Hannah Maynard
by Kyle Legge
Hannah Maynard was born in Bude, England in 1834. She married Richard Maynard in 1852, they then moved to Canada. Once they arrived, they changed locations again and finally settled down in the Colony of Vancouver Island in 1862 with their four children. They brought all of their photography supplies with them, and she became one of British Columbia's first professional photographers. She learned photography in Ontario, so she decided to open the city's first portrait studios, and her husband opened a boot and shoe store right next to it. Her pictures were so popular though, because she experimented with almost every possible photo technique. She was also obsessed with her children, and deeply troubled by the deaths in her family, and some of her pictures show that. But she was also very innovative, an example of this was when she tried to take pictures of moving objects. This was extremely difficult due to lack of technology at the time, it was almost impossible to capture motion. By the time she retired in 1912, she figured she must have photographed almost everybody that had lived in, or passed through Victoria.
