Museum Exhibit Features Photos Showing 'Everyday People' Since New West's Beginnings

On now, at the New Westminster Museum until the end of June, is ReFrame, a photographic study of the stories of the everyday people of New Westminster over the last 125 plus years....with a particular focus on people of diverse backgrounds - Indigenous people and immigrants to the city. In this program, Susan Millar talks with Michele Taylor, curator of the show. She underlines that New Westminster has been a multicultural city from its beginnings, although it's hard to tell from looking at the photographic record. Finding photographs that give hints about, and uplift the stories of these people, was not a straightforward activity. After all, it's those who are prominent and well-off who are the ones that were photographed for the most part in the past. The museum has 230,000 photographs in it's collection, and it was quite a task to find pictures that provided a glimpse into the mostly hidden lives of a broader slice of New Westminster's residents, according to Michele. Simultaneously, and really of necessity, the exhibit traces the history of photography in the city... the principal photographers and how their photography was defined to a large extent by their equipment and it's capability. We see how the imagery evolved with the evolution of cameras over the century plus. This exhibit is a continuation of the New Westminster Museum and Archives' work to shift the focus of their changing displays away from the colonial stories that have dominated these institutions. As Michele explains, museums were really started as colonial institutions, but there has been a broad movement away from that today.