(14 June 1946-5 Feb. 1997), photographer. (Jennifer Harper, Mrs Brian Merrett) Born in Toronto. Parents: J. Russell Harper and his wife Elizabeth Goodchild. Jennifer Harper attended Lisgar Collegiate Institute, Ottawa, and graduated from McGill University, 1967. In England, she studied photography for two years at the Guildford School of Art, in Surrey. During her working life, employment included teaching photography at Champlain College, and working for Tourism Quebec. Notably, Jennifer Harper attracted widespread attention by editing a collection of the photographs of Duncan Donovan, the Alexandria photographer, under the title of City Work at Country Prices (Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1977). Not since the days when Ralph Connor was writing about them, an Ottawa journalist declared, had the “Glengarrians drawn such national publicity as from the new book of portraits.” (Heward) Jennifer Harper had an exhibit in the spring of 1975 of Donovan’s photographs at the Galerie Optica in Montreal and in the late summer of 1975 at the Nor’Westers and Loyalist Museum in Williamstown and in June 1977 at the Art Gallery of Ontario. On Donovan she also published “The Portraits of Duncan Donovan: ‘City Work at Country Prices’,” Artscanada (Dec. 1974) and “Cradle to the Grave: Intimations of Mortality through a Turn-of-the Century Lens,” The Canadian, 21 May 1977.

     Jennifer Harper did not claim that Donovan was a great photographer or a major artistic figure; instead, she emphasized the importance of his photographs as records of social history. However, the suggestion of artistic excellence was perhaps implicit in her Donovan publications, and Glengarry admirers of Donovan have been ready since to see him as a creative artist. As a result of Jennifer Harper’s work, Glengarrians have come to see Donovan photographs as collectors’ items: a market has been generated and defined. By way of criticism, it may even be argued that Jennifer Harper’s particular selection of photographs for publication emphasized their social message at the expense of Donovan’s extraordinary capacity for capturing character and producing a sense of the aliveness of the people looking out from the photographs.

     Jennifer Harper died at her home in Montreal from abdominal cancer, aged only fifty. She was buried at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian cemetery, South Lancaster. She was married 13 Sept. 1974, at Montreal, to Brian Merrett. The marriage was terminated by divorce, Dec. 1992. (two children) Jennifer Harper became, after them, the owner of her parents’ fine home near Alexandria. She is described in her two Glengarry News obituaries as being “of Montreal and the Second of Kenyon.”

Glengarry News 12 Feb. 1997 (two notices, both under surname Harper) * private information * Burt Heward, “’City Work at Country Prices’,” Ottawa Citizen 25 June 1977, on Jennifer Harper (portrait) and the Donovan volume * Galerie Optica exhibit: dust jacket of City Work at Country Prices * 1975 Williamstown exhibit: GN 21 Aug. 1975, Standard Freeholder 23 Aug. 1975 * 1977 Art Gallery of Ontario exhibit: Le Carillon 25 May 1977 * publication noted of The Canadian article and City Work at Country Prices, GN 26 May & 27 July 1977