Renowned photographer is 1st victim identified by police in Old Montreal fire

Camille Maheux, a 76-year-old woman who was the first victim to be recovered from the Old Montreal building ravaged by last week's fire, was a renowned photographer whose work is part of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts's collection. 

Maheux's identity was confirmed by Montreal police Insp. David Shane Wednesday afternoon on Place D'Youville, outside the three-storey, 15-unit building.

Her body was recovered Sunday in a complex search to comb through the building's rubble with the help of a crane. Five more people are still missing and nine others were taken to hospital, two of whom suffered serious injuries.

A friend and colleague of Maheux, Marik Boudreau, said in an email Wednesday that Maheux had lived in the building for more than 30 years. 

She said Maheux was born in Saint-Georges in the Beauce region south of Quebec City and that she had studied cinematography at the Institut Supérieur des Arts, an arts college in Belgium. 

"She was a documentary photographer, an excellent portraitist and a pioneer of intimate documentaries. She primarily photographed the women's movement, LGBTQ communities and marginalized people starting in the early 1970s," Boudreau wrote. 

Maheux's work was exhibited across Canada, Europe and in Brazil, where she was based on and off in the 1980s, Boudreau said. Maheux even hosted a program on Brazilian music on CIBL, a francophone community radio station in Montreal.

Three of her short films are available to watch on Vithèque, the streaming platform for Vidéographe, a Montreal-based centre for artists. One of them, Deux, is part of a series on femininity, art and couples. It takes place in an artist's loft and features poet Geneviève Letarte. 

"She was known and recognized by her colleagues," Boudreau said.

Sunday, Michel Béliveau visited the building to bring a single white rose for Maheux. Inside the flower's plastic packaging was a photo he'd taken of her at her loft in 2006. 

Béliveau said he met Maheux that year at the Gingras-Lindsay rehabilitation centre in Montreal's Glenmount neighbourhood, after he happened to have been hit by a fire truck. Maheux was there after a surgery to her hip or knee, he believes. 

They became friends because Béliveau used to play piano at the centre and Maheux later invited him to her Old Montreal loft because of his love of architecture. 

"I remember that all the stairs inside were made of wood — all everywhere was wood," he said. Béliveau remembered Maheux had a set of evacuation stairs outside one of her windows on the second floor, and he had noticed there weren't any on the other side of the building. 

"I don't know if she had a chance to get out because they said on the news people didn't hear any fire alarms go off," he said. "It's so sad. I'm devastated."