From early reports of the invention to its wide application during World War I, the idea of photography created anticipation and participation in the modern world. The first volume of A History of Photography in Canada captures this phenomenon by looking at hundreds of photographs generated in and about Canada-in-the-making and by listening to the chords they struck in the collective imagination. Emphasizing technological readiness and cultural eagerness for the medium, Martha Langford shows how photography served ideals of progress and improvement as Canada’s settler society looked to master the world by seizing its visible traces. The imposition of these programs on Indigenous Peoples and indentured labourers is confronted throughout this volume, which offers both narratives and counternarratives of subjectification. Reproducing images of people, places, events, and objects from the unceded territories of the First Nations, Inuit, and Métis, from British North America, and from the Dominion of Canada and the Dominion of Newfoundland, Langford asks where and when photographs were taken, why, and by whom. How did the making and preservation of a photograph alter the circumstances in which it was produced, and how did this affect individual and collective consciousness? Alongside accomplished portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and their vernacular counterparts, the book draws glimmers of photographic experience from treatises and doggerel, official reports and personal diaries, newspapers, magazines, letters, and travelogues. Anticipation to Participation chronicles eight decades of reinvention and repurposing, from a wondrous discovery to the wide adoption of a basic tool for knowledge gathering, artmaking, and journaling. Langford’s sweeping narrative rewrites the history of photography from the bottom up, vividly expanding the definition of photographic experience.

Martha Langford is research chair and director of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art at Concordia University and co-editor of Photogenic Montreal: Activisms and Archives in a Post-Industrial City.