Brian Rusted

PERFORMING THE VISUAL NORTH

Image, place and the Hubbard-Wallace expeditions

During the last decade, the phrase ‘visual culture’ has come to identify a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to the visual in everyday life. While analytic perspectives may come from gender, race or media theory, political economy, psychoanalysis, and so forth, there is an apparent agreement about the critical relation the visual has to subjectivity and social organization. The travelling of critical and cultural theory across disciplinary boundaries has given ‘visual culture’ an institutional form through new degrees, programmes, cross-faculty appointments, courses, introductory textbooks, and research publications. This paper comments on the intellectual history of ‘visual culture’, identifies cultural aspects of visual performance that have been understated in recent formulations of visual culture and visual studies, and argues that the current institutional form of visual culture research has contributed to the disappearance of cultural and anthropological approaches within visual culture. The paper is developed in relation to a case study involving popular photography as a cultural performance of the Canadian north, and considers the contribution of performance to visual culture.

Keywords visual culture; performance; spatialization; Canada; north; photography

Introduction: how to picture the north

My pictures came today and they are wonderful. Feel excited about them they are so fine I have never seen such pictures anywhere as some of them are ... . (Mina Hubbard Collection 241 3.02.001, Diary 25 December 1905)

In the penultimate entry of her diary for 1905, Mina Hubbard, explorer and recently widowed wife of the New York, outdoor writer Leonidas Hubbard, Jr noted her excitement at receiving photographs from her trip through the

Cultural Studies Vol. 19, No. 2 March 2005, pp. 253 /285 ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online – 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09502380500077797 254 CULTURAL STUDIES

centre of Canada’s northern region of Labrador. This small, private note of pleasure is an expression of satisfaction at the conclusion of her part in three major expeditions to Labrador. Her entry though is also a starting point for the representational work these expeditions produced. Two days later, her final diary entry for that year provided a list of the 101 negatives she sends to Beseler Co. to be made into lantern slides for public lectures, and the 221 prints she sends to her publisher. Three of these expeditions occurred between 1903 and 1905: the initial Hubbard-Wallace Expedition in 1903, Mrs Hubbard’s in 1905, and Wallace’s second in the same year. Wallace undertakes a subsequent commemorative trip in 1913. The prominent role given to photography, textual documentation and representation (diaries, letters, magazines, newspapers, books, memoirs and public lectures) in these expeditions is an opportunity to reflect on visual culture ‘as rich, ambiguous and embedded cultural products’ (King & Lidchi 1998, p. 13). What is it about these photographs that give Mrs Hubbard such excitement? Certainly their making had been a productive pleasure for her. Their delivery some weeks after her return from Labrador transforms memories of a long, arduous journey into representation. Are her photographs good photographs? Are they better in technical or aesthetic quality than other photographs? Or had Mrs Hubbard simply not seen many photos of Labrador beyond those of her late husband? Are hers distinctive and unique images of what she will describe in the title of her book as an ‘unknown’ place? Answering such questions means opening up the conventions and constraints that allowed Mrs Hubbard and other expedition participants to take and make the pictures they do. The answer is not a singular one: it means locating images within or against a larger milieu in which they circulate; it means considering how these images are produced and reproduced; and how they both produce and represent the space of the North. The visual and representational activities of these expeditions are cultural performances, occasions as Bauman says, ‘to discover the patterns, functions and meanings of those communicative resources in the conduct and interpretation of social life for the people among whom they are current’ (Bauman 1992, p. xv). ‘Encapsulated contingent events’, as Denzin says (following Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998) ‘that are embedded in the flow of everyday life’ (2003, p. 8). To consider this visual work as performance, I have organized this article around the following: (1) a discussion of an attenuation of visual culture as a research area; (2) a discussion of visual culture and the critical analysis of space; (3) a discussion of the photographic practices of these expeditions; (4) their relation to practices contemporary with their production; and, finally, (5) a discussion about visual culture and photography as performance. PERFORMING THE VISUAL NORTH 255

Retrieving the cultural

More than 90 years after Mrs Hubbard writes in her diary, the art theory journal, October published a special issue that included a ‘Questionnaire on Visual Culture’. The term described both the increasingly popular notion that our social world is mediated by the visual, and the increasingly apparent convergence between academic areas with predominantly visual subject matter: art history, film, mass communications, architecture and so forth. This questionnaire had been sent to a variety of practitioners in these disciplines. Their responses filled nearly 50 pages of the journal. The editors saw the responses to their leading questions about the emergence of visual culture as a way of offering,

...an initial account of its uses and abuses-its premonitions in art history, its affinities with anthropological discourse, its resonances in contemporary art and criticism, and its ramifications for various institutions. (Krauss & Foster 1996, p. 3)

The publication two years earlier of a collection of essays by Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey with the title Visual Culture may also have been something of a catalyst, although the editors make no mention of it (see also Jencks 1995, Cartwright 1995, Bird et al.1996, Mirzoeff 1998, Evans & Hall 1999). ‘Visual culture’ begins to appear in the early 1970s in art historical works of Michael Baxandall and Svetlana Alpers. In Alpers’ study of Dutch painting, she uses visual culture to identify ‘cultural resources’ that artists used in making their work (Krauss & Foster 1996, p. 26; see also Alpers 1983 and Baxandall 1972). From a slightly different intellectual tradition, the character of visual culture picks up momentum with research into the social and historical determinations of vision, visuality and spectatorship during the 1980s (see Crary 1990 and Jay 1988). This historical narrative of ‘visual culture’ has been well mined and shown three distinct veins. First, visual culture identifies conceptual changes in the practice of art history as social determinations come to be included in the account of artistic practices. Secondly, the recognition of an increasingly diverse array of new visual media challenges both the methods and the boundaries of art history. Visual culture in this sense is descriptive of a broadened subject matter for art history. Finally, visual culture identifies an intellectual space where other disciplines can take up this broadening of visual subjects. ‘Visual studies’ also captures the shift from visual subjects to visual (inter-) disciplines (Elkins 2003; see also Dikovitskaya 2005 on visual culture’s institutional development). 256 CULTURAL STUDIES

What goes along with this movement is a shift in the research questions and theoretical vocabulary. Emily Apter suggests that new interpretive paradigms appear:

Formalist approaches to painting, thematic considerations of typologies and topologies of art, iconology, the social history of art and the history of material artifacts, seem on the surface to have little relevance to visual futurism, whereas discourses in psychoanalysis, gender, race, technology, and global economics seem obviously, if divergently, pertinent. (in Krauss & Foster 1996, p. 27)

