Imagining Winnipeg

“L.B. Foote’s Winnipeg is a boomtown of staggering abundance and meanest privation. His city teems with a mad sense of community—everywhere people, people and more people, throngs of new citizens forever gathering, spilling over, lining up; everyone held rapt and almost intoxicated by grand ceremony, fevered ritual or political upheaval. So much giddy newness plopped down on top of the nations that came before and on the timeless, pristine, soon-to-be-bedevilled plains. Foote honours human, city and prairie alike with his peculiar and ennobling eye.”

– Guy Maddin, director of My Winnipeg

“Imagining Winnipeg is at the same time a coffee-table beauty, a collection of intriguing photographs from a time past, and one of the most creative analyses of this period in Winnipeg’s history since Alan Artibise’s influential books over thirty years ago. It will forever change your impressions of the city.”

– Hayley Caldwell, Canada’s History

“Imagining Winnipeg offers us a way of re-imagining not only Winnipeg the history of Canada in the first half of the twentieth century. Beautifully curated by Esyllt W. Jones, this collection presents the work of photographer L.B. Foote in all its mastery and idiosyncrasy. The eclectic subjects of the photographs – the social and political pressures of the 1930s, strikes and union issues, Native life and its representation, diverse cultural identity and relations – brings many aspects of Canadian history back into conversation in new ways. Jones’ insightful introduction establishes the cultural and aesthetic context for Foote’s photographs and asks us ‘to risk a move into unknown territory, beyond the firm ground of well-trod historical narratives,’ so as to look at the history presented within these pages, as well as – by extension – our own time period, in a new light.”

– Jurors for the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award: Jake MacDonald, Susan Musgrave, Johanna Skibsrud. 2013 Manitoba Book Awards.

“While the book certainly does contain many photographs, it is much more than just a book of photographs. Neither is it exclusively a book about a photographer or photography in general, nor, despite its title, is it even primarily a history. Rather it is a hybrid that attempts, and to a large extent, succeeds, in being all of these.”

– Richard Holden, Border Crossings

“As Jones’ title suggests, ‘history through the photographs’ involves many ways of imagining Winnipeg—as Foote’s own chronicle, as the way historians can use photographs to gain a subtler understanding of themes they hope to investigate, or as an argument about the cultural agency of photographs in shaping our understanding of the past.”

– Matt Dyce, University of Winnipeg, The Canadian Historical Review