Agent of Change or Marketing Bait: The Photograph in 100 Photos That Changed Canada

At a time when Canadian history is no longer being taught in some high schools, popular history "coffee-table" books can serve a serious educational purpose. Equally, when digital images circulate in innumerable ways and in unfathomable numbers, historical photographs can help launch and anchor, clarify and complicate, reflect and construct popular and academic understandings of the past. The title of Mark Reid's book, 100 Photos That Changed Canada, holds out the promise of both a selection of iconic photographs that, in some way, changed the course of Canadian history or influenced the shape of Canadian society, and also a lesson in how to interrogate the power of images as devices of memory and tools of preservation. It does not deliver either. What it does offer is an interesting, if at times idiosyncratic, choice of images that serve as springboards to launch commentaries on defining moments or key people or memorable events in Canadian history. The result is a good idea gone awry. Incapable of living up to its title and hijacked by clever graphic design, the production deserves harsh criticism for what it is, and high praise for what it could have been. As such, it offers an opportunity to suggest how social historians can better bridge the word-image divide in their use of photographs as primary sources. It also confirms that you cannot judge a book by its title.

Expanding on the feature "10 Photos That Changed Canada" in a 2008 issue of the Beaver (Reid 2008), the book is divided into four parts: "The Road to Nationhood, 1847-1921"; "Forged in Fire, 1922-1955"; "In Search of Ourselves, 1956-1979"; and "Future Focus, 1980 to the Present." This periodization seems to have been chosen to ensure an equal distribution of photographs in each part, rather than to reflect a historically significant set of watershed developments. Even a quick survey of the photo credits reveals a heavy presentist bias. The nineteent and the first two decades of the twentieth century—a full half of the history of Canada since the invention of photography—get one quarter of the images, with only nine for the 60 years of the nineteenth century when, in fact, photography played an active role in the making of modern Canada. This skewed sense of historical time might have been justified had the book's focus on photojournalism been acknowledged; however, the sparse representation of images prior to the driving of the last spike at Craigellachie (Reid 2009, 19; pl. 8) ignores the reality that, in the mid-nineteenth century, photography was new and exciting. Sent through the mail, collected on travels, compiled into albums, exchanged with family and friends, and used as the basis of engravings in books and pictorial weeklies, photographs disseminated news and circulated ideas in visual form. Before the advent of photo-mechanical reproduction in the late nineteenth century and the digital technologies of the late twentieth, the photograph carried truth value and rhetorical clout far greater than that wielded in today's image-saturated and digitally manipulated world.

The photographs are given "voice" in this book by an A-list cast of Canadian contributors, whose names no doubt help to boost sales across a range of reading constituencies. Prominent historians Irving Abella, Michael Bliss, Margaret Conrad, Tim Cook, Jack Granatstein, Tina Loo, Des Morton, Winona Wheeler, and Brian Young collectively contributed one quarter of the texts, lending academic credentials to balance the popular appeal of public figures from the world of broadcasting and politics—Peter Desbarats, Don Newman, Peter Mansbridge, Tom Axworthy, Brian Tobin, and Deborah Grey—as well as familiar authors of popular history such as Charlotte Gray and Christopher Moore, and a host of writers, photojournalists, and contributors associated in some measure with Canada's National History Society and/or its publication the Beaver. Where, apart from Jim Burant, who manages the art and photography section of Library and Archives Canada, are the...