For Susan Buck-Morss certain intellectual themes cut across the new formation of visual culture: ‘the reproduction of the image, the society of the spectacle, envisioning the Other, scopic regimes, the simulacrum, the fetish, the (male) gaze, the machine eye’ (Krauss & Foster 1996, p. 29). For Crary and others these lists would also include ‘the construction of subjectivity’ (Krauss & Foster 1996, p. 33). So, while visual culture might have particular disciplinary antecedents and hypothesize an interdisciplinary space for development, it also seems to support a convergence of intellectual projects across disciplines. When the editors of October posed the questions for this issue, they identified ‘the model of anthropology’ (Krauss & Foster 1996, p. 25) as the change agent in the practice of art history. Martin Jay is the sole respondent who takes up this idea and offers some context for their concern. Anthropology is shorthand for thinking about culture as ‘the whole way of life’ of a people rather than as elitist notions based on absolute models of aesthetic value. Integrating this change precipitates a market crash: the value of art is social rather than intrinsic, and the availability and legitimacy of visual objects expands beyond earlier classifications of art history. The responses to the questionnaire make it clear that this situation creates anxiety for some and windfalls for others. What is surprising is that no anthropologists were featured among the respondents. Jay’s effort to provide context for ‘the more anthropological use of ‘culture’’ (Krauss & Foster 1996, p. 42) does not address the absence of anthropologists. While anthropology may have been an intellectual and disciplinary force contributing to the emergence of visual culture, apparently there is no further reason to hear from it. This erasure from the academic formation of visual culture is evident in its various publications and anthologies. Possibly, the sole exception is the reprinting of James Clifford’s article in The Visual Cultural Reader, but he is not identified as an anthropologist. James Elkins’ recent book recapitulating this history makes brief reference to El-Guindi’s review of Ruby (Elkins 2003, p. 207, note regarding El-Guindi 2001). PERFORMING THE VISUAL NORTH 257

While some ambivalence towards anthropology might be expected from the respondents (especially those who are wistful about art history before the crash), ambivalence alone does not account for the absence. One other reference to anthropology in Tom Gunning’s response may suggest an alternative account:

Although anthropological methods and concepts of culture that erode barriers between everyday structures of experience and aesthetic domains can be extremely useful in this opening of the text, I remain suspicious of the power relations and reification possible in the concept of ethnographical research as I would be of the master narratives of traditional historical methods. (Krauss and Foster 1996, p. 38)

Identifying the politically fraught nature of anthropology is important here. It implies that somehow or other, visual culture has escaped the power relations of any academic practice and is free of the political fallout from ‘master narratives of traditional historical methods’. By extension, this view suggests that anthropology can never escape earthly bonds and is beyond redemption. Not only are the concerns about power relations and the discipline’s complicity with a nineteenth century colonial project insurmoun- table, the discipline itself is imagined as destitute of critical or reflexive resources to engage these issues (see Conquergood 1991 for an alternative view). Without rehearsing the dynamic, diverse and multi-vocal character of critical practices within anthropology, statements such as these open up a new round of questions about whether or not visual culture is itself launched on a colonizing project if it requires that formative disciplines be represented with such fixity (see Pink 2003). Bal recently attempted to discuss the way that analytic emphasis on visual objects has produced a ‘regime of truth’ (Bal 2003, p. 12). It is not clear if anthropology was in her mind but she does make the more general observation: ‘The hasty dismissal of methods allegedly belonging to disciplines alien to the visual is a move in that game, and it undermines any claim to innovation that such moves may stake’ (2003, p. 12). The way this narrative has unfolded within October and Cultural Studies generally (see Evans & Hall 1999 and Mirzoeff 1998) effectively removes ‘culture’ from the field. If visual culture is to be seen as an interdisciplinary space, why remove one of the primary intellectual sources for both analytic tools and critical theory? The discipline offers a research tradition on visual culture at least as continuous as that of art history and cultural studies (Crawford & Turton 1992, Chaplin 1994, Taylor 1994, Burnett 1995, Devereaux & Hillman 1995, Ruby 2000, Banks 2001, Pink 2001, Griffiths 2002, Pink et al. 2004). What this tradition offers is a long conversation about 258 CULTURAL STUDIES

the everyday practice of producing and consuming visual culture in addition to discussions about the politics of the visual (Harper 1998). Related to this absence of culture is a disembodiment of both subject and researcher. The editors of October suggested that the turn to a consideration of digital and virtual forms of visual culture leads to the disembodiment of the image. For anyone who has worked with digital imaging technology (and who appreciates differences in file formats, image resolution, colour balance, screen resolution and so forth) such an assertion makes little sense. There is no question though that often what passes as critical research moves away from visual objects to consider images detached from the mess of human practices. As Carol Armstrong has suggested disembodiment masks ‘a distrust of the material dimension of cultural objects’:

I sometimes wonder if this is not simply a new face put on the old contempt for material crafting, the surface and the superficial, as well as the old privileging of the verbal register that went with traditional humanist notions of idea or ut pictura poesis ... (Krauss and Foster 1996, p. 27)

Both Armstrong and Martin Jay point to this disembodiment as ambivalence towards issues of difference in visual culture. Armstrong describes it as,

...an indifference, even a hostility to thinking that there might be any foundational differences between media, kinds of production, or modes of sign, or that those differences might matter to either the producer or the consumer of a given object.

(Krauss and Foster 1996, pp. 27/8)

The questions being posed here move beyond the social constraints evident or embodied in the photographs of Mrs. Hubbard and the members of the other expeditions; they try to compose an argument that includes the visual, the cultural, the performative and the spatial within one frame. What might we understand about the embodied production of space by drawing from performance and returning culture to the visual?

Performing space

What is the attraction of century old expeditions to northern Canada? What might cultural performance bring to understanding their photographic records? The answer in part involves thinking about how photographic practices as representation are patterned by convention, how the embodiment of those practices produce space in performance, and how the photographs reproduce PERFORMING THE VISUAL NORTH 259 space through cultural performance. The images made during these expeditions involve social and aesthetic determinations at all moments of the communications processes of their production and consumption (Chalfen 1987): experience with image conventions before the expeditions began, in interactional dramas during and following the expeditions, through the performance of the photographs in lantern slide lecture tours or editorial selection in the years that followed, and the ongoing reproduction of the images in contexts increasingly remote from those the photographers may have envisioned. These images then are produced in grounded aesthetic practices (Willis 1990) that ‘make up an important part of the body of conventions by means of which members of art worlds act together’ (Becker 1982, p. 131). The photographs from these Labrador expeditions suggest the degree to which the participants’ visual choices were informed by the visual culture of their day: the conventions of picturesque landscape painting, photojournalism, snapshot photography, visual anthropology, and scientific surveys.1 For the photographers, Mrs Hubbard, Dillon Wallace and others, the practice of photography was not the act of a colonial or tourist to capture and display, the images not merely representations. Taking a photograph is as much a performance of aesthetics as it is representation of space. David Harvey noted, ‘There is much to be learned from aesthetic theory about how different forms of spatialization inhibit or facilitate processes of social change’ (1989, p. 205). The participants experienced the space of Labrador through aesthetic performance. At points in his diary, Dillon Wallace seeks out vistas for their beauty as much as for their assistance in finding a route:

