Northern Exposures: Photographing and Filming the Canadian North, 1920–45

Kerry Abel is a professor of history at Carleton University. She is the author of Drum Songs: Glimpses of Dene History, co-editor of Aboriginal Resource Use in Canada: Historical and Legal Aspects, and co-editor of Northern Visions: New Perspectives on the North in Canadian History.

Scan any book with historical content, popular or scholarly, published
in the last 40 years and one is bound to see photographs illustrating
the topic. Seldom, though, are those photographs well-integrated with
the text, and even more rarely are they analyzed for meaning or
significance. Most of us think of photographs as captured images of
reality. In recent years, however, a growing body of scholarly
literature has proposed that film and still photos are scarcely
unfiltered “truth.” Professional historian Peter Geller has applied
these ideas to a large, fascinating collection of images taken of the
Canadian North in the mid-20th century to demonstrate that visual
imagery conveys many levels of meaning and serves a multitude of
purposes.

To make these points, Geller has selected representatives of state,
church, and commerce, as well as an individual freelancer, who left
behind significant collections of still and moving images. He explains
in each case who the players were, the intended purpose of the
photography, and the historical context in which the images were made
and presented. Some 86 images are reproduced in the book and discussed.
We meet the men of the then newly formed Yukon and Northwest Territories
Branch in Ottawa, Anglican Bishop Archibald Fleming, the publicity
machine of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the indomitable Richard
Finnie as they make (or commission) northern images. Their purposes are
as varied as asserting sovereignty, publicizing the value of Christian
missions, constructing corporate public relations, and even simply
justifying the budget of an expanding bureaucracy. While some parts of
the analysis are more convincing than others, no one will come away from
this book looking at photographs or films in quite the same way again.

Perhaps appropriately, one of the book’s greatest strengths is its
visual design. The layout is imaginative and appealing, the archival
images are beautifully reproduced, the paper quality is high, and the
binding is good. Rarely do Canadian scholarly publishers succeed with
the physical presentation in this way, and UBC Press and Friesens
printing should be commended.