The Lens of Time: A Repeat Photography of Landscape Change in the Canadian Rockies (review)

The Lens of Time is a layperson’s history text masquerading as a repeat photography book. The book is about the people of the Canadian Rockies and their interactions with the landscape in which they live. Photographs and text describe the changes that have occurred over the past two hundred years in a broad region, sweeping west from Calgary and Edmonton, through the Rocky Mountains to the Columbia River. Repeated photographs and corresponding historical narratives are concentrated in the towns of Banff, Lake Louise, and Jasper, and along the road and rail corridors connecting the populated areas of the Rockies. The majority of the photographs detail changes in human settlements and infrastructure. Focus is given to railroads, abandoned mining and ranching efforts, and the rapid growth of urban centres, while the remaining images describe ecological histories and document changes in glaciers, the elevation of the alpine treeline, and fire frequency. In both tone and detail, what has changed in the landscape, rather than what remains unaffected by the passage of time, is the dominant subject of this book.

Two themes are extensively woven throughout the book. The first points to the differences in land management practices between the First Nations and the European settlers. In both cases the authors argue that humans constitute a keystone species and that both cultures have played a dominant role in shaping the Rocky Mountain landscape. The second is the role that National Parks, as idea and practice, have played in shaping the social and ecological histories of the Canadian Rockies.

Repeated photo-pairs, grouped into geographic regions, alternate with short chapters that provide a deeper written analysis and description of several themes referenced by the images. The repeated photographs are used primarily as reference points, while accompanying text describes specific and parallel events surrounding the photographs. Rarely do the authors explicate specific differences seen in the repeated images. Rather, the reader is left to find the changes or lack of changes between historical and modern views.

While the majority of the book’s modern views precisely replicate the historical images, there are notable discrepancies in more than a dozen of the repeated images. Most often, the modern and historical images have been cropped to different sizes. While this suggests slightly less attention to detail than is given in other repeat photography volumes, it does little to diminish the overall impact of the repeated photo-pairs. However, a few of the modern images appear to be taken from significantly different vantage points.

In a view taken from just outside the town of Banff, the modern image shows a log ranch building beneath the towering Cascade Mountain. The modern image has been captured at a significantly greater distance from the base of the mountain than the original and consequently a highway interchange is visible in the foreground. This unacknowledged and significant manipulation of what the viewer sees in the before and after views implies a bias towards documenting specific changes that ultimately suggest a general trend of increased industrialization of the landscape. Similarly, a repeated image of the Pocahontas Highway in Jasper National Park has been taken 300 metres from the original location. Though acknowledged, this set of views deliberately paints a picture of increased human presence on the landscape. An accurate replication of the historical image would likely show the re-vegetation of an old roadbed, while the modern image shows increasing industrialization. Both narratives have occurred in the Rockies, and the authors’ choice likely identifies the more common occurrence. However, the viewer of repeated images must trust that they replicate historical views as accurately as possible. The authors stretch this trust and in doing so imbue the book with a more subjective tone than the style of the work suggests.

The book’s concluding chapter presents a synthesis of over a dozen change processes that have shaped the ecological and cultural landscape documented by...