...paddled two miles into a bay near a high hill which Pete, Easton & I climbed.... On the hill we had one of the grandest views I have ever beheld and by far the greatest view of lakes at our feet for very [many] miles a great [plain] and everywhere lakes. It was a magnificent panorama. (Dillon Wallace Fonds., Collection 244 3.02.002, Diary, Saturday 26 August 1905)

Perhaps this is such a striking experience of space (see figure 1) that Wallace neglects to mention another member of his team who accompanied them (see full description in Wallace 1907, pp. 106/7). Leigh Stanton records his experience:

The summit of the mountain is about 2225 feet above sea level. Arrived at the extreme summit we had a magnificent view of the surrounding country; imagine a vast plateau reaching 40 or 50 miles, dotted with lakes of every size large and small, lakes and nothing but lakes, so plentiful were they that we christened it the ‘Plateau of a Thousand Lakes.’ Wallace took 5 panoramic shots of it. The cloud effects were very beautiful. (Stanton 1905, p. 50) 260 CULTURAL STUDIES

FIGURE 1 Dillon Wallace Fonds., collection 244, 8.01.055.

In recent decades, the concept of ‘space’ has received much critical attention. This interest has involved both elaborating the denotations of space into place, locale, location, site and so on, in addition to a retreat from conceiving space as an arbitrary unit of data collection, a physical setting of empirically identified dimensions (Agnew & Duncan 1989, Rusted 2002). No longer viewed as bounded geography, space ‘is constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations’ (Massey 1991, p. 239). Rob Shields’ phrase, ‘social spatialization’ (1997) captures this sense of space as an artefact of the social imagination, its meaning indissolubly bound to its representations. One feature central to social spatialization is the assumption that both political and economic forces existing ‘beyond the local horizon’ (Gregory 1994, p. 122) contribute to the construction of space. Social spatialization is not simply a reading of landscape-as-text or reading text said to represent it. Social spatialization involves the collective and collaborative activities that produce space, the performative ways in which it is embodied. It is the interlocking network of such activities that contribute to Labrador’s spatialization, including scientific mapping and surveying, anthropological research and representation, journalistic narration, photojournalistic documentation, missionary fundraising, indigenous mapping and so on. Each of these activities contributes to the spatial discourse of this place. The participants in the expeditions contribute to and extend them through their own visual and representational performances. Their sense of identities (as explorer, writer, widow, companion etc.) are intimately linked with the task of performing this space in representation, even performing themselves in representation. The spatialization of Labrador is produced and consumed within a context of other images, a ‘mediascape’ (Appandurai 1990), or a ‘matrix of PERFORMING THE VISUAL NORTH 261 existing representations’ (Marcus 1994, p. 44). Features of this include the production of images, their relation to other representations of Labrador of the same period (see, for example, Hind 1863, Turner 1894, Low 1906, Duncan 1905, Cabot 1912, Rompkey 1996), and their eventual dissemination and circulation. It could be seen as ironic that at the moment when critical geographers articulate the absence of the spatial in social theory (Agnew & Duncan 1989, Soja 1993), anthropologists and ethnographers endeavoured to expunge the spatial from their treatment of culture (Marcus 1994). The common ground of such juxtaposition is the ‘deterritorialization’ of space. The participants’ labour in producing diaries, letters, photographs and so on both perform and document the deterritorialization of this space, and hence its circulation and commodification. As a transient and nomadic group, the participants left a substantial representation of their own activities. This mass of note taking, letters, diaries and photographs are parts of an amateur ethnography that, at one level deals with the space of Labrador, at another with the participants themselves.

The expeditions

Here it may be said, the North begins. (Cabot 1912, p. 17)

In the first decade of this century, two New York based ‘explorers’ made trips into the uncharted interior of Canada’s North. The first expedition conducted in 1903 was a disaster and resulted in the death of its primary organizer, Leonidas Hubbard, Jr, an outdoor writer working for Outing, the illustrated magazine ‘of human interest’. His partner, lawyer Dillon Wallace mounted a second expedition two years later, a trip that was seen in competition with a concurrent expedition headed by Hubbard’s wife, Mina. Scots-Cree guide, George Elson employed on the 1903 expedition returned to Labrador with Mrs Hubbard for her 1905 expedition. Wallace made a third, commemorative trip in 1913 with the goal of installing a plaque at the site of Hubbard’s final camp2. This trip also had limited success. All three of the early expeditions were heavily documented with diaries, accounts in the popular press and in books (Wallace 1905, 1907, Hubbard 1908). The expeditions were much commented on at the time (Cabot 1904, Whitney 1905, Cabot 1912) and have continued currency (Berton 1978, Klein 1988, Atwood 1996, Davidson & Rugge 1988, 1997, Pratt 2002, Grace 2004, Silvis 2004, Buchanan et al. 2005). The principals themselves had careers performing their accounts of these expeditions for many years after their return to New York. Wallace talked to University Clubs, Chambers of 262 CULTURAL STUDIES

Commerce, lodges and so forth. The tent that he and Hubbard had used was donated to the Culver Academy museum where Wallace worked for many years, and even his clothing was displayed as ‘relics’ of the expedition in a storefront window. Mrs. Hubbard also had occasion to perform her expedition and to laudatory reviews. The Transcript noted her style of delivery:

Some of the episodes of her journey were told with remarkable dramatic power. Her powers of description are very remarkable, and gracefully and unconsciously she suits actions to her words so that every event becomes a picture. (Dillon Wallace collection 244, 6.02.004, no date)

Photographs were a significant component of the magazine publishing that followed the expeditions: editor Caspar Whitney publishes an article ‘with photographs taken by Mr Hubbard’ in the year following Hubbard’s death (1905, p. 643); Dillon Wallace’s serialization of the 1905 expedition narrative in Outing had twice the photographs that appeared in the subsequent book (Wallace 1907).3 Much of the correspondence that follows both expeditions involves the control of and rights to the photographs. Mrs. Hubbard maintained control of the photographs from her husband’s expedition. She gave Wallace permission to use copies, first to complete his contract with her for the book about Hubbard’s 1903 expedition, and then in exchange for letting her use a map of Labrador in a ‘memorial volume’ she was planning (see correspondence with Caspar Whitney 7 December 1904 in the Dillon Wallace Collection 244, 5.02.001). Wallace doubled the size of his party for the 1905 expedition and because the party returned from Labrador at different times, it was more difficult to control the circulation of photographs. Wallace has an agent receive the photos in New York prior to delivery to the publisher. Mrs. Hubbard also appreciates the value of the photos and manages to have her photos published before Wallace’s: he chose to stay in Labrador and take most 4 of the 1905/6 winter to exit with a dog team. Mrs. Hubbard leaves on the last steamer in the fall of 1905. In a letter to the publisher Whitney, Wallace notes,

Coming on the boat into Quebec last Spring on our way home I heard Easton promise one of the passengers to send him copies of some of his photographs. I called his attention to the fact that he was not free to do this and told him that I must insist upon his retaining all his pictures in his possession. (Correspondence with Caspar Whitney, 20 October 1906, Dillon Wallace Collection 244, 5.02.001)

Wallace’s lecture tours following the fatal 1903 expedition, and his own 1905 expedition were based on lantern slides of the photographs. Mrs. Hubbard is PERFORMING THE VISUAL NORTH 263 reported to have used a hundred lantern slides in her lectures on the subject (101 according to her diary, Collection 241 3.02.001, December 27, 1905).5 Circulation of the image of Labrador in this way shared in the aesthetics of this technology (Hepworth 1899, Gage & Gage 1914, Saucier 1990): dramatic projection, colour toning, hand tinting and retouching. The hand tinting increased the realism and emotional impact of Wallace’s slides. This aesthetic treatment goes hand-in-hand with a tourist gaze (Pratt 1992) of this and other places he tours (see, for instance, Wallace 1910, 1911), and to a degree it echoes styles of illustration common to Outing in this period.

