Picturing Toronto: Photography and the Making of a Modern City by Sarah Bassnett (review)

In this beautifully produced book, Sarah Bassnett explores the engagement of photography with modernity and urbanisation, examining images of early twentieth-century Toronto and Torontonians, and focusing especially on Arthur Goss, Toronto’s extraordinary city photographer. Bassnett locates Goss and fellow Toronto photographers as part of the project of liberalism that has so concerned Canadian historians of late. Her argument, familiar to cultural studies, but perhaps less appreciated among historians, is that photography is an argument for reform, an influence on modernisation processes, and critically important in shaping how individuals see themselves and perform the identities they would like others to see in them.

Bassnett focuses first on Goss’s photographs of the route for the Bloor Street Viaduct, Toronto’s project for opening up land east of the Don. Like photographs that accompanied reports of colonial expeditions, Goss’s images justified government’s expropriation of land, demonstrated the unproductiveness of vacant land, and indirectly persuaded voters to accept the financial implications of a major public project. Yet even in this instrumentalist survey, Goss could not escape his own passion for pictorialist photography – landscape art – by turns sensitive to depth of field or soft focus. Next, Bassnett examines visuality in city planning, comparing the Civic Guild of Art’s modest advocacy of a city plan for Toronto with Chicago’s fully-fledged plan, both published in 1909. In Chicago, Daniel Burnham’s plans were ‘rendered’ accessible through colour lithographs of a future fantasy city. In Toronto the Civic Guild selected photographs of world cities they aspired to emulate alongside commissioned photographs of Toronto sites they wished to improve. The former were invariably bird’s eye views, or long vistas; the latter were flat, frontal views, where ugly eyesores blocked off the viewer’s sight line.

Turning to ‘Liberal Subjects’, Bassnett first continues her focus on city sites, discussing images in public health reports and citizen-sponsored surveys of overcrowding, insanitary conditions and poverty, and noting their equivalence to contemporaneous medical photography. Reform-minded photographs, artfully constructed to emphasise disorder or imply what lay unphotographed behind shabby façades, contrasted with William James’s journalistic photographs which gave poverty a human face, and Lawren Harris’s paintings which aestheticised slum housing. A chapter on ‘Framing Citizenship’ compares representations of new immigrants in populist newspapers, which associated non-British immigrants with poverty, with the Globe’s liberal imagery which drew on the socio-anthropological photographic language of ‘types’ of ‘new citizen’ to support a national project of acculturation. Meanwhile, posed wedding portraits showed how immigrants presented themselves as typical Canadians. This focus on portraiture returns us to Goss’s personal practice. Photographs of his own family, of eminent Torontonians, and of schoolchildren, mothers and babies, and playground supervisors were all undergirded by the same liberal epistemology.

Lavishly illustrated, Picturing Toronto valuably exemplifies photography’s role in the making of modern life, but is also enjoyable as a work of art in its own right.