Carol Payne

Lessons with Leah: re‐reading the photographic archive of nation in the National Film Board of Canada's Still Photography Division

This article examines the negotiation of cultural memory within the photographic archive of the nation. As a case study, it focuses on representations of the Arctic and sub‐Arctic in photo‐stories dating from 1955 to 1971 and produced by the NFB Still Photography Division, an organisation that effectively functioned as Canadas national image bank. Photographic representations of the North reveal the dominant model of national identity that implicitly informs the Still Divisions original mandate and typically reduced the First Peoples of the North as one of the Canadian nations ‘Others’. This article proposes visual repatriation as a model for studying the photographic archive and returning agency to those it depicts. Specifically, it introduces ‘Project Naming’, a collaborative initiative of the Inuit college Nunavut Sivuniksavut, the Library and Archives Canada and the Nunavut Ministry of Culture.

“You Hear It in Their Voice”: Photographs and Cultural Consolidation among Inuit Youths and Elders

In April 2009, 19-year-old Inuk student Natasha Mablick recounted to me her experiences conducting interviews with Inuit elders in her community of Pond Inlet, in Nunavut, the Canadian central arctic territory established in 1999. Like all of the case studies discussed in this volume, the interviews that Natasha conducted centered around photographs as memory prompts and sites of social engagement (see Figure 5.1). Natasha recalled: Some [of the interviews] really make me want to get involved in politics… I have a feeling of just wanting to fix absolutely everything but I know that’s impossible… And I’m kind of finding myself juggling a bunch of mixed emotions. A part of me is kind of mad at the government [for] moving my ancestors into communities… taking my parents away from their homes and putting them into schools and in some cases breaking up some families and their relationships with their family members but on the other side, I know that if this didn’t happen, these people wouldn’t be who they are today. So it’s just juggling and what I believe is right and wrong.2

Photojournalism, Mass Media and the Politics of Spectacle

Images have an ever-increasing power to shape public sentiment and therefore public policy. This makes the role of photojournalism very important in the modern world. Articles in this Special Issue of Visual Resources will raise new questions about the relationships between photography, mass media, and what Guy Debord describes as the “society of the spectacle.” The Spectacle, as Debord famously argued, is a “self-portrait of power”; it, at once, imposes and naturalizes a dominant model of society. As a vestige of mass media, photojournalism sustains that power and yet, as several of the contributors demonstrate, the photographic image and photographic discourse can also open up a space of critical resistance. Not only speculating about theory, the articles in this issue will demonstrate the impact of recent events in history on the production of photographs and our response to them.

Negotiating Photographic Modernism in USA: A Quarterly Magazine of the American Scene (1930)

This article examines the journal USA: A Quarterly Magazine of the American Scene as a microcosm of the complexity of meanings and positioning of photographic modernism in interwar America. Established in the spring of 1930, USA would survive for only three issues. Yet despite that short run, this Philadelphia-based journal of the arts featured an impressive roster of work from across the arts including contributions by William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Martha Graham, José Clemente Orozco, Isamu Noguchi and Richard Neutra. Within its pages, USA also prominently featured photographic representations by such canonical figures as Edward Weston, Walker Evans and Ralph Steiner as well as anonymous vernacular works. This article argues that USAs treatment of the photograph exemplifies photographys complex position during the interwar years as, on the one hand, an emergent medium of modernist art and, on the other, a favored form of commercial and popular expression.

Stan Honda: An Interview

An interview with photojournalist Stan Honda, in which he describes his background and attitude toward his profession, and discusses three of his stories: his images of the aftermath of 9/11, of the Japanese-American internment camps in the Second World War, and of his recent assignment in Iraq. He is currently a staff photographer for Agence France-Press based in New York.

Randa Shaath: An Interview

An interview with Cairo photojournalist Randa Shaath describes how her intercultural background affects her professional perspective. Bridging art, photography and journalism, she is more interested in documenting the daily life of people, especially Arab women, than in news stories or working on assignments. She is a regular contributor to the Al-Ahram Weekly an English-language newspaper in Cairo.