The space of representation

This production of the space of Labrador / image and text / resides now in a collection of cardboard boxes. The images have a historical referent to the empirical spaces of their production, and, in Allan Sekula’s sense, they have been ‘‘liberated’ from the actual contingencies of use’ (1983, p. 183). This quality of the archived images ‘is also a loss, an abstraction from the complexity and richness of use, a loss of context’ (1983, p. 183). Hugh Brody suggests that the unreliability occasioned by such loss is part of the power of images:

Photographs make no noises, say no words. They seem, rather, to wait for someone to provide the story, the facts, that can transform the images into a mysterious aspect of oral history. (1998, p. 226)

Beyond ordering and retelling the historical narrative that produced these images does performance offer visual culture anything to redress this loss of context, the disembodiment of these images? As I spent time with this material, identifying dates, locations and subjects in the photos and slides, cross-referencing their production with diary entries, and various forms of publication, a number of distinct interpretive directions became apparent: the politics of the south’s imaginary semiosis of the north (Shields 1991, Hulan 2002); the colonial inscription on the Canadian north (Pratt 1992); the gendered character of northern exploration (Bloom 1993, Grace 2004); and the cultural chasm of otherness and indigenous knowledge (Fabian 1983). Common to these expeditions was the popular representation of Canada’s north for a mainstream American audience. Consistent with this popular character, the representations relied on photographs. Even during the most extreme moments of the first expedition, Hubbard and Wallace continued to photograph, and after the worst had happened, Wallace stayed through the winter to see that film abandoned on the tragic journey was retrieved. 264 CULTURAL STUDIES

In the years following these expeditions, Wallace had about 250 lantern slides made from the original photographs. The production of these images and their subsequent circulation in magazines, books, and lectures suggest very particular ways in which the image of Canada’s northern territory was organized for aesthetic pleasure and visual consumption in the early decades of the last century. A consideration of the imaging technology; the pictorial conventions available to the subjects, photographers, expedition participants, the publishing professionals, and the popular readership; and the moral boundaries established in the performing these representations help clarify this.

Technology In writing about the first, 1903 expedition to Labrador, Wallace is fastidious about listing the exact contents of their luggage. This is partly due to the subsequent criticism of their preparedness for such travel (Cabot 1904). It is also an opportunity to display the ability of their expedition to exemplify the soundest of contemporary advice regarding such travel. In their luggage,

they included a ‘3 1/4/4 1/4 pocket folding Kodak with Turner- Reich Verastigmat lens... thirty rolls of films of one dozen exposures each, in tin cans, waterproofed with electrician’s tape’ (Wallace 1905, p. 53). The decade or so prior to this first expedition was a period of frenzied patent activity for the George Eastman Company, manufacturers of Kodak cameras. The pocket folding Kodak had appeared first in 1895. The earlier models had been phased out of production but very quickly Eastman was producing nearly 500 folding cameras each day (see Collins 1990). For the second 1905 expedition, Wallace took no chances and brought three pocket folding cameras, Kodak model 3A, the ‘autographic’, with ‘sixty rolls of films, each roll sealed in a tin can and waterproofed’ (1907, p. 6). First produced in 1890, this larger folding camera was in production with Eastman until the mid-1920s. Mrs Hubbard’s choice was more distinctive: she took a pocket folding Kodak, but she also chose a ‘panorama kodak’ (1908, p. 23) as part of her luggage for her 1905 expedition. Although the fascination with panoramic views of landscape has a long history (Hyde 1988), the camera technology in a portable format had only been patented several years earlier. About 20% of her published images exhibit this distinctive horizontal format. All of these cameras had been designed with the ‘amateur’ photographer in mind.6 When Wallace returned to the States after the first expedition he was even referred to as ‘an amateur photographer who accompanied the writer [Hubbard] on his luckless journey’ (‘Brings Home the Body’, New York Herald, 28 May 1904). Wallace makes no mention of the camera, film or photographic PERFORMING THE VISUAL NORTH 265 preparations in his diary. The inventory for the 1903 expedition that Wallace provides in his book comes from Hubbard’s diary, and Whitney identifies the photos from the 1903 expedition as having been taken by Hubbard (Whitney 1905). In reviewing a ‘private lecture’ that Wallace gave in 1909, the Fishkill Daily Herald noted that the ‘views’ Wallace showed ‘were from photographs taken on the expedition in the Labrador in which Dillon Wallace figured. The photographs were taken by him personally.’ From the notes and diaries of the second 1905 expedition, this is certainly the case, but there is limited evidence to attribute the role of photographer to Wallace in 1903 except for the photos that include Hubbard. Hubbard routinely published articles in Outing illustrated with his own photographs. An article published under his name in the spring of 1904 includes 10 photographs detailing a variety of winter camp activities (Hubbard 1904) demonstrating a thematic attention to subject similar to many images produced on the 1903 expedition. Aside from the copies of the photographs from the 1903 expedition that Mrs Hubbard permits Wallace to use, few survive. After completing her publications, Mrs. Hubbard sent the photographs to her in-laws in Michigan. According to a letter from Hubbard’s sister Mary Williams to Dillon Wallace, the photos were destroyed in a house fire in February 1906: ‘All of Leon’s photographs and clothing which Mrs Hubbard sent them / also the little fly book / which he carried thro’ Labrador, were destroyed’ (correspondence with Mary Williams, Dillon Wallace Collection 244, 5.01.001).

