Student Essay

Alexandra Mills
This essay was written by an M.A. student in a Museum Practice seminar in the Department of Art History, Faculty of Fine Arts, Concordia University. The seminar was taught by Dr. Loren Lerner with the assistance of Dina Vescio, a M.A. graduate of the program.

Introduction

Currently, the Fokker Universal model resides in the small artifacts storage area of the Canada Aviation Museum. Although not currently on display, it helps narrate an important story in Canadian history. The model is an artifact from the Hudson Strait Expedition, an important event in the history of Northern development in Canada. The Fokker Universal model is an exact replica of one of the six open-cockpit Fokker Universal monoplanes used on the 1927-1928 Hudson Strait Expedition and was built by Sergeant Andrew Caggie out of materials found around the Northern camp on the shores of Wakeham Bay at Churchill, Manitoba (fig. 1).¹ Beyond its physicality, it is material evidence of the history of the social and cultural interactions that took place on the Expedition. This idea is substantiated by a photograph of the model found within flying officer B. G. Carr-Harris’s picture album, which contains a diverse selection of images representing different aspects of life in Northern Canada (fig. 2).

The album itself is typical; inexpensive craft paper, yellowed with the passing of time, bound together and contained within a brown leather jacket. However, the content of the album is unusual. Containing over a hundred unique photographs taken during the Hudson Strait Expedition, the album records an important time in Canadian history. Each photograph when seen in isolation is a snap shot of a particular moment, however, once laced together the images form a narrative that traces the lives of multiple people and events.

Photographs and Carr-Harris’s Photo Album

Photographs are records; they are visual evidence of an event, a person or a moment. Annette Kuhn and Kirsten Emiko McAllister write in the introductory chapter to Locating Memory: Photographic Acts that photographs are “recorded moment of stillness, capturing and offering up for contemplation a trace of something lost.”² Further, they propose that photographs offer and confront the viewer with a trace of their history, and in some cases, the history of others.³

Photographs have an experiential quality: they are entities to be experienced in and of themselves, and not completely restricted to the looking glass of history. In Image and Imagination Martha Langford suggests that “the beginning of a photographic encounter” is the viewers’ attraction to a particular image, referencing a longing to delve into photographs in order to understand their meanings.⁴ In addition, Langford indicates that individuals have a dual relationship with photographic images; while people are affected by photographic images, viewers also influence their content. She contends that images are affected by the imagination of the beholder, who “comes to the work with visual experience comprised of a multitude of images, mental and photographic,” thus supplementing the original meaning of a photograph with their own desires and experience.⁵ As an extension of this idea, Langford suggests that people do two things when confronted with a photographic image: initially they examine the images for possible interpretations and then they decide which interpretation works best for them.⁶

The photo album of Carr-Harris contains photographs from the historic Hudson Strait Expedition. This album functions as an archive, documenting the year Carr-Harris spent in Northern Quebec. The album however, is more than just a formal record. It presents a wide range of photographs that subsequently allow the viewer to construct multiple narratives. This includes (but is not limited to) a historical recreation of the events and activities that took place on the expedition, a document of the social and cultural interactions between the Inuit living near the Hudson Strait and the men taking part in the expedition, as well as an account of the relationship between man and nature (figs. 3, 4 & 5).

Depending on individual knowledge, diverse historical trends and the desires brought to the analysis of the images, the viewer might look at the images for their social, political, or economic significance to construct narratives. Our knowledge of the Hudson Strait Expedition, the economic climate of Canada in the late 1920s or of Canada’s Inuit population has an influence on our analysis of the images. Further, our interest in different aspects of history, as well as our knowledge of aviation, will have an impact on how we experience the images and construct a narrative.

Questioning Chronology: The Album in its Entirety

I examined the content of Carr-Harris’s photographic album on several occasions. Firstly, I surveyed its overall contents and discovered that the images fit within two distinct categories: aerial and ground photographs. Secondly, I attempted to sub-divide these further into smaller groups, including but not limited to portraits and landscapes. The images can be further classified into clusters that consist of lodging types such as igloos and wooden houses, aircrafts and their hangars, means of transportation, as well as images of hunting, ice fishing, whaling, working and other photographs illustrating life in one of Canada’s Northern regions (figs. 6, 7 & 8). On subsequent encounters I focused on seemingly ordinary images, such as those that depict scenes of daily life, thus allowing me the opportunity to construct socio-cultural narratives from Carr-Harris’s album. It is within these socio-cultural histories that the image of the Fokker Universal model belongs.

In Camera Lucida Roland Barthes defines the photograph as an object one looks through to gain information about the world.⁷ The images found in Carr-Harris’s album function as a form of communication with the outside world. Like a book, which speaks to its readers by assembling words on a page, the images in the Carr-Harris photographic album communicate with their viewers. The signs and symbols on each page each convey an idea, a history, an emotion or a memory to their ‘reader’. Each page in Carr-Harris’s album is organized in a linear fashion; therefore, on each page the images can be read from left to right and top to bottom organization. However, its organization is only a projection of the viewer’s assumptions when encountering an album presented in book form. There is no textual evidence within the album that informs the reader as to the so-called real order of the photographs. In fact, chronology is only presumed. This album has no interpreter, meaning that the viewer alone is able to construct narratives from its pages.

