Alexander Henderson (photographer)
Alexander Henderson (* 1831 in Scotland ; † April 4, 1913 in Montreal ) was a Canadian photographer of Scottish origin.
He is best known for his landscape photographs, but Henderson also documented urban life in Québec and Ontario as well as construction projects along the railway lines that were being built during his time. Much of his photographic work has been lost.
Life
Early years
Henderson came from a wealthy family who owned a mansion and extensive land in Press Castle , around 60 kilometers south-east of the Scottish capital, in addition to an estate in Edinburgh . The grandfather, Alexander Henderson Sr., ran the National Bank of Scotland and was a successful trader in seeds. The father Thomas Henderson continued the family business. Son Alexander spent a large part of his youth on the country estate and seems to have enjoyed nature there at an early age. When he was nine years old, his father died. Afterwards, a caring uncle took care of Alexander's upbringing and took him on extensive fishing trips, among other things. Henderson attended the Murcheston Academy in Edinburgh and the Rugby School in England . At the urging of his family, he began a three-year apprenticeship as an accountant with a firm in Edinburgh in 1849 , but got bored with his studies and expressed a desire for a more stimulating job. In 1851, on the initiative of his uncle, he visited the Great Exhibition in London , an evidently formative experience that stimulated his interest in other countries as well as in modern technology.
In October 1855, Henderson married Agnes Robertson, a daughter of long-time and equally wealthy friends of his family. Agnes later gave birth to nine children together, but only five of them reached adulthood. A few days after the wedding, the newly married couple moved to Canada, where they settled in Montreal. Nothing is known about Henderson's professional activities over the next three years. Between 1859 and 1863 he was listed as a commission agent in the Montreal address book and lived in a chic area of the city. The Henderson couple made repeated trips, including to Québec and the east coast. On the Saguenay , Henderson often pursued his old passion on a sailing boat, fishing. When tensions arose between Great Britain and the northern states of the USA after the outbreak of the Civil War and an invasion of Canada was feared, Henderson joined a newly founded militia (The Victoria Rifles) in December 1861.
Success as a photographer
Henderson discovered photography for himself around 1857 and soon developed into an ambitious amateur. In September 1859 he became the first member of the American continent to join the Stereoscopic Exchange Club, a group of photographers who exchanged photos produced using the stereoscopic method. His earliest known photos from 1858/1859 show Beloeil Mountain near Mont Saint-Hilaire and a winter panorama of Montreal. Henderson's photos from the following years attest to his rapid maturation, both technically and artistically. In 1865 he published for the first time, apparently in small editions and tailored to the buyers' individual interests, a narrow volume with up to twenty of his own landscape photographs.
Soon after, he gave up his previous professional career and devoted himself entirely to photography. In 1866 or 1867 he opened a photo studio in Montreal and advertised himself as a portrait and landscape photographer. Apparently portraits, which he only produced until around 1870, were only a secondary aspect of his work. Henderson achieved greater success with his photographs of lively city scenes and, above all, with his landscape photos, both preferably in a wintry appearance.
A collegial collaboration and friendship linked Henderson with the now more famous photographer William Notman , with whom he had already undertaken a photo excursion to Niagara Falls in 1860 . Both were founding members of the Art Association of Montreal and belonged to the Montreal Amateur Photographic Club. In 1865 they experimented together with magnesium flash light.
In the 1860s and 1870s Henderson made extensive trips through Québec and Ontario as well as individual trips to the maritime provinces and Labrador . The photographs taken on these occasions document both still largely untouched nature as well as the construction of bridges and railways, which are aimed at their development and often resulted in their destruction. The larger cities and many smaller towns in the regions he visited were also among the motifs. He was particularly fond of the landscapes on rivers such as the Blanche River , Rouge River and Rivière du Lièvre , which he often explored by canoe. In 1870 he published two further illustrated books under the title Photographs of Montreal , one of which presented the city in summer and the other in winter.
Henderson regularly presented his work to a wider public. This made him one of the few Canadian photographers of his time who also found recognition outside the borders of their country. He has participated in exhibitions in London, Edinburgh, Dublin , Paris , New York and Philadelphia , and has repeatedly received honorable mentions. At two exhibitions of E. & HT Anthony & Company for landscape photography he achieved first prices in 1877/1878. At the Paris World Exhibition in 1878 , he won the silver medal.
