Dear Editor

The Pontiac Historical Society was recently gifted a batch of glass-plate negatives – photographs by Shawville’s master photographer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Harry Imison. I was able to go through the procedures of making them visible as pictures fairly quickly, so now we have 34 newly-rendered glimpses into the distant past of this area. They are all portraits, because that was the bread and butter of photographers in the past. The equipment used to shoot the pictures was large, cumbersome and expensive, so there were few people in the position to make photographs happen.  

For some readers, this will be a ‘so what? who cares?’ situation. For me, it’s a rear view mirror on a continuous timeline. Who lived here a hundred years ago? How did they dress? How did they feel about life in what was then a very modern world? One can gaze upon their faces, look into their eyes, and imagine how it felt to dress up, stand or sit perfectly still for a minute or more, and then go back to a life of farming, blacksmithing, merchandising, and creating the villages that will become the Pontiac that we know today. By extrapolation, where will it go in the future? 

Many visitors to the Pontiac Museum remark about how “those were the good old days”, and how they’d like to go back to that time. I don’t think so, myself. I’m glad to be alive in this time slot, attempting to persuade my fellow travellers not to waste their attention energy on the fleeting worries and confusions on offer today. Rather, concentrate on what will last; the people who live near you, and the community that we create together. 

We have plans for publicizing these photos, in the hope that current residents will recognize a long-gone relative, or just for the feeling of finding out about the past, in order to have a more realistic future. 

Robert Wills, Shawville and Thorne