REVUE D’ÉTUDES INTERCULTURELLES DE L’IMAGE JOURNAL OF CROSS-CULTURAL IMAGE STUDIES

GUEST EDITORS • Now and Then The Road to Here DisAppearances on a Highway IMAGINATIONS ANDRIKO LOZOWY & KYLER ZELENY Placing Nostalgia Recalibrating Intimacy Seen and Imagined JOURNAL OF CROSS_CULTURAL IMAGE STUDIES | Fragments of Desire Seeing Saskatchewan Poke you in the Heart REVUE D’ÉTUDES INTERCULTURELLES DE L’IMAGE Leaving to Return Photography as Theory in Action Studies on How to View a Landscape

Wood Grain Elevators Border Lines and Crossing Points Publication details, including open access policy and instructions for contributors: http://imaginations.csj.ualberta.ca

North By West Editorial Team: Brent Ryan Bellamy, Daniel Laforest, Andriko Lozowy, Tara Milbrandt, Carrie Smith-Prei, Sheena Wilson NORTH BY WEST ISSUE 7-1, 2016 November 23, 2016

To cite this article: To link to this article:

Lozowy, Andriko. “Introducing North by West.” Imaginations 7:1 (2016): Web (date http://dx.doi.org/10.17742/IMAGE.NBW.7-1.1 ac-cessed) 6-13. DOI: 10.17742/IMAGE.NBW.7-1.1

The copyright for each article belongs to the author and has been published in this journal under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives 3.0 license that allows others to share for non-commercial purposes the work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal. The content of this article represents the author’s original work and any third-party content, either image or text, has been included under the Fair Dealing exception in the Canadian Copyright Act, or the author has provided the required publication permissions. INTRODUCING NORTH BY WEST

ANDRIKO LOZOWY

n this collection, North By West refers to a way This collection is focused on a large region of Western of dividing North America. Our grade-school , rather than on an entire national boundary. This days, with maps hung on walls, provide our ini- version of North By West conducts an inquiry into how Itial navigation of real and imagined spaces. Yet in visual culture is entwined with ideas of place, identity, this issue North By West signifies more than just and memory. Canadian visual and cultural landscapes are diverse, yet a certain tension exists between national a bounded geographical area. Here North By West and regional identity in Canada: what Amelia Kalant, in names a series of collaborations between individu- National Identity and the Conflict at Oka: Native Belonging als situated in place. We invite the readers of North and Myths of Postcolonial Nationhood in Canada (2004), By West to engage in the imaginative work of locat- describes as an uncertainty linked to our colonial history ing their own spatial assemblages—mentally, phys- that leaves us ungrounded: Image - 03 Vera Saltzman ically, topographically, and geographically.

DOIISSUE : ht 7-1,tp://dx.doi.org/10.17742/IMAGE.NBW.7 2016 · 6 -1.1 ANDRIKO LOZOWY

The profusion of colorful landscapes on Canadian dollars, part of an obsession with the production of a Canadian sense of place, suggests that the ‘problem’ of Canadianness is not the soul, but an ingrained con- sciousness that the place/body of Canada exceeds latter, providing a space the diversity of visual scenes the capacity to name and claim it…The dilemma of and practices that exists across the 12 million square Canadian identity is a product of a metanarrative kilometers of The Empty Quarter. that makes uncertainty of place foundational to the imagining of the Canadian nation...This occurs as a In American Nations (2012) Colin Woodhard argues whole as well as regionally. A nation amongst nations that North America ought to be thought of in the plural. perhaps? Regionally speaking of course. Canada as As his title suggests, the nations of America presume a whole suffers from a ‘failure of place,’ a narrative a multiplicity, a perspective with unique geographic of territorial failure, a historically successful one at locations nurturing unique cultures, practices, and that. (31, 33) customs. Thinkers whose work engages the multiplicity Joel Garreau’s The Nine Nations of North America, The of North American nations will already have the sense New York Times 3 Jul. 2014. Web. 1 Nov. 2016. that the very concept of the Empty Quarter contains a variant of colonial discourse. Others who have been Naming Place following the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of For some, Canada invokes memory or an imaginative Canada and may have read the final report, Honouring drive to picture place. In this collection we have asked We borrow the name North By West from Joel Garreau’s the Truth, Reconciling for the Future (2015), will know image makers to contribute their own representations Nine Nations of North America (1992). Garreau defines that the North by West depicted in this issue is also of North By West and invited scholars to write about the Northwest as “The Empty Quarter” and “The treaty territory and unceded land—Treaties 1, 2, 4, 5, these images from their own disciplinary perspective. Prairies.” His map provides a starting point for open- 6,7,8,10, and 11 to be a little more precise. In some cases the photographer-researcher—an ended dialogue and a place where questions persist: embodiment of methodology and considered what does The Empty Quarter mean, if it consists of American examples of regional photography are practice—appears in action throughout the collection. almost half the land-mass of the nation; why does plentiful. Ain’t Bad magazine’s (2014) visual series on The photographer-researcher undertakes hybrid ways Quebec adhere to geo-political boundaries as a “The American South” reminds the reader/viewer that of doing scholarly, creative, and collaborative inquiry. distinct cultural signifier; and, are boundaries actually returning home to places such as Clayton, Crawfordville Without presuming a particular method upon our about demography and culturally productive forces? or Decatur, Georgia serves as an opportunity to see contributors, the point here is to identify one of the Rather than taking its delimitation of space literally, anew and capture with glass and film or digital sensors theoretical elements at play in this issue: we asked we use this map to help us consider some of the more the deeply social nature of an individual environment individuals to submit work reflecting their expertise abstract ways in which place is imagined collectively, (Goffman 72). What might the Canadian equivalent and gave these visual scholars and visual practitioners the ways in which perspective can nurture visions of look like? How might it work? What is Canadian room to collaborate. homogeneity or diversity. North By West focuses on the visual culture in Western Canada and can it be thought

