"Knock on Wood": Creating a Decentred Finding Aid for the Montgomery Collection of Caribbean Photographs at the Art Gallery of Ontario

The Montgomery Collection of Caribbean Photographs comprises over 3,000 photographic objects dating from circa 1839 to circa 1940. It was amassed by Patrick Montgomery from 2005 to 2011 and was later acquired by the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2019. This project focuses on cataloguing 754 materials of the Montgomery Collection and creating a bilingual English-Spanish finding aid. It covers collection items dating circa 1839 to circa 1890 from the territories in the northern half of the Circum-Caribbean--the Bahamas, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Turks and Caicos. The finding aid addresses the sociohistorical context in which the collection material was produced, the AGO's acquisition, a summary of the catalogued material, intellectual arrangements of the material by geographic location depicted and by relevant subject, and biographical information about the makers. Including the spreadsheet catalogue with the scope of collection materials to this thesis.