Album documents a trip made by Robert Reford along the British Columbia coast on board the steamer SS Islander in the latter part of September 1890, including visits on the Sunshine Coast, Alert Bay, Port Essington, Skeena, Skeena River, and Masset in the Queen Charlotte Islands, as well as the Gardiner Canal, and along the Fraser River, British Columbia.
Another excursionist on the trip was Edgar Crow Baker, a former MP from Victoria, who was accompanied by his wife. The trip was both a working voyage and an opportunity for wealthy people to see some of the scenery of the BC Coast. This trip is well documented through newspaper articles in the Victoria Daily Colonist and Baker's diary.
Reford took photographs on this trip using three different cameras: 45 were taken with the early Kodak that took 2 ½ inch circular pictures; 45 were glass plate; and 18 were taken with Reford's new 3 ½ inch Kodak #2 camera. The 2 ½ inch camera, which started the era of snapshot photography, had been owned by Reford just over a year; the Kodak #3 had first been developed in 1889, and David Mattison of BC Archives has documentation that Reford received this camera from Notman in August 1890. While the 3 ½ inch camera was the newest of high tech photographic equipment, his small dry plate camera would have been considered to be traditional photography.
The newspaper accounts and Baker's diary provide a chronology of the trip. The photographs in this album are not in chronological order indicating that the album may have been assembled at a later date. An examination of Reford's photographs shows the difference between the 2 ½ and 3 ½ inch camera. The pictures are not only larger and more detailed, but also sharper and better quality. Reford seems to have realized that dry plates still produced the best quality photographs, as many of the highlight shots of the trip were photographed in this medium - Massett on the Queen Charlotte Islands, Fort Simpson, Metlakatla, Alert Bay. Reford also took a series of scenes from the boat on his 2 ½ camera and the pictures at Port Essington. In his diary Baker mentions having a "Kodak" of him taken in the pulpit. On the 2 ½ inch camera he is barely visible.
A commercial photographer from Victoria, Charles MacMunn, also traveled on this trip on the Islander. He had taken some albums of photographs on the CPR line in the 1880s. MacMunn is not listed as one of the excursionists, but although the CPR has no record of him being the official photographer for the trip, he may have made some arrangements with Captain Irving to take promotional pictures. Victoria newspapers mention a few times that MacMunn had taken such pictures. Unfortunately MacMunn's album does not appear to exist any longer (a MacMunn family story exists about the destruction of MacMunn's photographs). However, Reford and MacMunn appear to have a connection. Reford took a 3 ½ close-up portrait labeled McM, almost certainly Charles MacMunn. He also took a picture of the same person at Massett with his camera beside him.
Scope and content note completed with Information supplied to LAC by researcher Jay Sherwood, 2007.
