The virtual exhibition that accompanied Part 1 of my article on Micklethwaite Studio’s photography for Consumers’ Gas included a wide range of subject matter. There is, however, more variety in the series than I was able to accommodate in the initial portfolio, so readers will find a second, related photo sequence below.
Two new groups of images introduced in this sequence document the company’s day to day operations. In the first group (photos 1-4), we are shown interiors of the company’s head office at 19 Toronto Street, including one surviving view of “female clerks” operating the billing system. In the second (photos 7-11), we are given a photographic tour of coal gasification at Station B on Eastern Avenue, where trainloads of coal arriving from Pennsylvania are being processed inside enormous industrial sheds.
As in the Part 1 sequence, the remaining photos in this group (photos 12-32) illustrate the commercial, industrial, domestic and institutional settings in which the company’s manufactured gas is consumed, and well as a wide range of appliances and equipment fuelled by gas.
The Editing Process
I have never seen a paper print of any of the 1,034 photos in the Consumers Gas Collection. It’s doubtful that any photographic prints of these photos still exist. I selected the images for this two-part article by viewing digital copies made from the original negatives, available to researchers on the City of Toronto Archives website.
The negatives in the collection are of two types. Between 1909 and the early 1920s, F. W. Micklethwaite Studio photographed for Consumers Gas using an 8×10-inch view camera and glass plates. Almost 300 of these plate negatives still exist. I would have liked to examine some of them directly, but my previous difficulties in dealing with the City of Toronto Archives on this kind of research dissuaded me from asking.
From about 1922 on, the studio began using newer, nitrate sheet film negatives in the same large format. The majority of photos in the collection, 778 photos in total, were taken between 1922 and 1936 on sheet film.
Nitrate film is unstable and extremely flammable. After acquiring the collection in 1985, City Archives staff made high-quality copy negatives from the nitrate originals on 4×5-inch safety film. The originals were finally discarded in 2018.
While it’s obvious from the tone of the captions that most of the photos in the series were intended as technical illustrations, or as promotional material aimed at consumers, no printed matter containing reproductions seems to have survived. I thus set about to create a fictional version of how the company would have documented its operations and carried on its public relations using photographs over a 27 year period.
To organize the photos and reduce them to a manageable number, I started by creating a set of 21 folders, each labelled with a subject commonly encountered in the series. Thus, if I came across a good photo of a commercial kitchen, I would make a copy and place it in the folder labelled “Commercial Kitchens.” My cumulative long list still amounted to 250 images, but dividing them by subject made then easier to manage.
What followed was an iterative process in which I compared different visual narratives using images drawn from my 21 folders. My two main criteria were depth of subject matter and artistic quality. The result is, I think, representative, but other researchers with different interests might have chosen quite differently.
Damaged Negatives
During the editing process, I had to take into consideration the condition of the individual negatives, a fair number of which had sustained damage from being stored in poor conditions before being transferred to the City of Toronto Archives.
Parts of the emulsion had separated on some of the glass plates, leaving black holes. The nitrate negatives seem to have been affected by mould, and eaten by acid from non-archival storage envelopes. Losing a good archival photo in this way can be heartbreaking. The following are examples of photos I would certainly have chosen if they had survived in better condition.
Toronto, City of Gas, 1909-1936, Part 2 PHOTO GALLERY: 32 images
click on an image to launch gallery
