gallery

Joan M. Schwartz
Photographic Reflections:
Nature, Landscape, and Environment

WILLIAM NOTMAN'S Young Canada is a visual metaphor for the foundational myths of the nascent Canadian nation. Posed against a painted backdrop in Notman's Montreal studio, his son, William McFarlane Notman, sits in a snowy landscape, hood pulled tight, snowshoes at the ready. The glass negative waved through a mist of white paint produced the raging blizzard. Young Canada can easily be dismissed as kitsch, but this use of photography is more evocation than record. It represents an opportunity to explore the ways in which photographs have expressed and mediated engagement with the physical world, and thereby helped to forge and perpetuate ideas about environment and environmental concerns.	1
In Canada, photography has played an active role in the processes by which people have come to picture landscape, invest it with meaning, and articulate their relationship to it for more than 150 years. The photographs in this gallery have been selected to show how Canadian nature was imagined in early photography, and how it has been reimagined of late. They do not constitute a historical overview nor are they intended to highlight environmental change. Such a survey would have included images of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s on the Saskatchewan prairie, the Winnipeg floods of 1950 and 1997, and the Illecillewaet Glacier, a "must-see" tourist destination photographed repeatedly since the nineteenth century. Chosen with the intention of drawing out methodological approaches rather than tracing chronological developments, these mid-nineteenth- and late-twentieth-century images allow us to probe beyond their visual content to see what was brought to their creation, circulation, viewing, preservation, and use. Considered individually, comparatively, and collectively, they highlight aesthetic concerns and photographic fictions, changing perceptions, and contemporary politics.	2
Courtesy: McCord Museum of Canadian History, Notman Photographic Archives, I-24434. FIGURE 1. William Notman (1826–1891). Young Canada [William McFarlane Notman], Montreal, Quebec, 1867. Wet collodion negative, 170 × 120 mm.
This series of close readings explores how ideas central to Canadian environmental history have been reflected in, and communicated by, photographs. It goes beyond their presentation of historical facts or celebration of wilderness aesthetics to suggest how photographs have participated in the processes by which the human encounter with the physical world has been shaped and reshaped. If the difference between environment and landscape rests on sets of shared meanings embedded in and expressed through social practices, then it is well worth asking how photographs—either as images that generate shared meanings, or as both records and products of social practices—have helped to constitute or contest the social meaning(s) of water, rocks, and animals, snow and ice, trees, forest, and prairie.	3
THE PRAIRIE, on the Banks of Red River, Looking South is a monument to treelessness. Taken by surveyor and photographer Humphrey Lloyd Hime near what is now Winnipeg, Manitoba, this austere image of prairie topography reduces the landscape to what Canadian novelist W. O. Mitchell has called "the least common denominator of nature": earth and sky.1 To our eyes, it is an unrelentingly stark image, but to view it as desolate would be a misreading. Rather, its meaning, as well as the cultural value and projected use of the land it portrayed, was intimately linked to historically situated assumptions about land and land use brought to the act of looking.	. . .