Architect’s photographs, 153; biography, 25; Bloor Viaduct survey, 34–42, 36, 38, 39, 40, 44, 45–49, 47; Bureau of Municipal Research physical survey, 92–5, 92, 93, 95; exhibitions of work, 49; Health Department photographs, 139, 142, 143, 145, 146, 148, 154; marginalized subjects, 138–47; official city photographer, 25–7; Parks Department, 144, 147; photographic equipment, 45; pictorialism, 43–4; 43, 129, 130; portraiture, 128–50, 135, 136, 137; Works Department photographs, 33 governmentality, 5, 63, 87, 90, 141, 144, 147, 151–3, 164n22; defined, 5–7 Group of Seven. See Casson, A.J.; Harris, Lawren; Lismer, Arthur Guérin, Jules, 59–65, 60, 61, 64, 172n38, 173n40 Hammond, M.O., 115, 183n54 Harris, Lawren, 83, 83 Harris, Roland Caldwell, 26, 32–5, 37, 42, 151 Hastings, Charles, 75–88, 93–6, 148–9, 148, 151; “Report of Slum Conditions,” 75–6, 76, 81–8, INDEX

82, 85, 86, 94; and social survey method, 78–80; and public health, 77–80, 84–8, 151–2, 178n50. See also public health Hine, Lewis, 11, 144–5 Hocken, Mayor Horatio, 42, 88, 152 identity, 14, 16, 101, 130, 134; Jewish, 123–7 immigrants, 5–7, 75, 94, 131, 134; acculturation of, 16, 102, 117–18, 121–7, 141; British, 107–9, 109; eastern and central European, 10, 16, 75, 100–2; Italian, 100, 116–17, 117, 120; Jewish, 100–1, 109, 111, 117, 120, 122–7, 124; liberal reform of, 9, 87, 101; and nation-building, 114–16, 115, 117, 199; photography of, 85, 101–2, 108, 119, 122, 138, 145–6; and the Ward, 81, 85, 87, 102–5, 110, 111– 13, 112, 121–7 immigration, 10, 100–2, 109, 113–18 Italian. See immigrants, Italian James, William, 21, 22, 23, 24, 68, 69, 83, 107–11, 109, 110 Jewish, 100, 104, 108–9, 120, 122–7. See also antiSemitism; immigrants, Jewish Joyce, Patrick, 42 Kelso, J.J., 78, 119, 183n64 knowledge, 8–10, 91, 118, 148, 151; the city as an object of, 4, 10, 27, 30, 37, 43, 99; and city planning, 52–3, 70–1; cultural knowledge, 141; geographical knowledge, 27, 169n50; and liberalism, 77, 81, 88, 94, 99, 153; photographs as sources of, 33, 35, 77, 83, 88, 94, 153; self-knowledge, 143; social subjects as objects of, 7–8, 81, 88. See also power, and knowledge Kodak, 21 Langton, William, 50, 53–4 Laurier, Wilfrid, 100 liberalism, 9, 42, 65, 77, 137, 143, 151; defined, 4– 5; ideals and values of, 27, 33, 43, 46, 51, 145, 152–3; and McKay, Ian, 5, 41; and property, 37– 41; and reform movement, 6–7, 80; and selfregulation, 128–31. See also social subject; subjectivity, liberal liberal order framework. See liberalism Liberal Party, 100, 113, 116 Lismer, Arthur, 134 London, England, 3, 78–9, 84, 101, 103–4, 181n18 Long, Marion, 103, 105–6, 106 Lyle, John, 70, 168n36, 168n40

