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The following is excerpted from The Official Picture by Carol Payne.
By the 1950s, landscape would come into focus in Still Division work. A 1958 photo story “From Sea to Sea …,” for example, cites historian Arthur Lower and states: “Canada … had sought and found a new consciousness – a national spirit – in the land which gave her birth.” Photo stories and individual photographs of this time promote tourism with romanticized depictions of the country’s national parks and scenic destinations such as Percé Rock and Niagara Falls. Yet, surprisingly, these sites did not constitute the majority of landscape representations of the time. Instead, the division maintained the wartime tendency to picture the environment in productive terms, and so the land is often tied to an economic picture of the nation.
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In depicting forestry, agriculture, fisheries, and mining, these stories served to promote the Canadian economy within the country and internationally. A brief discussion of one Still Division photograph from this period illustrates how the landscape images represented economic abundance in the postwar period. During the winter of 1955, staff photographer Gar Lunney shot a lyrical view of a lumber camp in Quebec.
Taken from an elevated vantage point, the image is of a trail of horses pulling wagons through snow to collect logs in the bush. It offers a vista of a productive and vast land. With no modern machinery in sight, it is a vision of rustic life. Here some of the standard devices of landscape representation – the distant and sharply perspectival view and the cropping of treetops in the distance – emphasize a sense of capaciousness. The image demonstrates a certain cultural bias: it might be seen, for example, as a romanticization of the Canadian lumber industry by omitting vestiges of industrialization as well as evoking the work of painters like Cornelius Krieghoff and calling forth what Daniel Francis has termed a “folkloricization of Quebec culture.”
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