Pictorial conventions As she reaches the end of her expedition and the expectations of publishing and book contracts start to loom, Mrs. Hubbard worries over how to write Labrador: ‘Writing today. Slow. Hard to decide what to write about. Afraid of writing what people are not a bit interested in and being thought silly or rather a bore’ (Collection 241 3.02.001, Diary, 31 August 1905). Taking photographs does not pose the same problem. At every opportunity, Mrs Hubbard plunges into the bush ‘to get some characteristic photographs’ (1908, p. 92). What makes them ‘characteristic’ is not that she has been able to emulate the typical views of the space, to stand like a tourist and photograph from the spot where others have photographed. There were no typical views of the place. Her photographs are characteristic of the pictorial conventions that were available to her and the other photographers at the time, many, as Joel Snyder and others suggest carried over from painting:

These conventions were shared by picture makers who worked in the

other print media / lithography, engraving, the various etching processes

/ as well as those who worked with paint on canvas. (1994, p. 177) 266 CULTURAL STUDIES

Or as W.J.T. Mitchell would have it:

Traditional eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscape conventions are now part of the repertory of kitsch, endlessly reproduced in amateur paintings, postcards, packaged tours, and prefabricated emotions. (1994, p. 20)

All participants can be said to have participated in (drawn on, performed, been influenced by) a variety of pictorial practices: the picturesque; the anthropological; the auto(ethno)graphic (perhaps a subset of the anthropological); and the journalistic.

Picturesque. Both European and North American landscape photography throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carried the marks of the picturesque conventions of landscape painting. Properties of this convention include the emphasis on the angle of view, the placement of figures within the frame who double for the spectator, the presence of and fascination with ruins, and a composition that draws the viewer’s eye into the depth of the frame (see Taylor 1990, Hussey 1967). Many of the photos from these expeditions exhibit traces of these conventions, particularly the placement of figures within the frame and the attraction of ruins. Certainly, the built environment in Labrador was minimal at best during this time, but if the explorers found any evidence of native camps or trappers’ cabins, it was occasion for a photograph. Mrs Hubbard’s use of a panoramic camera may contribute to her exemplification of picturesque conventions. Many of her panoramic shots contain a compelling sense of depth often constructed by the placement of a figure or the serpentine lines of a river moving towards the horizon. More often than not, Wallace’s photos have a degree of occlusion: some topographic or material feature is placed in the mid-ground in such a way as to stop the eye from moving forward into the space of the image (Taylor 1990). Figure 2 is a case in point. The published photograph taken at this location (Wallace 1907, facing p. 130) sharpens the angle between the wigwam frame and the seated figure moving the viewer more forcefully into the space at the right side of the image. Figure 3 taken by Hubbard during the 1903 expedition demonstrates a different compositional practice with similar subject matter. Here George Elson is posed next to the remains of the wigwam, both squarely occupying the mid-ground of the frame. Hubbard’s goal is informational: his photo shows us something of the scale of the structure and does not invoke the romance of drawing the viewing deeper into the space of the frame.

Anthropological. The representational work of these expeditions also bears comparison to the standards of ethnographic practice during the same period. PERFORMING THE VISUAL NORTH 267

FIGURE 2 Dillon Wallace Fonds., collection 244, 8.01.184. Another photograph taken at this location but from a slightly different angle was published by Wallace (1907) with the caption, ‘Abandoned Indian Camp on Shore of Lake Michikamats’. The structure midway between the wigwam ruins and the seated ﬁgure is the remains of a ‘sweat hole’.

As Pinney (1992) has noted (following Burgin 1982), such practices involve the tendency of photographers to stress re-production over production. As re-production, the expedition photographs attempted to represent culture in the north (trading posts, native encampments, trappers’ cabins, etc.) rather than the culture of the photographers. The camera is used to create a quality of ‘being there’ that captures what the photographers feel are distinctive yet exotic features of the place. As Grace says, ‘They constitute a truth claim by providing a visual record and evidentiary proof’ (2004, p. xxxv). Wallace does not photograph native inhabitants of Labrador during his first expedition. The Hubbard-Wallace party of 1903 never encountered anyone during their trek inland and it is not until late in the winter after recovering from his frostbite that Wallace makes a note of such an encounter. Writing to his sisters Anne and Jesse from Kenanish, he says,

We had a lot of Indians camping near here. I took my camera over to get some pictures in the camp, but did not succeed very well, as they were afraid of it and hid in the tents as long as I had it in my hands. (8 February 1904, Wallace Collection 5.01.004)

Photographs of both ‘Indian’ and ‘Eskimo’ inhabitants do appear in Wallace’s second book based on the 1905 expedition. The photos emulate the conventions often viewed as common to the visual anthropology of the day (see Poignant 1992, Griffiths 2002): erasure of background details in order to 268 CULTURAL STUDIES

FIGURE 3 Dillon Wallace Fonds., collection 244, 8.01.083. Elson is wearing the striped sweater evident in other photographs from the 1903 expedition.

generalize the particular individuals photographed; no captioning that might describe or individualize those people in the photograph; subjects presented and described as racial ‘types’ (see figure 6). The initial serialized publication of Wallace’s photos in Outing does contain considerably more compositional variety partly because of the larger number of photos included. This variety makes it difficult to assert that the photographers have been influenced by a particular style or genre of photography. Categorizing their photos in this way reduces critical attributions to available textual evidence, at the same time as it removes the images from the complexity of their cultural performance. Mrs Hubbard did encounter both Montagnais and Nascaupee (as she referred to them) and Inuit during her travels. Her photographs of the Nascaupee (taken in the more common aspect ratio) are casual, almost domestic images that suggest a degree of comfort and intimacy surprising for such a brief encounter. Her experience is quite at odds with Wallace’s described above yet both responses suggest the familiarity of these groups with the camera.

Meantime I had been thinking about my photographs. Taking up one of my kodaks I said to the chief that I should like to take his picture and motioned him to stand apart. He seemed to understand quite readily and PERFORMING THE VISUAL NORTH 269

FIGURE 4 Dillon Wallace Fonds., collection 244, 8.01.124. Wallace is in the mid-ground in this photo with Elson in the background. The photo documents their efforts at drying the meat of a caribou killed on 12 August 1905. Within two months they will ﬁnd their way back to this camp in the hope recovering bones, skin, and hooves for food.

stepped lightly to one side of the little company in a way which showed it was not a new experience to him. They had no sort of objection to being snapped but rather seemed quite eager to pose for me. (Hubbard 1908, pp. 174/5).

In some instances, she turns the camera over to her guide, George Elson: ‘Mrs. Hubbard washing took her picture three times this camping place. Job came and drove some caribou just around the tent’ (1905, Wednesday 9 August). The amateur explorer William Cabot travelled through Labrador in the same period as the Hubbard-Wallace expeditions. His publications also contain numerous images but where possible he captions them with the name of the subjects, a practice suggestive of a different relationship with local residents than that of Wallace’s approach (Grace 2004). Wallace’s treatment offers easy footing for developing a link between his visual practices and the subsequent exploitation of this region occasioned (or enabled) by the ocular practices of such photography (Ryan 1998, Bernardin et al. 2003). However, as a conclusion about the ideological character of these images, this opposition of styles may be hastily drawn.

