| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Founded | St. John's (1905) |
| Headquarters | St. Johns, Newfoundland, Canada |
| Key people | Anthony Maurice Tooton, Anthony Raymond Tooton, Anthony Geoffrey Tooton, Anthony McGrath Tooton |
Tooton's Photography, commonly known simply as Tooton's, was a photography retailer in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador, from the early 1900s until 1995.
The company was founded in 1905 as the "Parisian Photographic Studio" by Anthony Maurice Tooton (1886–1971) in St. John's. Tooton immigrated from Damascus, Syria in 1903 after studying photography in Paris.
After five years of traveling door to door across the island, initially taking portraits in addition to running his flagship store on Water Street, Tooton, at the age of 21, left for Rochester, New York to meet with George Eastman of the Eastman Kodak Company. While he merely intended to ask Eastman for the exclusive distribution rights to all Kodak product for Newfoundland, Eastman was so impressed with Tooton that he not only granted him the exclusive distribution rights on all Kodak product (a monopoly which would last until Confederation in 1949) but also gave him the exclusive right to use the Kodak name and marks on all major storefronts and materials. These relationships with Eastman and others helped keep Tooton's business up-to-date with photo technology.
Tooton's passion for photography and acumen as a businessman made the name synonymous with photography, Tooton himself appearing on the popular Ed Sullivan Show.[1] The company continued to experience growth in the following years and became a significant family endeavor. Before his death in 1971, Anthony Maurice Tooton passed the family business onto his son, Anthony Raymond Tooton (Ray), who grew the company significantly before subsequently handing it down to his own son, Anthony Geoffrey Tooton (Geoff), who brought the company to greater heights expanding it into other markets and mediums and continuing to maintain a dominant market share.
Plagued with the pressures and changing conditions the photographic industry was subjected to in the late '80s and onwards, and those felt by the Kodak company specifically,[2][3][4][5][6] Tooton's was forced to close its doors in November 1995.
At the time of its closure Tooton's had numerous retail locations in operation in the St. John's area, including at all major shopping malls, and throughout the province. Initially it was rumoured that a national chain such as Black's might buy the company's remnants, but this never materialized. Some locations later reopened under a number of different names and owners, but with the rise of digital photography, most of those stores eventually closed for good.
The Tooton legacy lives on; Anthony Tooton IV runs a media and production company, Tooton Films, in Toronto, Ontario. Tooton is currently producing a documentary film about Tooton's Photography, the Tooton family, and the history of photography in Newfoundland.[7]
