Looking through the Lens of Time

New photography book captures a fascinating portrait of Banff history

Over the years many books have showcased early photos of the Canadian Rockies especially in and around Banff National Park. Anyone seeking monochrome views of the mountains just after the arrival of Europeans need only drop in at a Banff bookstore or virtually any public library.

However biologist and photographer Cliff White and E.J. (Ted) Hart executive director of the Whyte Museum in Banff have taken things a step further. In their skilfully crafted new book The Lens of Time (University of Calgary Press) they’ve engaged in “repeat photography” juxtaposing historic photos of the mountain parks regions and modern images mostly taken from the same or a nearly so vantage point.

This isn’t a new publishing invention either. What makes the exercise novel and important is the emotional point of view expressed by this remarkable book with its 100 sets of then-and-now images reflecting some startling truths and troubling questions.

At a recent public lecture and slide show at the Whyte Museum White and Hart both urged the 70 or so folks in attendance to look carefully at some of those vistas from the 1880s. The early photographers’ motives for committing them to glass negatives included the desire to record the wilderness before the white man’s commerce began tearing up and chopping down the landscape. Yet there’s more to the scenes than that.

In an interview before the show White and Hart discussed their own reactions when sorting the images and studying the details. “I guess the big surprise for us was that these old pictures aren’t just representing pristine nature” White says. “What they represent is 10000 years of people living in this landscape and to understand that depth of how people have interacted with the landscape for a long time that’s what that view does. It’s not just a snapshot in time but actually a view that tells us something about the people who have lived here [for centuries]. It’s an interesting perspective.”

With this little clue to the puzzle I watched the series of images projected onto the lecture-hall screen and got what he was saying. Some of those mountainsides and meadows looked rather manicured and sparse in the 1880s compared with current stretches of thick forest and dense vegetation today. Shouldn’t it be the other way round?

An example in the book is an awe-inspiring vista of the Banff Springs Hotel and the Bow Valley shot by Byron Harmon in 1905 while standing on the side of Sulphur Mountain. This picture can no longer be repeated from the ground because of tree growth. White had to take a helicopter ride to approximate it in 2003. Ancient timber must have disappeared by the time Harmon got there at least in some places.

Hart and White explained that the First Nations peoples often burned corridors to manipulate game like bison in a direction more favourable for hunting or away from enemy combatants. The Kootenay for example preferred to process meat and hides in the mountains where they were less exposed to attacks from the prairie-based Blackfoot.

“Early peoples appear to have frequently burned the mountain valleys for several purposes ranging from improving wildlife habitat to regenerating vigorous berry crops… [affecting] many western mountain ecosystems” White and Hart note in the book.

Like these changes in the landscape The Lens of Time was something of a slow evolution too. “As Cliff and I started to formulate the idea of putting it into a book form he got me involved about seven years ago because he wanted some other eyes and other perspectives” Hart says. “We’ve been chipping away at it for that period of time.”

Some of the images are in sets of threes showing interim stages of change because White a Parks Canada employee with a doctorate in forest ecology has been shooting pictures in the mountains for more than 25 years. This book has been on his mind for the past 10 of them.

White says he generally sought to repeat with some accuracy the historic pictures — pulled by Hart from the museum’s archive of half a million — but wasn’t obsessive about planting his feet in the exact spot in each case. “We were not just re-shooting snapshots or postcards from the hip” White says. “We chose the pictures quite carefully because we had messages that we knew those pictures would tell us.”

That’s where other points of view come in. Without bashing development White and Hart dispassionately noted in their talk that the twin influences of government and private development have shaped the mountain parks’ landscapes in ways seen clearly in the photographic record. In some images such as those of two mining towns dwellings and stores disappeared when the mines closed leaving barely a trace of archaeological evidence today. In others we see in photos the emergence of ski hills burgeoning townsites and new hotels — most dramatically the 307-room Rimrock just outside the town of Banff. One wonders how this colossus ever slipped through the feds’ net.

Wildlife too has been greatly affected in the years spanning glass-negative photography and digital Nikons with elk populations exploding in the absence of predators while caribou have declined and bison have disappeared. Such changes in turn have affected the vegetation.

Balancing the conflicting demands of those who want mountain parks for their own reasons and visions will continue to be challenging but the debate will be well served by The Lens of Time a remarkable culmination of decades of devotion deep research and intelligently organized data.