Auto(ethno)graphic. Although these collections contain images of landscape, ruins, trading posts, native and non-native residents, and so forth, the most common subjects are the participants themselves. The photos are parts of what 270 CULTURAL STUDIES

might be called an autographic or autoethnographic performance of their expedition. Literally and figuratively the images reproduce the culture of the producer (Ruby 1981). On all expeditions, there are photos of camp activities, cooking, sleeping, writing and so forth. The expeditions did not set out to be a record of their everyday life in camp. As the trips progress, more and more of the participants’ own practical accomplishments take over the documentary objectives: shooting geese, smoking caribou meat, dressing, and so forth. This style of illustration, as mentioned above was common for Outing. Images illustrating the mundane duties of camp life were frequently offered for their instructional value in the pages of Outing. For the 1903 expedition in particular, this autoethnography moves beyond Hubbard’s everyday routines as an outdoor photographer of human interest to become a record of their progressive physical deterioration. Again, a hasty conclusion might suggest an objectifying male gaze being turned on other members of the party in the absence of more exotic subjects.

Journalistic. Within these practices, are images produced by professional journalists, but also images that are more broadly illustrative and unhampered by the constraints of scientific survey work. The journalistic tradition extends back (at least) to Commander Peary’s five voyages to Greenland with Kodaks during the 1890s (Collins 1990), and includes the more philanthropic use of images for fundraising purposes by Wilfred Grenfell and others (see James 1983, 1985, Rompkey 1996). As Rompkey noted, the circulation of images of destitution by Grenfell would ‘haunt’ public officials for a long period afterward. In 1906, the New York Times described a fundraising lecture by Wilfred Grenfell: ‘Besides relating the history of the mission to date, Grenfell, in his customary fashion, showed slides illustrating life on the Labrador coast’ (quoted in Romkey 1991, p. 117). In the New York Times coverage from April 1906, the visual strategies are clear: ‘The picture of a barefooted little girl, poorly clad, and standing in the snow, gave the audience an idea of the poverty which had to be confronted’ (quoted in Rompkey, 1991, p. 117). Journalistic images of this type are the most stereotypic of all those produced by the expeditions. They include images of the various outposts and trading companies, images of icebergs, sealers, the various coastal steamers, and various telling indications of living conditions, housing, clothing, etc. A subset of these more descriptive images is clearly used for humorous effect in the lecture presentations that feature lantern slides. Although these were contained in the Wallace collection, there is no certainty that Wallace took all or any of them. Some have already been identified as originating with the Holloway Studios (see Rusted 1993, Hebbard 1997). The image of a pipe smoking seal (figure 5) can be attributed to A.A. Chesterfield (James 1985), a PERFORMING THE VISUAL NORTH 271

FIGURE 5 Dillon Wallace Fonds., collection 244, 8.01.151. In his discussion of Chesterfield photos, James notes the existence of a photo of Chesterfield’s of ‘a man holding a pipe- smoking seal on his lap’ (1985, p. 6). The picture was taken at Rigolet during the 1890s when Chesterfield was first stationed in Labrador. James makes no mention of any contact with Wallace, and he makes no note of the use of Chesterfield’s photographs by Wallace.

Hudson’s Bay Company employee who had been stationed in both Rigolet and the Ungava region. Although there is no record of correspondence between

Chesterfield and Wallace to suggest a transaction over photographs, in 1905/ 6, the year following Chesterfield’s departure, Wallace stayed at the posts where Chesterfield had been employed. Chesterfield did sell some of his images as ‘stock’ shots that were used by publishers in the early decades of the century. The presence of unattributed images in both Wallace’s books and collections of lantern slide material suggest a very different critical direction than one that ties the meaning of images to the influences and motivations of individualized ‘authors’ of the photographs (Frosh 2004). In his monograph on Chesterfield, William James notes that one of Chesterfield’s pictures appearing in a 1912 book about Grenfell indicated that the Outing Publishing Company held the copyright. James suggests that this was ‘the agency through whom Chesterfield had presumably arranged its distribution’ (1985, p. 113). Outing published the magazine that Hubbard had worked for; in 1906, they serialized Wallace’s account of the 1905 expedition, and then published it in book form in 1907. James also mentions that other photos by Chesterfield appeared in books about Grenfell published by Fleming H. Revell. Revell published Wallace’s 1905 book on the 1903 expedition. The details of these transactions suggest the institutional contours of authorship of these photographs. It makes little sense to talk about the 272 CULTURAL STUDIES

stylistic achievements of an individual (or even to subject them to critical analysis) when the visual character of a publication is being shaped by conventions of image use beyond the control or even experience of Hubbard or Wallace. In the case of Wallace’s 1907 book, the anthropological and the journalistic influences collapse into one other. Comparing the images Wallace published with those taken by Chesterfield makes it obvious that Wallace (or his editor, or his publisher) simply used those taken several years earlier by A. A. Chesterfield in the western Ungava. Figure 6 is published by Wallace with the caption, ‘A Labrador Type’ but the original resided for decades in a collection of Chesterfield’s photos found in an office at Queen’s University (James 1985). It is not that Wallace has absorbed anthropological conventions but that the publisher bought or appropriated images taken by a self-taught

FIGURE 6 Dillon Wallace Fonds., collection 244, 8.01.210. When compared with the plate on page 70 of James, the relation between the Wallace Collection and Chesterﬁeld’s work is clear. Many of the glass slides of Inuit in the Wallace collection are clearly copies made from prints. There is no indication given in Wallace’s labelling of these slides what their origin was and he gives no credit to Chesterﬁeld in his books, letters or diaries. PERFORMING THE VISUAL NORTH 273

Hudson Bay Company clerk. The absence of captions that might individualize the man in figure 6 is partly the result of its users having no direct contact with its production. Moving from being amateur snapshot to stock photo, it becomes deterritorialized text.

Moral and ideological boundaries Coverage of Mrs Hubbard’s trip by the American Journal Examiner in 1905 referred to Labrador as ‘ice-bound waste’, ‘freezing, trackless forests’, ‘a wildness of s[l]eet and ice and chilling mist’, ‘the land of ice and bleak barrenness’, a ‘lonely barren waste’ and so on, all in one article! The popular press was not alone in connoting the place in this way: similar tropes turn up throughout Wallace’s publications. The photographic rendering is in some sense an effort to live up to these verbal metaphors, especially the latter portions of both expeditions when Wallace has to resort to dog team to get ‘out’. The first illustration in The Long Labrador Trail (1907) features ‘Ice Encountered Off the Labrador Coast’. Symbolically, it suggests the barrier Wallace had to cross in starting this expedition. Wallace himself has a strong moral sense of the separation of these social worlds. On several occasions he refers to being trapped there over the winter as a kind of ‘prison’. On other occasions, he is quick to point out the pristine features of the indigenous culture (‘uncontaminated’ in his phrase, 1907, p. 208), now at the mercy of outside intrusions. This creates the sense of the explorer’s boundary crossing privilege of spaces that otherwise should remain separate. To lose sight of the boundaries is to risk having the spaces confused, and to have the role of the explorer muddied with those of the tourist or the casual traveller. While wintering in Labrador during his second expedition, he has the opportunity to meet Inuit who had been exhibited at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Their opinion of the south plays into his sense of the need for boundaries.