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Revisiting Place of outside or beyond American examples? North by expanse and draw a reductive conclusion such as West serves as a brief historical and contemporary Returning to a place is a central theme that my “Saskatchewan is so boring; it’s all the same,” whereas introduction to and survey of photographers working co-editor Kyler Zeleny and I shared when we first a local inhabitant might have a more refined way of in the Canadian West.1 Moreover, we intend this envisioned North By West, and now looking at the recognizing and describing in detail landscapes that collection to act as a kind of muster point, an affective collection, we note a cyclical character reflected back could easily fool an outsider into thinking subtlety is topoi (see Shields 2013) which others interested in by the contributors. We find Woodhard’s work useful synonymous with homogeneity. Western Canada and photography can engage with as he writes about the power of a cycle of revisiting together. As a settler nation, Canadian culture and a specific place with camera in hand. In matters of Yet freedom of physical movement cannot be identity is necessarily multiple. Collectively we wonder the whole of the North and the West, a more human assumed here. Moreover the North and the West if Canadians perceive identity as antithetical, as not- scale for visual and scholarly consideration might be relate specifically to the real cartographic distinctions American. This collection aims to offer a sustained relatable to walking. For example, walking for one day made over human history wherein borders mean the focus on Canada on its own terms through visual gives a clear indication to an individual the scale of a difference between freedom of movement and violent culture. possible spatial consideration. How many days a year power. Unlike monetary capital, human capital is often does one spend walking? If you spend one day a year caged by immobility when nation states act in guarded walking, and perhaps photographing, could there be ways. For some, we might acknowledge the relative a benefit to navigating and interpreting an area that freedom afforded by the luck of being a Canadian, is familiar but changing? In this regard we also draw that movement across and through the vast expanse inspiration from photographer Edward Burtynsky, of Canada is not only taken for granted, but also who speaks of growing up in rural Ontario, playing presumed and encouraged. This project does not focus among the trees and lakes (Campbell 2008, 43). Some on the political intersections of human geography but of his own inspiration for photography comes from rather on the relationships of memory, photography, capturing still images of changing landscapes that rumination, and certain forms of distinctly Canadian could be easily read as on the verge of being lost to identity making. North By West strives to occupy industrial processes, commercialization, housing, and a space of serious and critical inquiry between so forth. North By West is a working collection that the known and unknown boundaries of real and finds common yet fragile ground in considering the imagined space. vastness of our given territorial focus. At the same time, we recognize the finite limitations on resources. On the one hand, an outsider might see the limitless

