At a time when few were working professionally with cameras, Hannah Maynard (1834–1918) made history with her boundless creativity and entrepreneurial acumen, becoming the first woman in British Columbia to establish a professional photography studio. In 1863, she launched her business, some two decades after photography’s invention, and operated it for nearly fifty years.

Hannah Maynard: Life & Work shares the remarkable story of how Maynard, born in Cornwall, England, immigrated to Upper Canada in 1853 at the age of eighteen, where she settled in Bowmanville, Ontario, and soon began to learn the still-novel art of photography. It details how, along with her husband Richard and their four young children, the family moved to the frontier town of Victoria, British Columbia, where Maynard opened her studio that operated in the city’s commercial core, becoming a civic crossroads attracting clients from babies to convicts, itinerant sailors to dignitaries, servants to industrialists, and fine young ladies to enterprising prospectors.

In this ground-breaking study, Elizabeth Anne Cavaliere traces how Maynard—who promoted herself as a “photographic artist”— combined her bold industriousness with an inventive approach to portraiture, from her uncanny multiple exposure images and imaginative tableaux vivants to her documentary work as an ethnographic and law enforcement photographer. The first comprehensive look at Maynard’s career, this essential book celebrates her creative legacy as one of the first women photographers working in nineteenth-century Canada.