The Magic Box: The Eccentric Genius of Hannah Maynard

Claire Weissman Wilks’ incredible look at the Eccentric Genius Of Hannah Maynard.

The Magic Box is a fascinating presentation of the life and work of an exceptional photographer working in the days of the gold rush in Victoria, British Columbia. Hannah Maynard’s  technical achievement is remarkable; her surreal images of herself and thousands of children’s faces falling in fountains of water are bizarre. She was a genius far ahead of her time, employing all the new techniques, pushing them to their limits. She was obsessed with herself, constructing montages and formal studies full of sardonic humor; picture after picture shows this middle-class stern-faced woman, always in the same black dress, neurotically experimenting with time and space, with fragmentation of the self, staring at her own image in parlor-room settings, perplexed and unmocking. These photographs, however, also constitute an extraordinary record of the gold rush times along the west coast — pictures taken on field trips to the ice-packs and along the new railroad construction, photographs of sedate ladies and mug shots for the police, sailing ships and Chinese mandarins, old stoves and stuffed animals. there is almost six decades of work in his unique collection, presented here for the first time in this tribute to her genius.