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The Photographer-Researcher North By West With the camera in hand, we see things differently. Returning to a place is a specific action, whether Pausing, perhaps to converse with another person North By West is organized into three themes: histories, mindful or passive. Photographer-researchers or press the camera shutter, breaks the veneer of places, and visions. North by West is a social experiment document, aestheticize, reveal, and capture the everyday and elevates the moment to a level of where image makers who might use image-making the specificities of place, culture, and milieu. The engagement that offers an opportunity for theoretical techniques as ways to ask ontological questions are photographer-researcher reflects on multiplicity while reflexive moments that, yet again, abstract to other then met by scholars who often ask further ontological considering the visible and the invisible (Lozowy 2014, bisections of space and time. The act of photography— questions followed by epistemological ones (see Sontag 393). At the same time the photographer-researcher as well as other modes of knowing, such as painting, 1977; Barthes 1981). is methodologically working through registers of the; audio-recording, video-recording, dictation, and so gaze, glance, focus, depth, exposure and representation forth—puts action into a direct relationship with (Shields 23-35). theory because it breaks the expected unconscious Histories moment-to-moment-ness of the everyday. It gives the photographer, or otherwise engaged practitioner, The photographer-researcher works within a ection one relates to four contributions that revolve reason to pause, to become aware of the subtle pulse methodological set of parameters with which around ways in which history, place, and memory between breaths. to negotiate fluid dialogisms, such as when a work in relation to patterns of settlement, the photographer walks with deliberate patience amidst Svocabulary of Canadian landscape, fragile materiality, fluctuating intensities of light and shadow, through and return cycles. Elizabeth Cavaliere kindly offered to spaces both real and imagined, and encounters create a groundwork for the collection by attuning her bodies, minds, emotions, and affective spatial milieu. focus to the power of photography as a technology that The photographer-research also moves through the shapes cultural discourse. Cavaliere looks to the work mechanical limitations of the given photographic of Humpry Lloyd Hime and the heavy, wet, messy, apparatus (Flusser 2000, 76) and makes expletive and and toxic process of image making in 1839, when discriminatory choices of when to press the shutter. expansive prairie lands were being visually surveyed and documented with an eye to resource development. Cavaliere argues that, along with technological shifts in the nature of photography over the last 180 years, pragmatism has been largely displaced by more recent shifts towards photography as a means to know place as reflexive, embodied, and affective.

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In “Placing Nostalgia,” Jon Petrychyn meditates on amidst the pragmatism of making a living in rural Beyond the standard narratives of boom and bust the currents between the photographic work of Vera places without artistic communities. Zeleny illustrates Michael Granzow and Kevin Jones meditate upon Saltzman and Valerie Zink. Petrychyn notes that the connections between notions of settler expansion, Eamon MacMahon’s photographs that challenge the old pastoral and bucolic Saskatchewan is dead; the pastoralism, identity, and geography, while asking rhetoric of division between the urban and rural to new Saskatchewan is on the move, but prosperity serious questions about what opportunities for even remind the reader that spatial divisions might fuel is not for everyone. In a province where pumpjacks temporary community assemblages are lost when the animosity; yet a closer look reveals interdependence have replaced combines, both literally and in the individualist tendencies of photographers deny any on micro and macro scales. Under the view of imaginary, the change represents progressive visions hope of mentorship. His images, presented alongside Granzow and Jones, MacMahon’s images refute ruin of acceleration and opportunity at the cost of fearful Thomas Gardiner’s, invite the viewer to tangle with the porn and instead offer a considered view of the ways displacement, the kind that means many people and textual argument he puts forward—where geography in which ruination is much more a lived process that even places are left outside of the halo of abundance coupled with topography defines not only what is seen, bears the trauma of lost prosperity rather than the and plenty. Through this reading, Saltzman’s and but also how place is lived, imagined, guarded, and predatory pathway for contemporary photographers Zink’s images reverberate with one another while the rooted. to entice viewership with the promise of salacious visual language of Canadian prairie landscapes makes decomposition. The notion of uneven relations of place itself apparent: grain elevators stand upright as place comprise the central argument here where Granzow markers inscribed with histories unbound by the brief Places and Jones describe how sites of ruin now exist as period where rail lines linked grain elevators dotted nodes in a network that once bore the livelihoods black across a fertile carpet of green and yellow. li Piwowar offers a detailed consideration of extraction. Ruin is a material reality where of place-making effects in “Wood Grain decomposition anchors signposts to the geographic Devotedly touristic and intensely private worlds Elevators,” beginning with a historical and and symbolic places that are coming up next. Perhaps collide in the contribution by Karen Engle and Trudi Aspatial analysis of the organizing principle of farming most unsettling is the sense that, because work camps Lynn Smith. Smith’s work reimagines what it means and harvesting practices tied to distribution through have become shelter for the long-shift working skilled to do archival research. There is a sense of fragility in grain elevators and trains carrying grain east to ports laborers of late-modern capitalism, the possibility of an exchange that saw materials shared, not over online such as those found in , Ontario. Piwowar ruin at multiple registers is just an unlucky hand away. connections, but rather through carefully packaged offers a multifaceted approach to the ways in which postings. Engle shared her delight at receiving a wood grain elevators occupy, represent, signify, and Lily Cho, in Chinese: Culture on the Menu package from Smith, not merely from the material command attention to a range of people. Piwowar in Small Town Canada (2010), expresses her views artifacts, but also the gesture of trust. reveals the political in the prairie sublime—the on the matter of diasporic lives of those who live to indigenous farmer recalls standing at the back of the meet the demands of hungry customers looking for Kyler Zeleny’s contribution “Leaving to Return” line, forced to wait until the settler famers had finished Canadian-Chinese . Cho returns to the subject projects a pattern of artistic practice and scholarship their grain dealings. for “Recalibrating Intimacy,” situating Elyse Bouvier’s that plays out on a daily basis for any person of any age photographs of Chinese as an invitation who grows up feeling alienated and disenfranchised to look repeatedly. Cho invites readers of text and

