Imagining Winnipeg gets FOUR nominations!

The Manitoba Book Award shortlists were announced last week!

And Imagining Winnipeg: History Through the Photographs of L.B. Foote by Esyllt W. Jones was nominated for FOUR Manitoba Book Awards! CONGRATS to Esyllt!

Imagining Winnipeg was shortlisted in the McNally Robinson Book of the Year, Best Illustrated Book of the Year, Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award, and Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher categories.

The awards will be presented at the Manitoba Book Awards gala, on Sunday April 28th at the West End Cultural Centre and hosted by Ismaila Alfa. Doors open at 7:15 p.m., with the ceremony beginning at 8:00 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

About Imagining Winnipeg
In an expanding and socially fractious early twentieth-century Winnipeg, Lewis Benjamin Foote (1873-1957) rose to become the city’s pre-eminent commercial photographer. Documenting everything from royal visits to deep poverty, from the building of the landmark Fort Garry Hotel to the turmoil of the 1919 General Strike, Foote’s photographs have come to be iconic representations of early Winnipeg life. They have been used to illustrate everything from academic histories to posters for rock concerts; they have influenced the work of visual artists, writers, and musicians; and they have represented Winnipeg to the world.

But in Imagining Winnipeg, historian Esyllt W. Jones takes us beyond the iconic to reveal the complex artist behind the lens and the conflicting ways in which his photographs have been used to give credence to diverse and sometimes irreconcilable views of Winnipeg’s past. Incorporating 150 stunning photographs from the more than 2,000 images in the Archives of Manitoba Foote Collection, Imagining Winnipeg challenges our understanding of visual history and the city we thought we knew.

About Esyllt W. Jones
Esyllt W. Jones is a history professor at University of Manitoba and is the author of the award-winning Influenza 1918: Death, Disease and Struggle in Winnipeg. She co-edited, with Adele Perry and Leah Morton, the forthcoming Place and Replace: Essays on Western Canada.