The Rural Voice, 2005-04, Page 43The photos of Reuben R. Sallows can now be viewed
online including Man Sowing Wheat, 1911, (above left),
and Petting Horse in Field, 1904, (right). There are 900
photos from six different collections that can be accessed
at sallowsgallery.ca giving a marvellous peek into what
life was like in the late 1800s and early 1900s on Ontario's
farms.
Photographer.
Over the next six years Sallows
kept taking outdoor photos. In 1903
a Philadelphia company asked for a
collection of his photos and accepted
10 of the 12 sent, paying him $50.
"Five dollars for each accepted
print!" the amazed Sallows wrote
later. "Sixty dollars a dozen. For the
same work at home my regular
customers were paying me $6 a
dozen. This was the first money I had
ever received for any commercial
work and it certainly 'woke' me up. I
concluded that if the picture -loving
public valued my work so highly that
they were willing to pay me $60 per
dozen, I would be foolish to confine
myself to portrait work alone."
Soon he was being called
"Canada's photographic
genius" and his work was being
published all over North America and
in Britain. The emergence of picture
magazines saw as many as a dozen of
his photos of domestic scenes,
pictures of rural life and nature
scenes published in one issue.
He did work for Canadian Pacific
Railway, Grand Trunk Railway, the
Ontario Department of Agriculture
and the federal Immigration
Department which paid him to travel
widely throughout Ontario, Quebec
and the prairie provinces to take
promotional pictures. During three
trips to western Canada he took some
of the first recorded photographs of
the Doukhobors, immigrants from
Russia who had settled in the west
and who were reluctant to have their
photos taken.
Closer to home, he took his
camera out into the fields and
farmyards of the surrounding
countryside capturing images of
people carrying out the full range of
their activities: seeding, picking
apples. cutting wood, harvesting and
building barns and fences.
Sallows described his style in a
passage quoted in Colborne
Township's history book Colborne
Connections: "I always strive to take
people unawares, in their natural
moods, at their common callings, or
in familiar surroundings — all of
which I find imparts natural and
lifelike qualities to all my studies."
There are those who might carp
that Sallows' photos weren't truly
lifelike because their subjects often
seemed to be dressed in their best
clothes, even when doing farm or
household chores, but the photos still
provide a glimpse of life in that
period better than anything else
available. With his large -format
camera, the photos have a quality of
detail just not available with smaller
cameras. even today's excellent 35
mm or digital cameras. He was also
expert in choosing lighting
conditions that seem to make many
of the photos three-dimensional.
Marian Doucette, information
service co-ordinator for the Huron
County Library, who headed the
project to create the digital gallery,
calls it one of her proudest
achievements. The project began
when the library received grants from
the Ontario Ministry of Culture's
Libtary and Strategic Development
Fund's Digital Alliance Program and
the Department of Canadian
Heritage.
Doucette worked with Robin
Wark of the Sallows Gallery to begin
the process with the 200 images in
the Sallows collection. Technician
Peter Marvel set about scanning the
images while library staff he_7:an
cataloguing.
Once the Sallows Gallery
collection was recorded. the
collection of the Huron
County Historical Society and the
archives of the Huron County
Museum were scanned. doubling the
images available for the gallery.
Next it was the University of
Guelph's collection of all the photos
at the former Ontario Agriculture
Museum at Milton and other smaller
APRIL 2005 39