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.