‘...‘Tis too lonesome in the States, sir’.

‘But you can’t get the good things to eat here*/the fruits and other things’, I insisted.

‘I likes the oranges and apples fine, sir*/but they has no seal meat or deer’s meat in the States’. (1907, p. 280)

It is the separation of spaces and cultures that maintains Wallace’s role as explorer. 274 CULTURAL STUDIES

It is never entirely clear what Hubbard’s or Wallace’s motivation is for coming to Labrador in the first place. In the opening pages of The Long Labrador Trail (1907), Wallace reprises Hubbard’s plans to follow the trail of the Indians from the coast to Lake Michikamau to the headwaters of the George River; to see the migration of the caribou herds; to meet the Nascaupee; to map the territory to be covered. Mrs. Hubbard sets as her goal the completion of the tasks left undone by her husband, and the discovery of details relating to his death. Setting aside their southern lives to do this means crossing the boundary, as their narratives state repeatedly, from the known to the unknown. Over the next few years until the start of World War I, Wallace is able to lecture widely across Canada and the United States on his ordeal. The subsequent news headlines though give as much attention to the discussion of wealth and resources to be found in Labrador as they give to the fate of Hubbard. The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s headline about his 1908 lecture to the Chamber of Commerce claims that he told the chamber of ‘That Untold Wealth Hidden in the Far North’ (‘Dillon Wallace Tells Chamber That Untold Wealth Hidden in Far North’, Cleveland Plain Dealer, 19 April 1908). Through the 1920s and 1930s, he is being approached with schemes to invest in timber and mineral rich areas, to reprise the expedition with the sponsorship of a motorboat engine company, and so on, but Wallace pursues none. It would have blurred the boundary he lived to articulate.

Conclusion

To be able to assemble a group of materials and a variety of methodological analyses around an issue that is determined out of cultural and political realities rather than out of traditions of learned arguments, seems an important step forward in the project of reformulating knowledge to deal responsibly with the lived conditions of highly contested realities, such as we face at the turn of this century in the West. (Rogoff 1998, p. 23)

The constitutive liminality of performance studies lies in its capacity to bridge segregated and differently valued knowledges, drawing together legitimated as well as subjugated modes of inquiry.

(Conquergood 2002, pp. 151/2)

In his book on Labrador published almost a decade after Hubbard’s death, William Cabot reflected on his encounter with the expedition. Cabot had declined to join Hubbard and had been critical of Hubbard’s planning in the year following the expedition. ‘Unquestionably’, he wrote, ‘the party’s initial PERFORMING THE VISUAL NORTH 275 equipment was deficient’ (1904, p. 478). Cabot had tempered his opinion when writing the introduction to the British edition of Mrs Hubbard’s book in 1908. In that text, Hubbard is listed as one of ‘more than thirty names of explorers of note’ (1908:14) that have travelled in Labrador. Striking a reflective and romantic pose in 1912, he could still summon the common feeling he shared with Hubbard as they were about to enter the space of Labrador that summer in 1903:

Hubbard and I, much together, looked with lingering eyes upon the far and sparsely forested hills. They were inviting hills to the feet, and save the fur hunters of the bays in winter no white man had traveled there. To our eyes it was the very unexplored land of our dreams. Again and again we said: ‘If we were only there! If we were only there, on those hills!’ (Cabot 1912, p. 28)

It is a saturated, sensory opportunity for both men and their gaze is directed towards a space they have imagined, a space they have conceived as outside culture. The representational labour they and their partners are poised to commence in that spring of 1903 performed this space, reproduced it and made it amenable to commodification for popular consumption. Given the products of their expeditions, and a future Labrador they might not have imagined (Wadden 1991), it is a commonplace to critique such a moment as ocular, as a moment when the imperial gaze is detained by the object of its desire. To let my discussion rest on such ‘sparsely forested hills’ might round it out along the lines that Mitchell recommends:

We have known since Ruskin that the appreciation of landscape as an aesthetic object cannot be an occasion for complacency or untroubled contemplation; rather, it must be the focus of a historical, political, and (yes) aesthetic alertness to the violence and evil written on the land, projected there by the gazing eye. (Mitchell 1994, p. 29)

For a ‘historical’ reading of these moments in the spatialization of Labrador one would ‘not simply retrieve their conventionality but explore the ideological use of their conventions in a specific place and time’ (Mitchell 1994, p. 21). The direction of such a reading is evident, even obvious in terms of the subjugations of race, gender, and the environment. Its corollary would be that Hubbard and Wallace might have achieved the same measure of success as Mrs Hubbard had they been attentive to local and indigenous knowledge. The research offered here though engages another projection of ‘the gazing eye’, one produced by a textual view of the visual and the spatial, one that passes over performance and culture. 276 CULTURAL STUDIES

In a survey article on genres of performance writing, Norman Denzin proposed that moments of performance ‘have the potential of overcoming the biases of an ocular, visual epistemology. They can undo the voyeuristic, gazing eye of the ethnographer’ (1997, p. 182). Denzin does not reference this critique of ethnography, assuming I suppose that it is so commonly shared as to need none (for example Fabian 1983, Faris 1992). The ocular, it asserts cannot help but produce the voyeuristic, imperial gaze whether directed at self or ethnographic other. The implication following Mitchell would be that visual culture in general, photography in particular cannot help but contribute to the commodification of place. Representation by its nature deterritorializes. The ocular comes to stand not just for the eye but for a western regime of truth, it is ‘a view from above the object of inquiry: knowledge that is anchored in paradigm and secured in print’ (Conquergood 2002, p. 146). As commonplace critique of colonial ethnography or as engaged and transforma- tive rethinking of contemporary ethnographic practice and epistemology, such exhortations continue to have consequences for scholarship and contribute to re-writing the boundaries of practice, institution and engagement. Yet it is unclear to me how to position such analysis of the ocular and not offer yet another view from above. In the analysis of a visual archive, there is also a doubling of effect: in judging those engaging in the representational labour as exponents of the ocular, the researcher re-engages the view from above. The archival boxes are open, the contents, slides, letters, diaries are scattered yet all within easy reach for transcription and analysis. The space of Labrador disappears into its textual performances and representations held within arm’s reach of the reading body. Analysis retreats to the text, hunts the nuances brought forward by letters, and tracks the innuendo of perceived convention and induced motivation. This space can be described as if it was performed, but it is always artfully textual. It doubles the disembodiment. In some cases, all of the implications of an ocular critique may be true, but they should not also erase moments of performance that undo such a disembodied view of those images. What I have tried to suggest with this visual case is an agreement with (the more thoroughly referenced portion of) Denzin’s observation: performance texts ‘can undo’. Thinking about the productive and reproductive labour of these expeditions as performative (rather than textual and representational) returns them to particular practices of embodiment. The journals, the lectures, the letters, the books and so forth locate these flecks of visual culture in the particular experience of the participants. Are the two images of Wallace (figures 7 and 8) simply a record of the party’s own voyeuristic, ‘view from above’? Have I accomplished anything if I name their photographs in this way? In their desperation and longing for home, had Elson, Hubbard and Wallace lost the ability to see the space of Labrador with their bodies? Figure 7, likely taken by George Elson on the threshold of their PERFORMING THE VISUAL NORTH 277