Henderson toured the Lower St. Lawrence River around 1872 and recorded construction projects for the Intercolonial Railway (ICR). Possibly these recordings motivated the ICR 1875 to commission Henderson with the comprehensive photographic documentation of the meanwhile almost completed railway line between Montreal and Halifax . From then on, railway companies were among his most important customers. In 1876 he photographed bridges on the route between Montreal and Ottawa for the Quebec, Montreal, Ottawa and Occidental Railway . From 1882 to 1884 he captured bridges in pictures that had been built by the Dominion Bridge Company Limited for the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR).
In 1885 he traveled west on behalf of the CPR and came to the Rogers Pass in British Columbia . On this occasion he photographed both the construction work on the railway lines and mountain landscapes. In April 1892, Henderson accepted the offered position as head of the newly formed CPR photography department. In the same year he went to British Columbia again, this time reaching the Pacific . Of the numerous photographs that were taken during his travels in the West, only a few have survived.
Late years and legacy
Henderson retired in 1897. Although he lived for another decade and a half, there are no known recordings made by him from this period. His letters suggest that he had given up photography altogether.
Alexander Henderson died in Montreal on April 4, 1913, at the age of 82. His photographic achievements seem to have been largely forgotten at this point, as they are not mentioned in the traditional obituaries. The heirs paid no heed to Henderson's artistic legacy. The only surviving descendant, a grandson, had the extensive collection of Henderson's glass negatives stored in a basement disposed of by the garbage disposal in the early 1950s.
The rediscovery of Henderson's work began in the 1960s. In 1973, the McCord Museum in Montreal organized a small exhibition of his photos for the first time. Aside from eight wet plates kept in the museum's Notman Photographic Archives, no negatives from Henderson have survived. Most of his work is best known today for several hundred prints and a few albums held in the holdings of the McCord Museum, the Library and Archives Canada and other Canadian and British institutions.
Henderson was one of four photographers Canada Post honored in 1989 with a stamp series dedicated to 150 Years of Canadian Photography .
Characteristics of his work
Henderson's early landscape photographs suggest a strong influence of English landscape painting on his work. In contrast to the sometimes stark, sometimes abstract realism of his friend Notman, Henderson preferred romantic-pastoral scenes. Although nature was his preferred motif, he mostly made references to human activities, such as breaking ice on a frozen river or canoeing down a forest-lined river. Possibly this aspect served a better marketing of his photos. Due to the cost and expense of the equipment, there were few amateur photographers and photos as souvenirs from trips, for example, were usually bought by professional photographers. Henderson's photos show subjects that were popular at the time, such as the felling and transport of wood, steamboats, waterfalls and railways, but they stand out from the majority of contemporary photographic production through careful composition and the masterful treatment of light.
If Henderson chose motifs in cities or small towns, busy streets and markets were often the focus. He documented a variety of human activities, including lumberjacks and railroad construction workers, making the photos a valuable source of social history . His photos of buildings also reveal his artistic skills. In contrast, the few surviving portraits from Henderson's studio are hardly noteworthy.
While Henderson initially used paper negatives and occasionally experimented with dry collodion plates, the wet collodion plate became his preferred technique. It is possible that he switched to the dry gelatin process in later years . He almost always used albumen paper for prints of his photos .
literature
- Louise Gay: Alexander Henderson, Photographer. In: History of Photography , Vol. 13, No. 1, 1989, ISSN 0308-7298 , pp. 79-94.
- David Mattison: Henderson, Alexander (1831-1913). Canadian Photographer. In: John Hannavy (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography. Taylor and Francis Group, New York 2008, ISBN 0-415-97235-3 , p. 648.
- Stanley G. Triggs: Alexander Henderson. Nineteenth-Century Landscape Photographer. In: Archivaria. No. 5, Winter 1977/78, pp. 45-59.
- Stanley G. Triggs: Henderson, Alexander. In: Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online .
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Henderson, Alexander |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Canadian photographer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1831 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Scotland |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 4, 1913 |
| Place of death | Montreal |