More than "competent description of an intractably empty landscape": A Strategy for Critical Engagement with Historical Photographs

Abstract

In the early autumn of 1858, Humphrey Lloyd Hime set up his camera and darktent not far from what is now Winnipeg, Manitoba, coated a sheet of glass with collodion, and produced a view, which was subsequently titled, The Prairie, on the Banks of Red River, looking south (Figure 1). It presents a quintessential image of prairie topography, one which has come to be an enduring image of regional identity. In it, the landscape has been reduced to what Canadian novelist W.O. Mitchell has called “the least common denominator of nature”: earth and sky. In the context of geographical concerns for the way in which landscape images influence perceptions of place, and conversely, for the way in which perceptions of place influence landscape images, The Prairie ... looking south raises a number of questions: Why did Hime take this photograph and what was it intended to convey? Even more importantly, why is this photograph of interest to historical geographers, and how should we interrogate it? As a source of visual facts, what can it tell us about the landscape it depicts? As a form of visual representation, what can it tell us about the time(s) and place(s) in which it was created, circulated, and viewed? As an act of visual communication, what meanings (messages) were invested in it and generated by it? And, more generally, what can it teach us about critical engagement with the photograph in historical geography?

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