The format of the album frames the photographs; however, the structure of the images need not have strictly defined borders in the way they should be read or interpreted by the viewer. It is possible to construct a non-linear, unfixed narrative by relating the images to one another in a multitude of ways. The nature of the support requires that the images be viewed in situ, or as they are found within the album, but this does not necessitate experiencing the images in chronological order.

Focusing on the Fokker Universal Model

The Fokker Universal model is only depicted once in Carr-Harris’s album, however it serves to connect the workings of the Hudson Strait Expedition with the life in and around the camps at Northern Quebec in the Hudson Strait (fig. 9). Portraying Native and non-Native peoples, the photograph is a conversation between two cultures and conjures up ideas concerning the relationships that existed between the individuals captured within the picture. This image also necessarily relates to the experiences of the viewer, acting as a snapshot capable of recalling individual memories, anecdotes and histories.

It is often believed that a picture is worth a thousand words. If this is the case, each element of the aforementioned image is necessary in determining its meaning. Machinery and the unidentifiable objects in the background are equally as important as the figures in the foreground holding the model or the landscape in which they stand. Every object, big or small, must be “entered on a mental list” for the purpose of dissecting each layer of the image in order to reveal their ever-growing meanings.⁸

Model aircraft function as a link between cultures both literally and figuratively; the Fokker Universal model visually connects two cultures together. From the head to the tail of the model aircraft a line is created which links the three figures in the image together. The wings of the model aircraft are vertically in line with the people in the image, symbolically acting as a fourth figure. This image provides a link to the past, allowing viewers to identify with the human side of Canadian history.

LIST OF FIGURES

fig. 1 Fokker Universal monoplane (registration number G-CAHF), Brian G. Carr-Harris photo album, 1927-1928, Canada Aviation Museum (Photo: Canada Aviation Museum Photo Collection, 1967.1251.1 )

fig. 2 Sergeant Andrew Caggie with Fokker Universal model and two unidentified men, Brian G. Carr-Harris photo album, 1927-1928, Canada Aviation Museum. (Photo: Canada Aviation Museum, 1967.1251.1)

fig. 3 Explorers on the Hudson Strait Expedition (with a local Inuit man), Brian G. Carr-Harris photo album, 1927-1928, Canada Aviation Museum. (Canada Aviation Museum Photo Collection, 1967.1251.1)

fig. 4 People in the Northern landscape, Brian G. Carr-Harris photo album, 1927-1928, Canada Aviation Museum. (Photo: Canada Aviation Museum Photo Collection, 1967.1251.1)

fig. 5 Two men on the Hudson Strait Expedition, Brian G. Carr-Harris photo album, 1927-1928, Canada Aviation Museum. (Photo: Canada Aviation Museum Photo Collection, 1967.1251.1)

fig. 6 Two Fokker Universal monoplanes, Brian G. Carr-Harris photo album, 1927-1928, Canada Aviation Museum. (Photo: Canada Aviation Museum Photo Collection, 1967.1251.1)

fig. 7 Landscape photograph, Carr-Harris photo album. 1927-1928, Canada Aviation Museum (Photo: Canada Aviation Museum, 1967.1251.1)

fig. 8 Hunted Beluga whale, Carr-Harris photo album. 1927-1928, 1967.1251.1, Canada Aviation Museum (Photo: Canada Aviation Museum Photo Collection, 1967.1251.1)

fig. 9 Sergeant Andrew Caggie with Fokker Universal Model and two unidentified men, Brian G. Carr-Harris photo album, 1927-1928, Canada Aviation Museum. (Photo: Canada Aviation Museum Photo Collection, 1967.1251.1)

NOTES

1. For information on the Hudson Strait Expedition, see: W.A.B. Douglas, The Creation of a National Airforce, vol. II., ed., Norman Hillmer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986) 105-112; Larry Milberry, Aviation in Canada (Toronto and New York: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1979) 190-191; and Canada Aviation Museum, “Hudson Strait Expedition, 1927-1928.” Canadian Aviation Through Time, 1 Oct. 2009 {http://www.aviation.technomuses.ca/explore/ exhibitions/timeline/index.php?file=exhiblet_7&Lang=e}.
2. Annette Kuhn and Kirsten Emiko McAllister, “Chapter 1: Photographic Acts – An Introduction,” Remapping Cultural History – Volume 4, Locating Memory: Photographic Acts, , Eds., Annette Kuhn and Kirsten Emiko McAllister (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006) 1.
3. Kuhn and McAllister, 1.
4. Martha Langford, “Introduction: Movements Towards Image,” Image and Imagination (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2005) 3.
5. Langford, 3.
6. Langford, 3.
7. See: Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).
8. 8 Martha Langford, Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2001) 4.