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The Urge To Re-Photograph

by Don Bourdon

April 4, 2014

I was reminded recently how much I love the act of landscape re-photography. Curiosity drives people to seek the exact vantage points where landscape photographs were captured in the past. And the BC Archives preserves hundreds of thousands of landscape images of the eras encompassed by photography and pre-photography, as rendered by painters and surveyors.  On an exhibits planning road trip to the gold rush town of Barkerville in British Columbia’s Cariboo country, colleagues Kathryn Bridge, Joan Schwartz and I sought out vistas to be compared with their counterparts recorded nearly 150 years ago by colonial-era photographers and artists. Sometimes, I could picture a particular image in my mind’s eye.  For greater accuracy, I brought along some reproductions of classic photographs to try and pinpoint the spots where they were made. In the process, we turned some of our assumptions about the original photographs on their heads.

So often, a century of forest growth has totally smothered locations essential to re-photographing 19th century views.  For instance, obtaining a specific riverside view of Yale today would require gaining access to private land or felling major trees.  Most sections of the Cariboo Road have been obliterated by railway and highway construction.  Hell’s Gate on the Fraser has been drastically altered by blasting, yet some striking rock formations remain, above the raging waters, from thousands of years ago and captured forever in early photographs.

There are plenty of opportunities to re-photograph archival photographs of landscapes at Emory Creek, Yale, Lytton, Spences Bridge, Clinton, and numerous other places all along the Cariboo Road.  Some spots, like Chasm between Clinton and 70 Mile House remain much the same today as in the 1860s –  natural spectacles.  Others like the ferry landing at Soda Creek require imagination to try to figure out just where hostelries and mule teams stood before Frederick Dally’s camera; the course of the river has changed, no original buildings remain and the time of year can have a huge effect on water levels.

Here are a few of my informal shots made in September 2013, alongside 1860s wet plate collodion-process photographs by expert photographer Frederick Dally and one watercolour painting of Quesnel by Roland Price Meade, created in the 1860s:

Swipe or tap the images below to compare the past and present images.

before
after

before: Mules and horses lead a freight wagon at the Yale headquarters of Barnard’s Express, view by Frederick Dally, circa 1868, MS – 3100.1 album 7, page 22

after: Today, at the corner of Front and Albert Street, where the Barnard’s Express building stood, a sign announces that 'In celebration of this Gold Rush time this key historic site will be restored to its original status as the busiest corner North of San Francisco and East [sic] of Chicago'

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before
after

Before: Frederick Dally’s classic view of freight wagons passing through the cut at the Great Bluff has graced books, articles, postcards and fired the imagination of Victorian audiences and those encountering the romance of the Caribboo today. Frederick Dally photograph, circa 1868, MS – 3100.1 album 1, page 42

After: Though battered and reduced in size, the Great Bluff still conjures the obstacles facing the Royal Engineers who carved a wagon road in the Fraser and Thompson Canyons. It’s hard to get quite the right viewpoint now to replicate Dally’s classic view. Next time we’ll bring a step ladder.

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before
after

Before: This beautiful watercolour Quesnelle, signed 'R.P. Meade. Pixit,' (pixit is Latin for 'one painted' and was sometimes added to a signature of a person responsible for creating a work of art, especially in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance according to good ol’ Wikipedia) shows the village of Quesnel at the confluence of the Quesnel and North Fraser Rivers in 1864. PDP10100. Joan Schwartz alerted us to this painting when it came up for auction and we purchased it with funds from the Friends of the BC Archives.

After: To secure our modern view, we stood on the river bank, scanned the hillsides and made a sightline from the confluence and the bank to higher ground. There above a cutbank was a white house on a promontory, a spot free of obstruction, where Meade could have sketched. We found that spot high on Marsh Road off West Fraser Road - our own eureka moment.

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“Then” and “now” photography, made incredulous in weight loss ads, is a natural outcome of curiosity about what places looked like in the past.  It is systematized in initiatives such as the Rocky Mountain Repeat Photography Project, where topographic survey photographs are revisited one hundred years later from precise vantage points. The ablation of glaciers or evolution of fire succession is obvious in many of these views.  So is the effect of human activities –road building, seismic exploration, damming of rivers, etc.

Rephotography also manifests itself in efforts to show just how much cityscapes have changed.  Urban life through two lenses, a vitual exhibit created by the McCord Museum of Montreal, compares and contrasts contemporary photographs painstakingly created by Andrzej Maciejewski based on the outstanding cityscapes of the Notman Studio, 1863-1918.  The McCord’s exhibit shows how Maciejewski rephotographed 34 views using “…the same composition, the same time of year and the same time of day – but a century later.

The City of Vancouver Archives has announced a fabulous project to recreate the panoramic views of W.J. Moore, veteran “Cirkut” camera specialist of the 1910s -1930s, in Through the Lens: Building Vancouver’s History at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre.  Imagine sitting in the Planetarium watching one of Moore’s 360 degree city views morph into the present day.

The Royal BC Museum BC Archives contains countless landscape photographs taken during the 19th and 20th centuries that are either enormously different or scarcely changed from today.  Here are a few that I would challenge you to attempt today and in the future:

Vancouver BC, showing Granville Street" [Hudson's Bay Store is at the far right with the rounded facade.] by Bailey Brothers, [189?]. BCA b-07587
‘Vancouver BC, showing Granville Street’ [Hudson’s Bay Store is at the far right with the rounded facade.] by Bailey Brothers, [189?]. BCA b-07587
A view of the upper town in Phoenix, BC, photographer unknown, circa 1912. BCA i-60908.
A view of the upper town in Phoenix, BC, photographer unknown, circa 1912. BCA i-60908.
"Mount Stephen House, Field, BC, on line of Canadian Pacific Railway.” by J. Howard A. Chapman, 1907. BCA b-07330.
Mount Stephen House, Field, BC, on line of Canadian Pacific Railway. by J. Howard A. Chapman, 1907. BCA b-07330.
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Don Bourdon
Don Bourdon
Contributor, Royal BC Museum
Curator of Images and Paintings, Don Bourdon is researching BC photographers and photographs of the wet-plate collodion era, a period that coincides with BC’s colonial era and waves of gold rush activity.

Contact Don Full profile More by this author

'After' photography by Don Bourdon, Kathryn Bridge & Joan Schwartz.

Categorized History, Photography

Published November 7, 2013

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Cite “The Urge To Re-Photograph”

Don Bourdon, “The Urge To Re-Photograph, ” Curious Quarterly Journal 001 (2013), accessed January 18, 2021. https://curious.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca/the-urge-to-re-photograph/
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