[Summer 2025]

View from the Sidewalk
by Stephanie Hornstein

[EXCERPT]

Few people have meaningfully transformed the way that I perceive the city around me. One was a graffiti artist friend who took me beneath the Ville-Marie overpass and taught me how to decipher the bubble letters and flourishes that form the signatures of Montreal’s most notorious taggers. The other was Edith Mather. I came across her unorthodox body of work a few years ago on a visit to the McCord Stewart Museum’s archives. Carefully filed away in protective plastic slips are thousands of photographs that Mather produced at the height of Jean Drapeau’s “urban renewal” – a time when stately mansions were knocked down and entire working-class neighbourhoods were bulldozed out of existence. Looking at her pictures opened up a vista that I had not yet perceived in my own meanderings through the city. Most of her photographs chronicle whimsical elements of Montreal’s Victorian architecture: a cornice here, a chubby gargoyle there, an Art Deco façade, snow on a wrought-iron railing. Others show dilapidated laundromats, the slanted, red-brick residences of the Saint-Henri neighbourhood, and buildings in various states of demolition. Mather also paid special attention to the “boys” and “girls” signs that adorn the twin entrances of old schoolhouses – perhaps on account of her son Geoffrey, whom she often took along on her photographic excursions. The mental image that I conjured for myself of Mather trundling the toddler’s pram down the street, stopping every few paces to snap a picture of a detail that caught her fancy, touched me, as did the fact that many of the buildings that she immortalized are no more. Although her style is rigidly straight, almost investigative, her photographs have a quiet urgency that entreats us to “look here!” and “notice this!” lest the features recorded today become the wrecking ball’s target tomorrow.

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[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 129 – FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: TITRE ARTICLE EN]

Stéphanie Hornstein is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at Concordia University, where she researches nineteenth-century travel photography of Egypt and Japan.