First Friday Lecture with Laurie Bertram

Shadow archives and ladies of the evening: Commemoration, incarceration and self-fashioniong in Winnipeg mugshots, 1874-1916

with Laurie Bertram

Presented by MAWA and Platform centre for Photographic & Digital Arts

Drawing from the Winnipeg Police Museum Archive, this talk examines turn-of-the-century mug shots of Western Canadian women on the margins who were arrested for various offenses. Through these photographs, Bertram investigates intersections between commemoration and incarceration. Amid ongoing attempts to secure attention for missing sex trade workers in the West, she asks: what challenges do criminalized women pose to Canada’s commemorative landscape? How can carceral images be redeployed in the construction of radical gender histories? Bertram will look at incarcerated women’s compelling use of fashion, cloth and notions of portraiture in their sometimes-defiant confrontation with police cameras and photographers who “captured” their image.

Born and raised in Winnipeg, Dr. Laurie K. Bertram is now the Grant Notley Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta. She is a specialist in material culture, trauma, and memory in Canadian history and completed her PhD at the University of Toronto in 2010. Laurie’s exhibition, Pioneer Ladies (of the evening), will be at Platform from Friday, May 4 – Saturday, June 9, 2012, with an opening reception on Friday, May 4 from 7-10 pm.

Location: MAWA, 611 Main Street 
Start Time: 12:00 pm
Date: Friday May 4, 2012
End Time: 1:00 pm