In November 1891, William Notman writes to his son Charles that he is suffering from a cold — nothing serious, he says, but the doctor has told him to keep to the house.

The cold turns to pneumonia, and a week later, the founder of the Notman Studio dies at the age of 65.

My experience in researching Notman was that you’d walk into an American repository and mention his name and it would certainly ring a bell. To the informed he was a superb pioneer American photographer, uh, and when you’d explain to them that he was in fact a Canadian, they were very surprised.

I think William Notman was so successful because he was a man of remarkable vision. I think he was one of those types of people who is always imagining how things can be better, how things can be not just bigger, because he certainly divested at times as well when it was a way to achieve something better, but no, I think he was somebody who was always, always able to imagine how they could be better.

Its almost as though I know Canadian history because I know Canadian photographs of Notman’s. For every Notman photograph there’s a history story attached; it’s the biography of people, it the biography of place, and um, you can lean an awful lot about Canadian history by looking at William Notman’s photographs.

He gave us a sense that we know who passed through those rooms. Therefore those rooms live for us in a way that … the artifacts of other generations that don’t have a Notman, or don’t have photographs, they can’t. I think that’s what he gave us.

For more than one hundred years after his death, William Notman’s studio continues to take photographic portraits of the citizens of Montreal.

Over the years, the style of image changes, but what does not change is the desire: the desire to preserve a part of oneself forever, the desire to leave a trace of who we are, at a single moment in time, for all time.

William Notman was there at the birth of this desire. He nurtured it, nourished it, dedicated his life to it.

His own image, and the images of the thousands of men and women he photographed live on for us, as they wanted, testimony that they were once here, alive on this earth.

Well, talking about favourite photographs, it was early in my job at the archives, somebody asked me the usual question, “Which is your favourite photograph?”

And I gave my usual answer, “I don’t have a favourite, there’s too many, they’re all good.” Well, then she had an inspired thought. She says, “S’posin’ you had to take one to heaven?” And I said, “Oh, that’s easy, ‘The Indian Women’.”

There’s the mammoth shapes and the choosing of the right angle to accent the design of the forms, and then personification of motherhood and care. So that’s the photograph I’d take to heaven. Ha, ha.