FIGURE 7 Dillon Wallace Fonds., collection 244, 8.01.098. This is a threshold image and appeared in The Lure with the caption, ‘We arrived at Rigolet’. departure from Northwest River on 15 July 1903, shows Hubbard (left) and Wallace in their prime: relaxed and comfortable. Hubbard has his thumbs hooked in his pocket; Wallace is completely at ease, abdomen in the lead. Neither betrays a sense of what lies ahead. Figure 8, taken by Hubbard in his last weeks preserves a grim pleasure for us. He gazes at the disarray of his

FIGURE 8 Dillon Wallace Fonds., collection 244, 8.01.059. Wallace (right) stands with Elson amidst the disarray of their diminishing gear. 278 CULTURAL STUDIES

expedition and the deterioration of his friend, Wallace, ‘a great comfort ...no friction this trip whatever’ (Hubbard 1908, p. 240). The image documents little except his travelling companions struggling with tattered clothing, Wallace in particular trying to find a way to keep it draped around him. The image conveys something of their weariness and their utter lack of concern for the camera. Hubbard is performing what he does not name, their progressive deterioration and starvation. As Wallace noted, ‘our eyes were sunken deep into their sockets. Our lips were drawn to thin lines over our teeth. The skin of our faces and hands was stretched tight over the bones’ (Wallace 1905, p.

186/7). In the days that followed, and after they leave Hubbard to seek help and a cache of food, Wallace says repeatedly, ‘H is in very bad shape & I fear he will break down before getting out. His condition is pitiable but he bears himself like the hero that he is trying always to cheer us’ (Dillon Wallace Fonds., collection 244, 3.01.001, Friday 16 October 1903).7 Is there another way to think of these images than as the last objectified and voyeuristic traces of a fatal expedition? How did Hubbard, Wallace and Elson know what to photograph in Labrador? Was it just the habits of visual conventions carried so lightly that guided composition and subject? Or were such habits a burden that limited the ability to see beyond, outside, otherwise? Considering these images performatively has raised clear questions about textual attributions in terms of both the diverse conventions that were in circulation and the actual authorship and circumstances of their production. Certainly these images contributed to the commodification of this place. But what of the Labrador they are so fatally earnest in exploring? Do these images convey this space? Are they as good as those of Mrs Hubbard? These images trouble. Despite their textual essence, there is nothing fixed or certain about them. Perhaps it is commonplace to conclude that these images of deterioration mark a fatal threshold, one that Elson and Wallace are just able to hike around. Perhaps it is also commonplace to see these images as a means of performing the effect this space has on the expedition. Hubbard is both recording this embodiment and embodying this place through his images. What the participants of these expeditions have left is not simply a corpus of representations, an archival record of the imperial gaze. They have performed, for the camera and with the camera. They have embodied the space of their photography.

Acknowledgements

Research for this paper was supported by sabbatical research grants from the University of Calgary in 1992 and again in 1998. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference, Tampere, PERFORMING THE VISUAL NORTH 279

Finland, June 2000, and at the National Communication Association, Performance Studies Division, in Chicago, Illinois, November 2000. All photographs in this paper are used courtesy of the Centre for Newfoundland Studies Archives, Memorial University of Newfoundland. Head Archivist Bert Riggs, Archivist Linda White and Honorary Research Librarian Anne Hart provided invaluable help and support over the years in the documentation and description of the images in this collection.

Notes

1 With specific reference to Mrs. Hubbard’s images, Sherrill Grace has commented on their relation to picturesque conventions and scientific surveys (see Grace 2004). 2 Wallace’s 1913 expedition can be seen as the first in an ongoing sequence of commemorative re-enactments of the 1903 expedition. His son Dillon Wallace III returns sixty years later in 1973 and again in 1976 to complete his father’s 1913 task of placing a bronze plaque at the site of Hubbard’s last camp. Davidson and Rugge’s work was fuelled by canoeing this area, as they describe it, ‘an attempt to recount the tale in full, based on our own retracing of the Labrador routes by canoe’ (1988, p. 4). Earlier efforts (Iwata & Niemi 1983) and later (Pratt 2002) are explicit re-enactments of Mrs Hubbard’s expedition. The performative character of these re- enactments is captured in the naming of Gipps’ 2003 trip: ‘The Hubbard Memorial Centennial Expedition’ (2004, p. 2). 3 Grace also notes some photographs that appear in Mrs Hubbard’s magazine articles that do not appear in the final book (Grace 2004, pp. xxxvi/xl). 4 Although Wallace begins the serialization of The Long Labrador Trail late in the summer of 1906 in Outing (Wallace 1906), Mrs Hubbard had published photos from her expedition by May (Hubbard 1906). 5 There are existing news reports of both their lantern slide lectures. See, for instance, coverage in the Globe and Mail for 4 December 1906 of a lecture Wallace gives to the Aura Lee Club: ‘A large number of stereopticon views were shown, illustrating the scenery of the Labrador, the types of inhabitants, the modes of travelling, igloos, and other habitations, etc.’. Coverage of Mrs Hubbard’s talk in Williamstown (‘Mrs Hubbard’s Lecture’, North Adams Evening Transcript, 27 February 1906, p. 7) notes that she spoke for forty-five minutes, then showed ‘100 stereopticon views’ and delivered all with ‘remarkable dramatic power’. 6 Grace stresses the influence of the ‘conventional exploration-narrative’ (2004, p. xxxv), ‘northern expedition photography’ (2004, p. lv), and ‘ethnographic photographs’ (2004, p. lvi) on Mrs. Hubbard’s photographs. In the end, she concludes that Mrs. Hubbard is forerunner of a ‘subjective documentary’ practice (2004, p. lvii, following Hamilton 1997) because some of her images are ‘highly inclusive and respectful’ (2004, p. lvi). While I would not disagree with the latter description of Mrs. Hubbard’s images, it 280 CULTURAL STUDIES

is important not to lose sight of the fact that all the participants in these expeditions (with the possible exception of Leonidas Hubbard himself) were amateur photographers. Equating their work with professionals in other genres is to lose sight of the domestic and vernacular determinants of their images. 7 After Wallace has been rescued, he notes in his diary, ‘weighed me today 112 lbs / 9 days after rescue. The day before I left New York City I weighed 168 in light summer clothes’ (Dillon Wallace Fonds., collection 244, 3.01.003, Diary, Sunday 8 November 1903).

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