Geraldine Moodie

Geraldine Moodie, nee Fitzgibbon ( born October 31, 1854 in Toronto, Ontario, † October 4, 1945 in Midnapore, Alberta ) was a Canadian pioneer of photography. She was the first professional photographer who documented the lives of the Inuit across the Arctic Circle.

Life

Geraldine Moodie was born as one of six children of lawyer Charles Fitzgibbon and Agnes Dunbar Moodie illustrator in Toronto. After the early death of his father Geraldine and her family moved to the grandmother Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill 's sister. There, she helped her mother with the illustration of Parr Traill's book Canadian wildflowers.

During a stay in England she met her future husband, John Moodie, a distant relative and head of the North West Mounted Police ( NWMP ) of Canada, know. After their marriage in 1878 they lived in various border posts where Geraldine Moodie collected various plant species recorded and certain and photographing learned. In 1895 she was commissioned to photograph many places and attractions that were visited during a trip to the Prime Minister Mackenzie Bowell.

In connection with the Saskatchewan Rebellion, she made a series of portraits of Cree Indians and documented their ceremonies. They also held the everyday work of farmers and the NWMP in numerous recordings.

In 1904 she traveled to her husband in the Arctic. During her stay in Fullerton and Fort Churchill on Hudson Bay, they created a large number of portraits of Inuit. The only in 1970 rediscovered paintings are now part of the collections of the British Museum and the National Archives of Canada and are regarded as the first photographic evidence of the life of the indigenous people of the Northwest Territories.