206

McKay, Ian, 5, 41. See also liberalism McLaughlin, Samuel, 31 maps. See cartography Marville, Charles, 31 Mavor, James, 134–5, 135, 138 Mayhew, Henry, 104 Medical Health Officer. See Canniff, William; Hastings, Charles Micklethwaite, Frank, 26 modernity, 3–4, 37, 113, 125, 140, 149–51; the city as the site of, 128–31; conditions of, 14–17, 56, 136; culture of, 140, 149; experience of, 4, 11, 107, 150, 155; histories and theories of, 4, 9, 11; and photography, 25, 30, 43, 48–9, 66, 150 Montreal, 9, 30–1 motherhood, 129, 138–41 Nadar, 3, 163n2 nation, 5, 102, 104, 108, 113–14, 140–1; nationality, 81, 94, 114–15; nation-building, 9, 12, 30–1, 105, 114, 120; nationhood, 139–40 newspapers, 25, 41, 83, 99, 101, 111; Canadian Eagle (Kanader Adler), 124; Canadian Jewish Times, 124; Globe, 97, 101, 113–18, 115, 117, 127; Hebrew Journal (Yidisher Zshurnal), 124–7, 126; Jewish Daily Forward (Forverts), 124–5; Jewish Daily News (Jüdisches Tageblat), 125; Toronto Daily News 118; Toronto Evening Telegram, 118; Toronto Star, 86, 97, 118, 125; Toronto World, 101, 106–13, 110, 112, 127 New York, 3, 31, 34, 44, 68, 70; Bureau of Municipal Research, 89–96; newspapers, 124–5; reform initiatives, 78, 88. See also de Salignac, Eugene; Photo-Secession; Riis, Jacob Notman, William, 30–1 Ondaatje, Michael, 49 Ontario Association of Architects, 50, 52–4 Otter, Chris, 56, 61 Paris, 3, 31, 50, 53, 65–6, 70; Haussmanization, 53, 66; photography of, 3, 31 perception, 3, 55–8, 68, 152, 155 photographers, 10, 13, 24, 30, 45, 131–2, 149; amateur, 26, 45–6, 138; Bruce, Josiah, 26; Carter, Sidney, 132, 185n11; de Salignac, Eugene, 31–2, 32; Foote, Lewis Benjamin, 31; Gariépy, Edgar, 30, 31; Hine, Lewis, 11, 144–5; James, William, 21, 22, 23, 24, 68, 69, 83, 107–11, 109, 110, 155; McLaughlin, Samuel, 31; Marville, Charles, 31; INDEX

Micklethwaite, Frank, 26; Nadar, 3; Notman, William, 30–1; pictorialist, 133–5, 139; Riis, Jacob, 11, 78, 101, 177n38; Rust, Arthur, 26; Woodruff, John, 114. See also Goss, Arthur Scott photography, 10–11, 25; artistic, 43–9, 131–8, 149– 50; as discursive formation, 15; histories and theories of, 5, 9–15; instrumental, 12–13 (defined), 25–7, 46–9, 76–7, 84–5, 149–52; and knowledge, 33, 35–7, 77, 94; and modernity, 3– 4, 43, 128, 131, 151; and reform, 6–9, 16–17, 87– 8, 94. See also Goss, Arthur Scott; photographers photography and blueprinting section, 25, 48 Photo-Secession, 11, 44, 131, 133. See also Steichen, Edward; Stieglitz, Alfred pictorialism, 11, 44, 131–43, 148–50; Carter, Sidney, 132, 185n11; Hartmann, Sadakichi, 131, 132, 134; poetic feeling, 10, 131–2. See also Photo-Secession; Steichen, Edward; Stieglitz, Alfred picturesque, 21, 30, 41, 46–8, 86, 108, 110 Pinney, Christopher, 123, 185n22 Pittsburgh survey. See survey Plan of Chicago, 1909, 55–65, 60, 61, 64, 65. See also Chicago portraiture, 101, 122–5, 126, 130–8, 132; Goss, Arthur, 135, 136, 137, 143–5, 148; and wedding, 122–4, 124, 138 power, 13, 42, 48, 89, 94, 141, 164n22; defined, 8– 9; and knowledge, 7–8, 12, 14, 43; and visuality, 60, 64 Protestant. See religion public health, 77–80, 85–8, 90, 94, 141, 151–2, 179n72. See also Hastings, Charles public works, 9, 26, 31–2, 37 reform: aesthetic, 62–3; and citizenship, 102; initiatives and measures, 8, 78, 81, 94, 118, 141, 149, 151; international, 76–9; liberal, 16, 102, 116, 127, 138, 141, 145–9; movement, 6–9, 14, 107, 138, 151–2, 164n18; municipal, 88–94, 97; organizations, 119–21; public health, 87–8, 151; sanitary, 57, 62, 77; target of, 16, 64, 77, 102, 118, 127; urban, 6–9, 14, 16, 76–9, 87, 99 reformers, 4, 43, 57, 120, 127, 131, 155; American and British, 78–80; and immigration, 100; motivations for, 78–80, 103; and photography, 9, 11, 76, 79, 138, 148–9; Protestant, 120; Toronto, 5–7, 104, 118. See also Booth, Charles; Kelso, J.J.; Woodsworth, J.S.

