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The Composite Photographs
Stanley G. Triggs
A Well-earned Celebrity
When we look at composite photographs today it is in some instances with a certain amusement at what we may perceive as a naive idea, mixed with a sense of wonder at the magnitude of the project and admiration of the craftsmanship and artistry required to bring it to a successful completion. A few of the composites such as the school group of young girls sitting in stuffed chairs on the grassy slopes of Mount Royal have an almost surreal effect; in others, an occasional figure may seem to float in air, or appear just a little too small or too large.
Yet, at the time composite photographs were created, they were accepted by the enthusiastic public as factual, as true renditions of a group or an event. The previously cited article in the Canadian Illustrated News of May 21, 1870 describes with enthusiasm the life-like quality of Notman's new composite photograph of "The Skating Carnival".
In London, England in the January 17, 1870 edition of The Photographic News, the realism and artistic merit perceived in a tiny copy of the same Skating Carnival composite are extolled at greater length.
A few years later the Halifax Morning Chronicle of 1879 also stresses the accuracy of another large composite showing over four hundred and fifty people attending the investiture of the Marquis of Lorne the previous December.
Notman deserved the praise, for he and his staff took great pains to produce an artistic but truly representative image within the bounds of the technical limitations of photography at that time. True perspective was striven for and usually achieved. Consistent lighting of the subjects is another strong point of Notman's composites. An early composite, "The Rendez-vous" of 1872, depicts a group of snowshoers who have just completed a nocturnal tramp over Mount Royal to Lumkin's Hotel. Most of the individuals in this large group were back-lit when they were photographed in the studio, making it appear in the finished composite that the snowshoers are lit by the moon which is seen over the crest of the mountain, while the members of the group sitting around the bonfire in the foreground appear to be lit by its warm glow.
In 1868 Notman expanded his operations to Ottawa and Toronto, establishing a studio in each city on the same lines as the one in Montreal and each managed by one of his personally trained staff. He opened a studio in Halifax in 1869 and one in St. John in 1872, and later made further expansions into New England. Notman had been photographing students and professors of schools and colleges in Montreal ever since he opened his business, and by 1869 had ventured into the lucrative American school market at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, followed closely by Harvard and Yale. Eventually he had contracts to photograph the students, campus and buildings of Dartmouth, Princeton, Lafayette, Andover, Smith, Holyoake, Trinity, Amherst as well as others.
To photograph the students, Notman set up temporary studios in one of the college buildings or erected a prefabricated studio on the campus. One of these was made entirely of wrought iron and glass. After the photographs were taken, the processed negatives were sent to Montreal where prints were made and mounted on cards or placed into albums, which were then sent to the student customers at the various colleges. This involvement in school photography led to the opening in Boston, in 1878, of Notman's first permanent studio in the U.S.A. at No. 4 Park Street. This was followed by two more in Boston; one each in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Newport, Rhode Island, and Albany, New York; and several seasonal studios in resort towns such as Poland Springs, Maine and Saratoga, New York. These American studios were incorporated under the name of the Notman Photographic Company. Through all this expansion, Notman's Montreal studio remained the centre of his business and creative endeavours. Just as the negatives for regular portraits of students in the United States were sent to Montreal for printing, so too were those for the composites from the American studios as well as from the branch studios in Canada, at least most of them for many years.
