A Fur Trader's Photographs: A.A. Chesterfield in the District of Ungava, 1901-4

By William C. James

A Fur Trader's Photographs presents the most significant images from a previously unresearched collection of early twentieth-century photographs. The photographer, A.A. Chesterfield, spent most of his working life in Montreal as a professional photographer, a field in which he achieved a national reputation. But between 1901 and 1904 he was employed as a fur trader with the Hudson's Bay Company, and his most significant camera work comes from this period. The only white man at the company's northernmost posts (Great Whale River and Fort George), he lived and worked with the Cree and Inuit. The photgraphs he took during this period are remarkable in their combination of technical skill, visual appeal, and documentary and historical significance. Chesterfield recorded the effects of post life upon the Cree and Inuit, and showed how the white agents of the church and fur trade made us of native implements, clothing, and transportation. Recognizing the threat to native ways of life posed by the white man's advancing civilization, he photographed the native people's dress, their everyday activities, the details that define a culture. Much of what he recorded is now lost forever. The text by William C. James provides a detailed framework in which to understand the photographs. James describes Chesterfield's life, the region, the people he photographed, the role of the Hudson's Bay Company, the documentary significance of the activities depicted in the photographs, and the relationship between these and other extant photos of that region and era. The three-year period Chesterfield spent in the District of Ungava emerges as crucial in his own development and as a decisive turning point in the history of the region. Together with James's text, these pictures constitute an arresting chronicle of a place, its people, and their ways of life, now all irrevocably changed.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0773505938
• ISBN13: 9780773505933
• Release Date: October 1985
• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Length: 120 Pages