Author: Aaron T. Francis
March 2026 marks the seventh anniversary of Vintage Black Canada (VBC), a growing, publicly accessible digital archive on Instagram of approximately 500 images, a dozen home videos, and an award-winning film Temple of Love. VBC documents the transnational modern history of the African Diaspora in Canada with specific reference to my hometown of Kitchener-Waterloo.
How it all started
When I think about why I started the Instagram page, it had a lot to do with missing my grandfather, Roy Francis, who had passed away three months earlier. He was an aeronautics engineer by day and a self-taught photographer of Black families in Waterloo Region who, by night, would develop his own images. He was my hero. When I founded VBC, he passed suddenly and without warning. The loss was compounded by the realization that I could no longer turn to him with questions about “back home” — Jamaica — and our family history there. But I found some solace in the thousands of reggae records, cassette tapes and Black portraits he left behind, a collection that was almost trashed before I intervened.
Given all that I have experienced during these years of stewardship, I am grateful for the opportunity to reflect — especially on how much has changed since 2019, and how much has not. Back then, at the onset, I really did not have anyone I could look to for support, or even a thumbs up to let me know I was on the right track. This lane did not exist. There were, of course, some examples online of major organizations posting the work of legendary photographers like American Jamel Shabazz and Gordon Parks; and Canadian Zun Lee had made a name for himself with his astounding collection of Black film photography, and similarly, Renata Cherlise had also gained a global audience with her Black Archives, but what I wanted to do was different; I was really interested in sharing my family’s archive and I wanted to share Black Canadiana.
VBC is for the people
When visiting the VBC archive today, users are met with a description of the page as an “art gallery.” I always wanted to work at an art gallery and struggled to find a place for my vision in that world. I did not yet understand that what I was doing was stewarding an archive, not necessarily creating one
Finally, nostalgia was also part of the inspiration behind VBC. By 2019, a steady procession of police killings of unarmed Black people had made me feel a sense of grief, that feeling had become almost routine, and I was also angry. Names like Philando Castile were already seared into memory; soon Stephon Clark, Botham Jean and Atatiana Jefferson were added to the list of unarmed, murdered Black people. Each case reinforced the same dispiriting feeling that Black lives in North America are disposable to people outside our communities.
VBC as a response
If the dominant imagery of Black existence circulating in the media consisted of Black crime and Black death, then I believed that by sharing candid, everyday photographs from the past, it could be my humble contribution to remap and counter the prevailing cultural narrative. The archive offers something else; it offers evidence of ordinary joy, dignity and survival — a visual record that insists that Black lives have always been fuller and more human than the dominant narrative allows. For this intervention to truly matter, however, I felt that it could not remain purely digital; it had to become tangible, and it had to expand beyond an Instagram page and take up space beyond the screen.
Photo by Roy Francis
My first two exhibitions took place at Black Artists Network and Dialogue (BAND) Gallery, in large part because of support from Glodeane Brown who introduced my work to Karen Carter. Further, my contributions to the Art Gallery of Ontario also occurred because Karen introduced me to Dr. Julie Crooks. My first published piece of writing about the archive came about because former Toronto Metropolitan University fashion professor, Kimberly Jenkins gave me a shot through her Fashion and Race Database. Moreover, I came to understand myself as an archivist because Melissa J. Nelson showed me a path forward.
The power of Black women
Vintage Black Canada would not have reached an audience without the guidance, generosity and intellectual leadership of Black women at every stage of its growth. Throughout this work, my mother has been my most essential collaborator — helping me identify family members, and, at times, providing me with the context needed to turn my photographs into historical artifacts.
Black women in my life have been a Godsend.
In hindsight, what I have received from Black women has been more than opportunities; they have also provided apprenticeship. They (and many others) have schooled me on how to move through institutions with clarity and purpose – how to frame the work, who to speak with, when to ask questions, and when to wait. For a Black artist without inherited access to these spaces, this guidance has been formative. It has demystified the system of art and archiving, which has made my participation possible.
The future is what you make it
In 2019, when I was applying to programs at the University of Waterloo, there were few pathways to explore Black studies, and I had not yet thought of cultural memory work as academic scholarship. Today, I am a fifth-year PhD student in Global Governance at Waterloo’s Balsillie School of International Affairs. Even though VBC does not directly relate to my doctoral research, I sometimes joke with my dissertation supervisor that if I had been able to pursue Black Studies as a disciplinary focus, I might already be finished.
Over time, however, my confidence has grown and is aligned with the labour I have put into creating VBC. My research focus has also shifted, from an earlier emphasis on Chinese foreign policy in the Caribbean to an examination of how cultural and spiritual movements shape political life, using Jamaica and the rise of Rastafari as a case study. This case study also reflects the same questions about power, memory, and legitimacy that continuously inspire VBC.
By pairing my doctoral research with archival practice, I am now able to work on a different level, giving all that I have done legitimacy and arguably this has helped open institutional doors such as invitations to speak at libraries and cultural institutions, most recently at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, for example. This kind of credibility has also translated into pedagogy in the classroom where I was able to shape the creation of a course, titled Pan-African Global Politics, and I am also a founding faculty member of the Black Studies program at the University of Waterloo, which launched in 2022.
Over the last two years, Pan African Global Politics and the related public lectures I have given have allowed me to create space for archival work, cultural history and political theory to finally sit in tandem rather than in parallel.If there is a lesson that ties these experiences together, it is a simple one: if you do not see the thing you believe should exist, it is your job to create it.
About the Author:
Aaron T. Francis is a doctoral student at the Balsillie School of International Affairs at the University of Waterloo researching the influence of Rastafari culture on Jamaican foreign policy. Aaron is also a community archivist, curator and the founder of Vintage Black Canada.
Founded in 2019, Vintage Black Canada is a multidisciplinary creative archive that documents the transnational modern history of the African Diaspora in Canada. Art, video and photographs from this initiative have been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario (2021, 2023), University of Waterloo Art Gallery (2023), Maclean’s magazine (2023) and in several award winning documentaries including CBC’s Black Life: Untold Stories (2023) and CityTV’s Black Community Mixtapes (2023).