Wills had heard rumours such a stash might exist somewhere in Shawville’s hinterland, but didn’t realize it had been living in the museum since its donation.

The glass negative plates, which are photography’s precursor to film, came into the museum’s possession when they were donated by a man charged with tearing down an old home in town. The man knew nothing of the plates’ origin — only that they looked old and worth saving.

Many of Imison’s photos had long been available at the Pontiac Archives and at the museum, but these glass plate negatives offered a never-before-seen window into Shawville life more than a century ago.

Since the discovery, Wills and other volunteers at the museum have spent hours, mostly over the summer months, unpacking these envelopes, sorting through the plates, and finally turning them into finished and digitized photographs.

On Wednesday, in a presentation at the Archives, Wills presented a selection of these new images to the public for the first time.

Pontiac Historical Society president Robert Wills shows the crowd at the Pontiac Archives one from the collection of Imison’s photos the museum has spent the past few years sorting and digitizing. According to Wills, the photo on the projector is technically impressive due to the long exposure time required to take it. Photo: Jon Stewart

Old photos find new life thanks to volunteer effort

After an initial inspection, Wills and other volunteers found the recovered plates in various states of wholeness. Some were broken. Some had smudged around the edges.

Pontiac Historical Society treasurer Chris Seifried, who worked in the National Film Archives as a photography archivist, put the museum’s summer students at the time in charge of discarding broken plates, cleaning the intact ones with a soft brush and putting them away in envelopes.

“They were old and they weren’t in ideal conditions,” he said of the plates. “They were subject to fluctuations of temperature, fluctuations in humidity, [and] careless handling.”

Last summer, after the plates sat around for a few years, the museum’s summer students began to digitize the collection, placing the negatives on a light box, taking a photo with a phone, and uploading the images to a memory drive.

That drive got lost somewhere along the way, but Wills, determined to preserve these images, started again from square one. He set up his own light table at home to begin chipping away at digitizing the photos.

Wills placed each glass plate on the light table and snapped a photo with his phone, which he then uploaded to a website that can transform a photographic negative into a positive, to display the image as it was originally captured.

Volunteer Chris Seifried used a computer program to repair damages to photographs caused by eroding emulsion (above) so they appear more as they would have before time had its way with them (below). For this photo, Seifried copied parts of the man’s right arm to rebuild his left arm.

Once the images had been digitized, Seifried took the reins. The emulsion on many of the plates had eroded away over time, creating a sort of bubbling appearance around the edges that obscured parts of the images.

He used a computer program that allowed him to remove the bubbling effect and restore about 20 photos to something close to their former beauty.

In the case of one photo, depicting a suit-wearing man sitting in Imison’s studio, the emulsion had come off entirely, removing the man’s left arm from the photo.

“I copied his right arm and flipped it over, and I put it on the left arm,” Seifried said, referring to the digital restoration process he had undertaken. “I added some creases and I removed some creases, just to improve the aesthetics of the image.”

Lens into another era

The plates are from an era when photos were taken using large, box-shaped cameras.

When it was time to take the photo, the photographer would hit the shutter, exposing the light-sensitive emulsion on the glass plate and capturing a negative version of the image. The image would then have to be processed in a dark room, where it would be turned into a positive and final version of the image.

As Wills made his way through the collection of nearly 300 negatives, he began to recognize some trends.

Most of them were portrait photos, shot in Imison’s studio, which makes sense given the man’s vocation as a portrait photographer.

But a small number of the photos were taken on location, including one of Bryson before the fire of 1914 that engulfed most of the village.

This would have meant lugging a heavy camera from Shawville to Bryson, possibly by horse. But according to THE EQUITY’s archives, Imison was known to own one of Shawville’s first cars, so, depending on the date of the photo it is possible he might have driven.

Perhaps the most impressive photo from a technical perspective, Wills said, is a photo of eight men sitting, paired, in rowboats, with each boat containing two dogs.

“When you consider the slowness of the photographic process at that time, it’s a miracle he could get that, that he could calm the raging waters,” Wills said, adding that photos at that time needed long exposures, which is to say the subjects needed to sit still while the light fully impressed upon the plate’s emulsion.

He said the museum was so enthralled by the photograph they decided to make a t-shirt with the image emblazoned on the front.

Seifried said the discovery of the negatives was an astounding find for the museum’s collection.

“It was a miracle, because they were that close to being taken to the dump,” he said. “This is a collection that preserves the images of people who built our community.”

He said he was glad to have been able to touch up the photos and provide a better look into what Pontiac life was like all those years ago.

“You can take an old image that’s kind of beat up, it’s got a lot of scratches and dust and emulsion missing, and you can make it look like new.”

In his presentation on Wednesday, Wills displayed several of the touched-up portraits, the Bryson photo, and even wore the t-shirt the museum had printed of the boating men with their dogs.

He said he was happy to be able to offer a glimpse through the lens of Shawville’s most famous photographer.

“It’s life that was captured a hundred years ago,” he said. “These people have been sitting in an attic for 50 years, and now they’re springing back into the digital world.”

Most of the envelopes containing Imison’s negative plates are unidentified, and thus the names of people in them are unknown. But Wills said the society would like to change that, by crowdsourcing the public to help them find names.

“That’s the endgame here, is to have a gallery and invite people to identify.”

If you recognize any of the people in these photographs, please write to us at news@theequity.ca, or get in touch with the Pontiac Museum at (819) 647-2535.

Imison worked mostly out of his photography studio in Shawville for the 40 some years it was open, capturing formal photos of community members, like this one.

Register or subscribe to read this content

Thanks for stopping by! This article is available to readers who have created a free account or who subscribe to The Equity.

When you register for free with your email, you get access to a limited number of stories at no cost. Subscribers enjoy unlimited access to everything we publish—and directly support quality local journalism here in the Pontiac.

Register or Subscribe Today!