ISSUE 7-1, 2016 · 10 ANDRIKO LOZOWY image to consider not only this article but the entire a pair of photographers separated by 100 years, are childhood. “Border Lines and Crossing Points” brings North by West collection as an opportunity to extend connected by the geographic places they traversed. the images of place to the forefront, each captioned critical thinking practices around the body of work The 100-year separation is where Dyce has room to with brief detail. Though readers might have the that is generated by photographers who argue and contrast relationships of identity, cultural practices, impulse to skip ahead, these images demand multiple ask questions with light, shadow, and colour. Cho and appropriation, and how notions of the spiritual have viewings. As McManus writes, we come to know in Bouvier engage in a dance of intimacy and publicity been underrepresented in Canadian visual cultural more affective ways the sensorial spectrum of power through carefully waged narratives and counter- studies. Dyce looks carefully at the ways in which relations at play. The brilliance of Rutkauska’s images narratives that revolve around the pithy cultural/racial/ Boorne chose to represent the Blood Tribe celebrating/ emerges as McManus points out the tension between ethnic/diasporic question, “who has authority to say performing a sun dance ceremony, images that we now the act of photographing and the social effects of that egg foo yong is not real Chinese food?” read as racist and dehumanizing. The second half of this bodies in space in relation to borders. essay contrasts George Webber’s work with Boorne’s. In dialogue with Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places: The Webber was already an acclaimed photographer by the Erin Ashenhurst offers a playful view through the Complete Works (2004), John Conway’s Saskatchewan: mid-1990s and his images illustrate not only the shift in construct of a toy windshield, where subjectivity Uncommon Views (2005) provides visual evidence of relation to the previous 100 years, but also pave the way meets the mountains and wrestles with contemporary the significance, not only of Canadian image making for photographic styles that push and pull the vastness points of cohesion—small towns along winding roads. but, more accurately, of prairie landscapes that of prairie landscapes into sharp focus: billowy clouds, “DisAppearances on a Highway” locates the viewer eschewed aesthetic beauty for the resignification of pastoral grasses, social or material ruin, and subjects safely behind the windscreen of a playmobile car, the the weird as iconic. Conway’s contribution to North By who embody fully fleshed humanity wrought with view similar to the plastic lens images conjured by West, both as image maker and scholarly interlocutor, all manner of suffering, humility, and even spiritual Lomo cameras. Forward momentum ensures that the coalesces around the way in which Saskatchewan, transcendence. Dyce illuminates, as his title suggests, pursuit of the horizon makes for a sense of familiarity the subject of his 2005 collection, remains burned “Photography is theory in action when it becomes a for those who face similar geographic expanses, such into his vision. Conway elucidates the metaphor by means for people to negotiate the context of both their as those in Australia or Siberia. At the same time, the drawing visual connections to the way that his new representation and place in history.” DisAppearances might also allude to more romantic surroundings on the West Coast persuade him to seek possibilities of getting lost in land and the self. out the horizontal expanse of the ocean as a surrogate for a big-sky prairie horizon. Visions “Seen and Imagined” brings visual sociology pioneer Douglas Harper in conversation with Tara Milbrandt, By tracing lines through not only the invention of ndreas Rutkauskas’s images focus on actual both of whom bring text and images together in deeply photography but also of the idea of the West, Matt borders as political and spatial lines that personal ways. Together, Harper and Milbrandt invite Dyce offers a comparative analysis of the ways in were more porous before the spectacle and the viewer/reader along for a walking tour of Edmonton, which photographers confront personal ethics and Aperformance of power and control intensified following Alberta. Edmonton is represented here and read as a in many cases make decisions based on commercial 9/11. Karla McManus writes in relation to Rutkauska’s kind of gritty postmodern frontier, a necessary hub for viability. William Hanson Boorne and George Webber, images; their comradery began in Winnipeg during the far greater expanse of the North and the West, at

