Michael Snow Scraps for the Soldiers, 2007

Zona Archives, Florence, 36 p., Offset, 1000 ex 30,5 x 24 cm

Michael Snow’s co-author of Scraps for the Soldiers is his aunt Dimple, who compiled the scrapbook in 1921, three years after having lost one of her brothers to the first World War. The pages of the book consist of family photographs taken between 1913 and 1921, when the Snows were vacationing in Ontario’s lake country. As Michael Snow writes in the book’s short introduction, “These photos are recordings of the happiness of the well-to-do (despite the tragic war in Europe) at a time (roughly 1890s to 1940s) when Toronto had its own, (not English, despite the great loyalty to the Empire and not American) special anglophone character.”