\n
\n
Trudi Lynn Smith | University of Victoria
\nKaren Engle | University of Windsor<\/p>\n
FRAGMENTS OF DESIRE\u00a0[*]<\/a><\/h4>\nAs soon as the idea of a debt to the dead, to people of flesh and blood to whom something really happened in the past, stops giving documentary research its highest end, history loses its meaning. \u2013 Paul Ricoeur (qtd. in Merewether 68)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Riggall and Smith: His Adventures and Her[1]<\/a> Desire<\/strong><\/p>\nF. H. \u201cBert\u201d Riggall (1884\u20131959) took photographs. He was also a \u201cmountain guide, outfitter, hunter, trapper, rancher, naturalist\u2026writer and gunsmith\/loader in southern Alberta\u201d (Fonds Whyte). Sometime in the early 1900s, Riggall photographed Waterton Lake from the Prince of Wales Hotel. He used a Kodak Panoram No. 1 to record this serene view of a lake bounded on either side by mountains, thus producing a now-classic picturesque vision of the Canadian landscape as uninhabited and majestic.[2]<\/a> Grazing horses on the far left\u2014presumably members of Riggall\u2019s party\u2014constitute the only sign of life here beyond the vegetal. The copy of Russell\u2019s image in Trudi Lynn Smith\u2019s archive is in the form of a postcard\u2014that classic structure perfecting the miniaturization of experience. Picture postcards were at the height of their popularity in the early-20th<\/sup> century. For an imperial power such as Britain (and Canada as inheritor of its visual traditions), the picture postcard functioned as a carrier of national mythology (see Engle; Wollaeger; Wong).<\/p>\n![\"7-1-4-3_smith_detailweb\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/7.1-4.3_Smith_detailWEB-1.jpg\")
Figure 1.\u00a0Panoram\u00a0<\/em>by Frederick Herbert (Bert) Riggall, in collection\/courtesy Trudi Lynn Smith<\/p>\nSmith found the picture postcard in the archives of the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies.[3]<\/a> She placed the card, all alone, in a file labeled \u201cWaterton Lakes National Park (1895 \u2013 2015) \u2013 early 20th<\/sup> century photographs \u2013 FH (Bert) Riggall \u2013 Kodak Panoram No 1.\u201d She must have seen so many images in these Whyte archives, but somehow all manner of things converged for her with \u201cBert\u201d\u2014the shape of the clouds that day, her fatigue, the sound of the wind through the trees\u2026\u2014and she chose his vision as her object.[4]<\/a> She becomes Riggall\u2019s ghost, haunting his process in a quest to reproduce the photograph he made over 100 years before.[v<\/a><\/p>\nclouds<\/strong><\/p>\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 erasure<\/strong><\/p>\nThe file folder is labeled with these words\u2014clouds erasure\u2014on an index card paper-clipped to the folder. Inside this file, I find a piece of tracing paper made to look like a postcard, several photographs of varying sizes made from different cameras, and four pieces of photographs that have been cut and orphaned from their contexts\u2014tiny fragments sliced from one environment and laid into this one.[6]<\/a> Among the ephemera, an index card is paper-clipped to a small, square image consisting almost entirely of an inky, interior darkness. Details of the room are vague at best, but in the centre of the photograph, seemingly very far away from the camera, a rectangular window beckons. Yet the window does not open onto any discernible vista\u2014it is backlit by a light so opaque it may as well be black. The light refuses its essential function and shuts out all clues to the outside. Shooting from an impalpable interior, the photographer directs her focus outward to a window that appears too distant to reach, almost like a portal to another time that eternally recedes. Trapped inside the darkness of the present moment, she cannot get close enough to see beyond this stain of light.<\/p>\n![\"7-1-4-5_smith_detailweb\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/7.1-4.5_Smith_detailWEB.jpg\")
Figure 2.<\/p>\n
Typed on the index card to the right of the image is the following text: \u201cWaterton Lakes was first \u2018set aside for future generations\u2019 on May 30, 1895 when official recommendations were made to parliament.\u201d The caption invokes time. Past and future intermingle in text generated by an actual typewriter, a technology now distant enough to appear archaic. Having all but vanished from contemporary practice, the typewriter is entirely foreign to my students. If a machine I used 30 years ago is too distant for memory, what is 1895 to the future-nows?<\/p>\n
