Prince Edward Island has 25 libraries, and photographer Doug Dumais has explored all of them.

Circulations, his exhibition at the Charlottetown Library Learning Centre, shines a spotlight on some of the Island’s smaller libraries.

He says he set up for a few hours in each one, photographing the spaces and talking with the librarians about their histories.

The project started because Dumais wanted to find out how P.E.I. ended up with so many libraries in such a small place. 

‘A public good’

“The Carnegie Corporation of New York was doing these pilot projects of rural libraries,” Dumais said in a recent interview with Island Morning’s Laura Chapin.

“So there was a plan of putting libraries all across the United States, and they wanted kind of a nice space that they could test out these regional libraries.”

That space was Prince Edward Island.

In 1933, the corporation hired a librarian named Nora Bateson from McGill University. Her job was to set up a regional library system over three years.

“She would go to these communities and talk to women’s organizations, and kind of garner support for libraries,” Dumais said.

He says a lot of these libraries she helped set up at the beginning were in people’s homes, or in available spaces in the communities.

“She would drive around to the small communities with a very early car. You can imagine in the ’30s, that she modified [the car] to hold 300 books,” said Dumais.

When Bateson started, there were three libraries on P.E.I. By the end of the three years, there were 22.

When she published her report on the project, it showed that people were taking out thousands of books over a period of several months, making the program a resounding success.

Bateson was a tireless champion of rural libraries. The Circulations exhibit includes a pamphlet Bateson published in 1944, called Rural Canada Needs Libraries.

“It was sort of like a manifesto for after the war, how important these community spaces would be as we kind of rebuild what Canadian identity looks like.… This idea that you have to provide a public good for your people, and that’s what democracy looks like, and that’s something that shouldn’t be taken for granted,” said Dumais.

Exhibiting P.E.I.’s past

Dumais likes photographing subjects associated with change: construction sites, shorelines and now libraries, because many of the Island’s libraries have shifted from small spaces set aside in people’s homes to their own buildings, changing hands and contents over the years.

“It’s up to communities still today to provide the spaces.… It could be an old P.E.I. Liquor location like in Stratford, or it could be an old train station like in Alberton,” said Dumais.

He loved touring the libraries, and he says it’s tough to choose a favourite, but his is probably the Alberton Public Library because of that historic location.

From the moment her father took his Leica camera from around his neck and gave it to Dorothy Bohm as she boarded a train out of Nazi-occupied Lithuania in June 1939, she seemed fated to her vocation. Bohm – then Dorothea Israelit – was 14 at the time and the journey took her to England as a refugee; she lodged with a family in Hassocks in the heart of the Sussex countryside. She did not see her parents – eventually sent by Russian forces, separately, to detention camps in Siberia – for another 20 years. The separation, she later said, gave her a profound sense of impermanence; the Leica felt like one antidote to that: “The photograph fulfils my deep need to stop things from disappearing,” she wrote. “It makes transience less painful.”

Over her long life – Bohm died last year aged 98 – that need never left her. This picture, taken in Lisbon in 1996, is included in a small exhibition and a wonderful retrospective book of the photographer’s work, Dorothy Bohm at 100, in which notable friends and fellow photographers pay tribute to her pioneering influence. Her career began when she set up a portrait studio in Manchester in 1946, but she subsequently travelled extensively with her camera across Europe and beyond, before settling in London, where she was a prime mover in creating the Photographers’ Gallery in 1971.

She had a consistent eye for the uncanny and the absurd. This image, with its foregrounding of the toy flower spinners, and the newspaper seller keeping his stock dry behind plastic sheeting, was not unusual in keeping the viewer guessing for a moment. Bohm was always aware that the surfaces of the world did not tell the full story. “Sometimes I want a picture to ask why,” she said, “and not to be too easily deciphered and decoded, because our lives are often like that.”

• Dorothy Bohm at 100 is published by Beam Editions on 20 June (£35). A print sale exhibition of her work is at the Photographers’ Gallery, London W1 until 23 June