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all degrees of compass and thermometer. Through the need to make sure that we as academics, scholars, and North By West lenses of each photographer and researcher, Edmonton photographers work together to remember what we bleeds the themes of settlement patterns and conflict might otherwise selectively forget. In the same way, When this special issue began to take shape we aspired restrained in held breaths. Brutalism stands as an Elkaim the outsider and Bouchier the insider both to create a publication that allowed contributors to affront to the big skies that offer limitless visions offer photographs that reveal a part of what is now at think critically and steadily about images, and to work beyond the built utility of a city known for its blue and least a binocular vision. together and to open a space for creative forms of dirty collars, a city once surrounded by fertile fields scholarship. bearing wheat and corn but now paved and serviced Readers will be struck by the candidness that Jessica for the resource industry. Auer brings to her photographic vision, one sculpted Upon reflection Lily Cho noted, and our editorial and shaped by her parents’ divorce when she was 10 team agrees, that this special issue represents a kind Jenny Gerbrandt’s “Poke you in the Heart” examines years old. Auer joined her father during a summer of of social engineering and could be looked upon as a the anthropological scholar at the intersection of two travel with a book and a camera. The Auer we meet useful model for combating the dizziness of visual photographers, one from outside, read as an ally, and here is shaped by her traversals across time and by oversaturation. one from inside, read as Indigenous. Aaron Elkaim returning to places; in turn she reminds us to return responded to the initial call for images, which we paired again and again, to gaze, to ruminate, to notice, and Thank you to our photographers and interlocutors for with Gerbrandt because of her geographically specific to recognize that everything changes—a metaphor for contributing to this experiment, and to our readers engagement with the Métis near Fort McMurray, the project of North By West. alike for joining us in this exploration of the North and where she connected locally back to Nadia Bouchier the West, via the shared virtual space of Imaginations. of Fort McKay who had worked closely with Elkaim in the first place. In the text by Gerbrandt, Bouchier’s grandmother speaks strikingly of the Athabasca River, wondering how she could take care of the river when the river could no longer take care of her. Gerbrandt’s articulation of the spoken narrative reinforces the

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Notes Works Cited 1 Of course this is not a comprehensive list. For instance, it Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Shields, Rob. Spatial Questions: Cultural Topologies and does not focus on historical photographers such as Orest Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981. Print. Social Spatialisation. SAGE, 2013. Print. Semchishen or Sandra Semchuck. However, it does provide a range of contemporary work in the region. Butala, Sharon et al. Saskatchewan: Uncommon Views. ---. “Visualicity.” Visual Culture in Britain 5.1 (2004): 23–35. Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press, 2005. Print. Print.

Campbell, Craig. “Residual Landscapes and the Everyday: “Snapshot.” Web. 15 Nov. 2016. An Interview With Edward Burtynsky.” Space and Culture 11.1 (2008): 39–50. sac.sagepub.com. Web. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. St Martins Press, 1977. Print. Flusser, Vilem. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Reaktion Books, 2000. Print. “The American South.” A—B. N.p., 20 Oct. 2014. Web. 15 Nov. 2016. Garreau, Joel. The Nine Nations of North America. Reissue edition. New York, N.Y.: HarperCollins Canada / Non- Tillman, Lynne, Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, and Stephen Fiction, 1989. Print. Shore. Stephen Shore: Uncommon Places: The Complete Works. Subsequent edition. New York: Aperture, 2005. Print. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 1956. Print. Woodard, Colin. American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. Penguin, 2011. Kalant, Amelia. National Identity and the Conflict at Oka: Print. Native Belonging w Myths of Postcolonial Nationhood in Canada. Routledge, 2004. Print.

Lozowy, Andriko. “Picturing Industrial Landscapes.” Space and Culture 17.4 (2014): 388–397. sac.sagepub.com. Web.

Lozowy, Andriko J. “Icons of Oil: The Photographer- Researcher and Collaborative Practice.” Doctoral Thesis. University of Alberta. Print.

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