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As we evolve and find new ways to serve the city we love, I’d like you to get to know this remarkable team of photographers we have here.
John Henry Sidaway photographed in his bedroom on Curatteau St. circa 1967. Brothers Geoff, Mark and Dave are reflected in the dresser mirror in the background. Dave Sidaway’s first photograph ever… taken with his dad’s Nikon. Photo by Dave Sidaway
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The attached image is a remarkable document. As you’ll read, it’s the first photo Dave Sidaway ever took. It’s of his grandfather, and was taken with an assist from his father, Len Sidaway, who’d been a Gazette photographer himself for three years by the time his son took it in 1967.
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Though I’d already bought the book, the first History Through Our Eyes column I read through prior to publication was for May 16, 2022. It was about poet Frank Scott and the photo had been taken to illustrate a story we’d run about him in 1982. It was five days after I started here as editor in chief, and the thing that struck me first and hardest was the photo credit: John Mahoney. I asked our editorial page editor, Edie Austin, who had been writing and researching HTOE since it debuted in 2019, whether that was the same John Mahoney who still worked for us, knowing it couldn’t possibly be.
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But of course it was. The same John Mahoney who took the picture of Valérie Plante getting out of a Nissan Leaf that ran in Friday’s paper.
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From that point on, whenever I took a last look at HTOE before it was published, I’d keep an eye out for the photo credit, and they were all there. Pierre Obendrauf with his 1983 picture of a reunion of 12 members from the team that won five straight Stanley Cups, Allen McInnis getting a shot of some of the last tokens used before the toll booths came down from Champlain Bridge in 1990, and Dave Sidaway capturing 71-year-old Montreal Yiddish novelist Chava Rosenfarb in 1994.
I was just bowled over by the sheer scope of their experience and the images they’d captured of Montreal and elsewhere (look out for John Mahoney’s 1991 image from Derwernache, Ethiopia, we’ll be running on Jan. 21).
So I decided to shift our focus from subject to photographer, and replace HTOE with Photographic Memory, having our no-less-impressive reporters interview them every week about how they got the pictures, and what it was like being there.
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Like many of you, I’ve been a fan of the HTOE project, initiated by former editor in chief Lucinda Chodan. Running daily throughout 2019, and then resuming weekly in the fall of 2021, it was a great reminder of Montreal through the ages captured by Gazette photographers.
But as we evolve and find new ways to serve the city we love, I’d like you to get to know this remarkable team of photographers we have here — as I have over these past seven months — who continue to record Montreal’s daily life, its triumphs, its tragedies and its continually captivating beauty, creating a uniquely fascinating, uniquely valuable record of our own lives and times.
I’d like to thank Austin for the remarkable work she’s done on HTOE, both on the original series and the weekly version, and invite you all along for this weekly conversation from the most experienced team of photojournalists, not only in this city, but I’d wager in any other city in the country.
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