pre-colonial forest images
Image 1:
VIEW-596.A.3 | Photograph | Around the Camp Fire, Caribou hunting series, Montreal, QC, 1866 | William Notman (1826-1891)
© McCord Museum
Image 2:
“Pre-Colonial Forest in Fog” (a biocentric reading of William Notman’s “Around the Campfire, Caribou Hunting Series”). Yedda Morrison, 2009.
This work attempts to imagine a wood/world prior to, and free from, imperial intervention. By physically removing the original image’s “subject;” the hunters, I attempt to unearth a forest subsumed by the narratives of colonialism. In reading a traditional image or text through this lens, I’m trying to animate or bring into focus, that which has been rendered scenic, passive or ornamental. By refusing to exist merely as backdrop on which the human performs his exploits, “Pre-Colonial Forest” asserts a certain subjectivity of its own. The irony is, of course, that the forest in the original image is itself a fabrication, completely constructed by William Notman and his assistants in studio. Rather than undercutting the presumed authenticity of the image, this seeming contradiction points to the recurrent mythology of wilderness itself as a lost purity. My decision to also remove the Native American “guide” (surely included to reinforce the authenticity of the scene) was a difficult one. But hold your hand up to the original image, block out all but this man. What is left is his defeated form, isolated, condensed to stereotype. To my mind he might find greater agency in the secret workings of the woods, perhaps erased but surely hidden from the cameraman’s imperial gaze.