Paper short abstract:

National parks are key sites of identity and place making in Canada. In this paper I argue that despite attention to the stability and persistence of photographs of Canadian national parks, shifting visualities and fleeting moments structure archives and experience in parks.

Paper long abstract:

National parks are key sites of identity and place making in Canada. Photography plays a key role in the production of national parks, and both photography and national parks play a key role in the understanding of nature in Canada. Photography tends to support a myth of wilderness: the idea that national parks are stable, unchanging spaces, outside of the effects of human activity.

While recent scholarship argues there is a stability of photographic views in protected areas and other vacation destinations that make place, I found that shifting visualities and fleeting moments are present in both archives and experience in national parks in Canada. Drawing out one image from over four-hundred archival photographs of Waterton Lakes National Park I analyzed, I argue that key to understanding the social meaning of photography is to investigate the instability of photographic views. How does a relationship with place - imagined as fixed - actually change over time and how is this reflected in photographic history and present acts?

I build upon recent trends in visual anthropology that argue for an embodied understanding of the visual domain. My method is to investigate photographs by attempting to re-enact them: not only as images of something, or as objects we can hold, but also as acts grounded in place. I consider the photograph as event. To attempt to re-enact a photograph provides space to consider the non-discursive realities that exist beyond, or below, or through, this form of representation.