207

religion, 81; Christian, 7, 119; Protestant, 119 “Report of Slum Conditions.” See Hastings, Charles Riis, Jacob, 11, 78, 101, 177n38 Rust, Arthur, 26 Ryan, James, 13, 114 Sekula, Allan, 12, 130, 134, 149 sensation, 17, 60–2, 71, 111, 118; sensation fiction, 111 sentiment, 71, 113, 137, 140 settlement house, 119–22, 127, 141, 143. See also Central Neighbourhood House slum, 42, 177n38; as term, 174n3; conditions, 63, 75–99, 101–2, 118, 176n28; district, 103–4, 108– 9; dwellers, 138, 145–6. See also Hastings, Charles, “Report of Slum Conditions” Smith, Shawn Michelle, 130, 140 social subject: acculturated, 125–7; capacities of, 56, 58, 67; interiority of, 134–8, 150; liberal, 4–5, 9, 16–17, 51, 84, 141–3; marginalized, 88, 94, 127; production of, 7, 13–14, 61, 77, 94, 130–1, 138–49. See also subjectivity social survey. See survey; reform spectacle, 4, 56, 101, 111, 118, 127 Steichen, Edward, 131, 132. See also PhotoSecession; pictorialism Stieglitz, Alfred, 11, 44, 47, 48, 131, 133 165n37. See also Photo-Secession; pictorialism subjectivity, 3, 13, 15, 102, 150; liberal, 16, 33, 41, 128–38, 142–3; and modern perception, 56, 58, 65–7, 152 surveillance, 4, 25, 43, 85, 101, 118; photography as a technique of, 12, 76, 80, 93–4 survey, 25, 77–80, 85–96; geological survey, 13; land survey, 10; photographic survey, 25, 34–49; Pittsburgh Survey, 79; survey method, 78–80 symbolism, literary and artistic movement, 131–2, 149

INDEX

Tagg, John, 12, 130, 177n38 Toronto Board of Control, 70, 80, 88–9, 125, 176n19, 178n55 Toronto Board of Trade, 37, 168n38 Toronto Camera Club, 21, 44, 132–3, 133, 166n9, 169n64, 183n54, 185n1 Toronto City Hall, 10, 42, 49, 54, 75, 81, 85, 88 Toronto Guild of Civic Art, 50–5, 55, 65–71, 168n36, 171n16. See also Toronto, plans: Report on a Comprehensive Plan for Systematic Improvements in Toronto Toronto, plans: development, 52; fire insurance, 29–30; improvements, 55; Report on a Comprehensive Plan for Systematic Improvements in Toronto, 67, 69; topographical, 28 Toronto Purchase, 29, 167n17 Turofsky, Lou, 22 visuality, 51, 55, 56 (defined), 58, 65–6, 71 Ward (district), 75–6, 81–5, 116, 127, 174n1; depictions of, 82, 83, 83, 98; inhabitants of, 83, 105, 111–12, 118, 120–3; as a slum, 100–13; study of, 97–9. See also slum Wexler, Laura, 137 Williams, Carol, 13, 140 Woodruff, John, 114 Woodsworth, J.S., 6, 107 Works Department, 25–6, 33, 35, 41, 167n28; photography and blueprinting section, 25, 48; requisition form, 26, 27 World’s Columbian Exposition, 53, 68

208