any of the images in this exhibition are not credited. Historically, the work of in-house photographic staff in Government of Ontario ministries was considered a technical “service” that supported departments within the larger institution. Therefore, crediting the institution and not the image-maker was a common practice. As a parallel example, a government bulletin on hunting and fishing procedures is credited to the Ministry of Natural Resources rather than to an individual civil servant.

Also contributing to expectations of anonymity for government image-makers are certain tensions concerning the medium itself that have existed since photography’s earliest years.  These are based on a simplified view of the place of subjectivity in relation to photographic end uses.

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Blimp [Airship R100] flying over Toronto, [1930]
Photographer unknown
Ministry of Education
Black and White print
Reference Code: RG 2-71, VA-5
Archives of Ontario, I0004270

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Miners working in Foster's Mine, [ca. 1916]
Department of Mines and Northern Affairs
Black and white print
Reference Code: RG 13-30-1-24
Archives of Ontario, I0004679

This view has tended to create a false separation:  photography as document (an aid to science, producing objective, self-apparent facts) differentiated from photography as art (a form of personal expression that shares pictorial qualities with older artistic disciplines like painting and drawing).

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Young man posing with giant
paintbrush, [197? - 198?]
Photographer unknown
Ministry of Transportation
Transparency
Reference Code: RG 14-151-3-6
Archives of Ontario, I0028130

Visually, this exhibition strives to address the gap between the notion of the government photographer as an executor of a technical function, a “documenter”, and as an “artist” who applies his or her own subjectivity and aesthetic judgment to the production of the commissioned images. 

The work of E. J. Zavitz (1875 – 1968), who has two credited photographs in this exhibition, ably demonstrates the futility of maintaining such a dichotomy.  Zavitz originally took up photography as an aid to his work as a forester. He had a well developed pictorial sensibility that, judging by his careful compositions, appears rooted in some knowledge of art history. As Zavitz is an exception to the norm of anonymity, we can speculate that this may be due to his overtly “artistic” approach to his documentation (and, perhaps, the not insignificant fact that he was appointed Deputy Minister of Forestry in 1926).

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Red pines on Benner Farm, in Norfolk, 1913
E. J. Zavitz
Black and white print
Reference Code: RG 1-448-1, 221
Archives of Ontario, I0006758

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Yellow birch log boom, [ca. 1915]
E. J. Zavitz
Black and white print
Reference Code: RG 1-448-1, 358
Archives of Ontario, I0006763