Canada, the Land That Shapes Us

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

This handsome volume of fine landscape photographs is a retrospective
celebration of Canada and of Malak Karsh’s 55-year career. Malak
arrived in Canada from the Middle East in 1937 and learned the
photographer’s art in his brother’s studio. In his preface, Yousuf
Karsh writes of his younger brother’s lifelong love affair with his
new country.

Malak’s images of Canada are, as usual, exceptional. Many of his
landscapes are symphonies of light empty of people; but the collection
also includes shots of maple sap being boiled down into syrup at Upper
Canada Village, the famous RCMP Musical Ride, and fishermen on New
Brunswick’s Miramichi River. “Sometimes, to capture the moment,”
Yousuf Karsh notes, “one must wait an eternity—until the light is
perfect, until the shadow is graphic, until the rain has stopped, or
until the view from the small, lurching airplane spirals towards the
decisive image.”

Also included in the book is a substantial essay by Peter Newman, who
quotes such writers as Marshall McLuhan, Northrop Frye, and Margaret
Atwood in his celebration of Canada. “We go outside to be alone, and
we go inside to be with people—a pattern that is antithetic not only
to Europeans but to all other cultures,” says McLuhan.

Canada, the Land That Shapes Us is a beautiful tribute to the country
and to the person who has captured its essence.