“A Picture of Prosperity” (1981 essay)
The above link will take you to an essay co-written by Myrna Cobb and [former RBCM] archivist Dennis J. Duffy for BC Studies (no. 52, Winter 1981/82). It appeared in a special issue entitled The Past in Focus: Photography & British Columbia, 1858-1914. In the introduction, guest editor Joan M. Schwartz wrote:
The CPR recognized the need to populate the province and it devoted one facet of its advertising to portraying the railway as a civilizing and colonizing force. Once again, photography played a key role in these and other efforts to “sell” the province. Views of extensive orchards and abundant harvests were more than record images — they were visual arguments. Where the emigrant guides of the 1860s could offer only glowing accounts of colonial life and the occasional wood-block engraving, half-tone technology permitted turn-of-the-century advertising campaigns to publish photographic proof of their enthusiastic descriptions. [This essay] looks at the use of photographs in the boosterism of the land boom years. In an examination of illustrations of the Okanagan, Cobb and Duffy address the larger issue of image and reality in photographic depictions of the province and bring together several themes that surface elsewhere in this special issue — the persuasive power of the visual image, the manipulative effect of a selective portrayal, the Victorian faith in photographic truth, the nineteenth-century obsession with material progress, and the filtered reality of published illustrations.
Despite its age — 44 years! — the article makes some interesting points about how photographs of the Interior were used to present an attractive, idealized image to potential settlers.
This research later sparked Dennis’s interest in British Columbia government travelogues of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, which are the subject of his essay “Highways and Hyperbole” and the Royal BC Museum’s first DVD publication, Evergreen Playland: A Road Trip through British Columbia (2008).
Seriously Moving Images 