Reframed: Understanding New West Through Photos

Opening Reception:
Thursday, February 6, 6 – 8 pm

The City of New Westminster’s Museum and Archives holds 230,000 photographs documenting scenes of the City’s history and its people. Community members donated the majority of these photographs, creating a preferred narrative of our past, influencing the stories told through exhibition, programming, and the media, and omitting the contributions of those not captured in this historical record.

Reframed: Understanding New West Through Photos critically examines photographs acquired by the City’s Museum and Archives since 1950. The exhibition articulates the role these images have played in shaping community narrative and reframes them to present a more genuine picture of the City’s past. By looking at who is, and who is not, present in these photographs, we explore how a limited number of photographers shaped the early historical record of the city. This exhibition compares the original vision of the photographer with the impact of their work. Evidence of forgotten stories appears at the fringes of their images and beyond the cropped areas of photos used for publication. Reframed considers the role developing technology played in empowering New Westminster’s communities to document their own lives. With thousands of unnamed faces in the collection, this exhibition highlights the power that names hold to reveal hidden histories of marginalized populations.

The exhibition critically examines the ways in which we can reframe our knowledge about the city by highlighting its marginalized stories.