Dr. Colleen Skidmore—author of Searching for Mary Schäffer: Women Wilderness Photography—gave a talk about the subject of her new book at the University of Alberta’s Mountain Festival on December 7, 2017. The event was hosted by Dr. PearlAnn Reichwein, author of the award-winning Climber’s Paradise.
Mary Schäffer was a photographer, writer, botanical painter, and mapmaker from Philadelphia, renowned for her travels in the Canadian Rockies at the turn of the 20th century. Schäffer’s own themes—women and wilderness, travel and science—shape this critical exploration of her work amid Philadelphia’s science and photography communities, and the scientific, tourist, and Indigenous societies of the Rocky Mountains of Canada.
Professor Colleen Skidmore is a photo historian at University of Alberta, whose work has been featured at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in Banff. Her previous work, This Wild Spirit: Women in the Rocky Mountains of Canada, was exhibited in at galleries in Edmonton in concert with the publication of the book in 2006, and again in Edmonton and Jasper in 2016. The exhibit was then mounted in Banff in the summer of 2017, as part of Canada’s 150th anniversary celebrations. It will be shown again this winter at the Jasper-Yellowhead Museum and Archives, alongside another show about Mary Schäffer’s photography.
