The fonds consists of several photographic projects created by Pamela Harris, Canadian documentary photographer and author. The projects include Faces of Feminism, a document and exhibition on the women's movement in Canada, and Spence Bay, a document on the Inuit community of Taloyoak, Nunavut (then Spence Bay, Northwest Territories) including photographs taken in 1972-1973. Other art items comprises humourous drawings relating to women's issues by such artists as Gail Geltner and Dawna Gallagher. The textual records include correspondence, notes, manuscripts, research material and printed material documenting Faces of Feminism, from its inception through its various exhibitions to the related book published by Harris. There is also a copy of The Women's Kit. The textual records have been arranged in two series: Faces of Feminism and The Women's Kit. Posters also were included in the kit. Sound recordings included in this fonds consist of radio interviews with Pamela Harris regarding the Faces of Feminism exhibit and book project. These recordings have been placed in the series Faces of Feminism.
Harris, Pamela, 1940- : Pamela Harris was born in 1940 and was educated in California, graduating from Pomona College, Claremont, in 1962 with a degree in English literature. She taught English literature, creative writing and drama at private schools in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1963-1967. From 1966 to 1975, she travelled in eastern Canada, the United States and in Europe, practising her photography, and she began to exhibit in shows in Toronto and Rochester and with touring National Film Board Stills Division exhibitions. Harris spent four months in Spence Bay, NWT, 1972-1973, working with Inuit women, both photographing them and teaching photography. The project resulted in exhibitions of her photographs in Toronto, Saskatoon and Monterey, California, in an exhibition of Inuit photographs at the Arctic Women's Craft Conference 1974; and in the publication Another Way of Being (Impressions, 1976). Harris taught in the Creative Artists in the Schools programme in Toronto in 1975 and gave classes and workshops at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the Ontario College of Art during the 1980s. She also undertook a major photo-essay of United Farm Workers and the farming community around Watsonville, California from 1977 to 1982. Harris's work became increasingly preoccupied by feminist themes. In 1972, she organized a touring exhibition called Photographs of Women by Women. In 1973, she researched and produced a teacher's aid, the Women's Kit, published by the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education for high schools and colleges to use in the teaching of women's history in Canada. Faces of Feminism became Harris's major photographic project of the mid-1980s. The first phase was a photo-essay, Faces of Feminism/Toronto, which formed a part of Toronto's sesquicentennial celebrations 1984. The project developed into a cross-Canada project to photograph women of all walks of life who had participated in the women's movement in some way or another. The photographs were exhibited in a series of exhibitions across Canada called Faces of Feminism, and a selection was published in the book Faces of Feminism (Toronto: Second Story Press, 1992). Harris's work is held in a number of permanent collections, including the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Art Bank, and the California State Library, as well as in many private collections. She received the Duke and Duchess of York Prize in Photography (Canada Council) in 1990. She holds dual Canadian-American citizenship.
