Product Description

The striking black-and-white photographs in this collection chronicle a voyage through Canada's cultural past. Selected for thier aesthetic value as well as their historical interest, these photographs provide a unique visual portrait of the nation's early days.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1199988 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-22
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 64 pages

About the Author
Edward Cavell has worked with historical photography in Canada for more than thirty years. Once the curator at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in Banff, and author of seven illustrated histories, Edward Cavell has poured through many hundreds of thousands of photographs in archives, museums, and private collections across Canada and abroad. This book is drawn from the author's extensive and eclectic collection, and from reference prints belonging to numerous collections ranging from the Library and Archives Canada to the British Museum in England. His published works include Sometimes a Great Nation, Journeys to the Far West, and Rocky Mountain Madness.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Photographs have an amazing power to speak to us. Sometimes it is the skill of a talented photographer that captures a subject's soul. Sometimes the subjects are so striking that they overcome all of the technical limitations of the medium to give voice to an image that is etched indelibly onto our history. This, then, is an incidental history of Canada's First Nations, a voyage of discovery in small glimpses.As the images in this collection speak to us we must keep in mind what they do not say. By the 1850s, the barely decade-old medium of photography could capture many aspects of daily life in our emerging nation. But the cumbersome equipment, long exposure times, and the convoluted processes ensured that many events went unrecorded. Laughter, gestures, motion, and the height of the moment could not be recorded until the 20th century. Above all, the attitude of the dominant society and of the person taking the photograph greatly affected what we see today. Victorian Canada was not a particularly sensitive, accepting, or expansive society. The First Nations were pragmatically viewed as lost civilizations - doomed to vanish completely in the relentless march of time. Fortunately, our ancestors were wrong.This collection is not a definitive survey of Canada's First Nations; hundreds of groups across the country could not be represented here. It does, however, celebrate their significance in the development of our nation, as well as the contributions of the people who stood on the other side of the camera.