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A Land of Youth: Nationhood and the Image of the Child in the National Film Board of Canada's Still Photography Division
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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O n june 27, 1964, the still photography Division of the National Film Board of Canada (nfb) released a photo story entitled “Canada’s Future Belongs to Them” (fig. 4.1). Produced and distributed to mark Dominion Day, this pictorial features eight photographs of exuberantly happy children, apparently selected to demonstrate the country’s harmonious cultural and geographical diversity. The children are pictured alone or at play in small groups, together forming a youthful and ebullient“imagined community.”1 Reflecting that pictorial optimism, the brief accompanying text announces that, although entering its ninety-eighth year,“Canada is still a land of youth”: Canada’s next generation will have its own special legacy. A wide, rich land of promise , a multi-racial population to nourish the roots of tolerance, a broad foundation of knowledge, wisdom, technology and freedom upon which to build the future and explore the widening avenues of philosophy and adventure. Their heritage will be the natural beauty of vast woodland vistas, the clear waters of millions of lakes, the freshness of wilderness rivers, the ruggedness of mountain ranges and arctic expanse. They will inherit good, rich soil to sustain many people, untold wealth in sub-surface rocks, valuable tools of learning and room to build. This Canada—nearly 100 years old—has a future dependent on the outlook, energy and knowledge of its youngest citizens—the adult Canadians of the world of tomorrow. In image and text,“Canada’s Future Belongs to Them”draws a correspondence between childhood and the nation. Indeed, the scenes of children at play and the textual references to Canada’s “good, rich soil” situate children within the country’s very earth. These children are presented as markers of Canadian identity, the citizenry as a whole, and the country’s aspirations. There has long been a connection between modern discourses of childhood and the Canadian state. As Neil Sutherland has demonstrated, by the 1870s many reformers A LAND OF YOUTH Nationhood and the Image of the Child in the National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division CAROL PAYNE 85 espoused the belief that the well-being of the country as a whole rested with the health and nurturing of young children.2 In subsequent generations, child welfare became central to government policy. Indeed, the country’s first universal social program (the family allowance, which was instituted in the 1940s) was designed specifically to ensure the care of all Canadian children.3 More recently, the government of Stephen Harper has attempted to implement controversial child-care legislation, which Harper’s Conservative Party promoted as a signature policy proposal during the 2006 federal election. But in all these examples, children not only are the concrete subjects of legislative policy, they are also invoked because of the loaded symbolic implications of childhood. This essay will explore the signification of the image of childhood and how it has been mobilized to serve the project of Canadian nationhood. As a case study I will 86 carol payne FIGURE 4.1 National Film Board of Canada, Still Photography Division, “Canada’s Future Belongs to Them,” Photo Story 367 (June 27, 1964). (Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa) [54.82.44.149] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:21 GMT) examine photographs and photo stories dating from the 1950s through the 1960s, such as “Canada’s Future Belongs to Them,” from the archive of the nfb’s Still Photography Division. Over its full history—spanning from 1941 to 1984—the division commissioned and disseminated some 200,000 photographs, as well as lavish pictorial publications , exhibitions, and hundreds of narrativized photo stories. Childhood is a prominent trope within the division’s enormous visual archive of the nation. Children appear in pictorials devoted to everything from multiculturalism policies and immigration to tourism, education, and health care, and from scientific research to agriculture and industrial production. I will argue that throughout these promotionals, the division employed the image of the child as a potent sign of Canadian citizenry and national aspirations. During the course of the period I trace here, strategies for representing children changed dramatically. In the 1950s and early 1960s, images of children reflect facets of expository documentary seen in contemporary, didactic nfb films of the time.4 Here, images and pictorials are instructional and formalized; in these images, children serve as models of an idealized citizenry. These photographs embody a view of Canadians as malleable beings in need of the paternalistic protection and guidance of...