Reviews

Imaging The Arctic

Stephen Osborne

In 1987 in the British Museum, George Qulaut of lgloolik discovered a photograph of his grandmother in an archive of photographs taken by Geraldine Moodie in the Canadian Arctic in 1904. Nine years later the same photograph appeared on a poster announcing a conference called Imagining the Arctic: The Native Photograph in Alaska, Canada and Greenland, at which George Qulaut was the keynote speaker. Last year a collection of papers and photographs presented at the conference appeared as Imaging The Arctic, a big volume published by UBC Press, University of Washington Press and the British Museum—and George Qulaut's grandmother is on the cover. Unlike typical collections of conference proceedings, Imaging the Arctic has been wonderfully edited (by J.C.H. King and Henrietta Lidchi) and the result is an enormous resource of clear thinking and intelligent discussion of photography and its protean uses. Here is photography revealed in its many modes: forensic, ethno-graphic, colonialist, memorialist; and as a form of cultural and family exchange, a site of memory and a tool for constructing and re-constructing history. The discourse in these twenty-seven essays and as many archives of northern photographs ranges from Roland Barthes to Peter Pitseolak (photographer of Baffin Island in the thirties and forties). This is the most important book on photography to appear since Barthes resolved from that experience to "derive all Photography from the only photograph which assuredly existed for me, and to take it somehow as a guide for my last investigation." And so has a Photography been derived from the photograph of George Qulaut's grandmother.

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Stephen Osborne

Stephen Osborne is a co-founder and contributing publisher of Geist. He is the award-winning writer of Ice & Fire: Dispatches from the New World and dozens of shorter works, many of which can be read at geist.com.


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