Mattie Gunterman

Mattie Gunterman, né Ida Madeline Warner, was raised in La Crosse, Wisconsin where she learned photography from her uncle, Charles Warner, a commercial photographer. At 17 she left home to move to Seattle, and in 1891 married William Gunterman whose brother Frank gave her further instruction in photography. The Guntermans moved to British Columbia in 1898; she and her husband worked as cooks for a mining camp called Nettie-L. Gunterman documented the lives of Canadian pioneers through photographs of herself, family and acquaintances in the Lardeau Valley of British Columbia. When the mine closed in 1910 Gunterman took fewer photographs, and in 1927 a house fire destroyed many of her negatives. Gunterman's images were never publicly shown during her lifetime. In the early 1960s some of her photographs were donated to the Vancouver Public Library. There have since been exhibitions of her work in British Columbia and Saskatchewan.