I think of W.G. Sebald\u2019s Austerlitz <\/em>(2001), in which photographs appear amidst narrative without any explicit connections made between them. They sit as silent interruptions in Austerlitz\u2019s quest to retrace history. The images are suggestive, but in the end they give up nothing to the reader who is destined to remain just outside the narrator\u2019s experience. What does the establishment of Waterton Lake National Park have to do with this inky room?<\/p>\nAt first I think that light is the aim of this image, that the photographer evokes the struggle to escape the blackness of the interior through the \u201clight-writing\u201d of technological reproduction. Yet as I continue to look back and forth between window and caption, I begin to picture the photographer setting up camp for an extended stay inside this darkened room. She is not trying to escape into the light; she knows that light is blinding and deceptive. She has learned, as Walter Benjamin learned, that light is a trickster (Benjamin, \u201cLittle History\u201d).[7]<\/a><\/p>\nFragility<\/strong><\/h5>\nShe sent it by post. I came home one day to find a box hand-delivered, containing a selection of 10 files from her archive. On the front of each file she has attached, with a paperclip, an index card containing a few typed phrases guiding the viewer as to each file\u2019s contents. These indexical phrases are more or less concrete. For example, \u201cFH (Bert) Riggall \u2013 attempts to replicate view \u2013 the darkroom \u2013\u201d reproduces a conventional labeling system in which the index refers quite literally to the file\u2019s contents, copies of her multiple attempts to reproduce Riggall\u2019s photograph. Other titles follow a less linear logic. \u201cWaterton \u2013 the Nondescript\u201d provides no semantic clues to the images and ephemera contained within: photographs of photographs, a piece of tracing paper with what seems to be an impression of the mountains surrounding Waterton Lake, and all manner of index cards attached to small photographs marking different moments from her quest and her haunting of his trajectory. To say that she has sent me multiple narratives is insufficient, for she has done much more with this box. She has generated an infinite number of ways this story can be told, for each folder opens up to a different starting point and branches off into any number of histories, memories, and musings. I start to think of the box as a shell for a living nervous system, one that can generate new synaptic connections with each combination and recombination of its elements. As in Chris Ware\u2019s Building Stories<\/em>, the brilliant box of multiple individual fragments of stories that combine and recombine to form related but unique narratives, one chooses a starting point in Smith\u2019s archive without any context for the implications of that choice.[8]<\/a> The stories that different readers begin to assemble contain the same elements but differ in focus and perspective. These are not puzzle pieces that fit together, but rather fragments of an unfulfilled desire that, in its failure to be realized, indicates the pure contingency of a moment archived as history.<\/p>\nPostcard<\/strong><\/h5>\nInside the file\u00a0 clouds<\/strong><\/p>\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 erasure<\/strong><\/p>\nI find a piece of tracing paper she has turned into a postcard. She has inscribed with pencil all the usual elements: a dividing line between address and message spaces; the word POSTCARD (which reminds me of Magritte\u2019s insistence that ceci n\u2019est pas un pipe<\/em>[9]<\/a>); a small rectangle in the upper right-hand corner indicating the place for a stamp; and a tiny caption printed neatly along the side that refers to an absent image. The sender\u2019s message reads: \u201cnote little town at right colour of mts in early morning is marvellous [sic] a small lake \u2013 Linnett \u2013 is near \u2013 [indiscernible] me \u2013 fed by springs many birds around it.\u201d<\/p>\nTwo observations about this gossamer object: the absence of the traditional recto\/verso structure\u2014she has superimposed the verso on to the recto\u2014and the neatly printed caption, CANADIAN ROCKIES HOTEL CO., references a non-existent photograph, a sign with no referent. The superimposition of front and back shows the entanglement of public with private, national visions with personal messages, and mass production with singular experience (see Derrida, \u201cThe Post Card\u201d; Engle 54). The absent image implies a process of abstraction: something material and tangible has been taken away. This blank square on the tracing paper is not merely empty space; it marks a removal so apparently complete as to leave nothing but a ghostly whiteness behind. The caption suggests that the missing image is most likely a reproduction of a devotedly touristic space, the Prince of Wales Hotel on Waterton Lake, since this hotel sits on the same hill as Riggall\u2019s and Smith\u2019s photographs. The hotel promises an experience of the classically picturesque:<\/p>\n
A true historic icon, the Prince of Wales Hotel offers an experience like no other. Views from the hotel lobby and lawn are magnificent panoramas of Waterton Lake and the surrounding mountains. The Prince of Wales Hotel is the perfect place to escape the everyday and immerse yourself in the magic of the mountains and the history of Waterton Lakes National Park. (\u201cPrince of Wales Hotel\u201d)[10]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\nBeyond the observation that these views seem to exist to be consumed, the everyday is also pictured as alien to this lovely scene. The deep irony in the hotel\u2019s ad copy\u2014that tourists can experience history here while leaving behind their ordinary everyday\u2014is of course the fact that this place had been a location for an indigenous everyday for at least 10,000 years before contact (Reeves, \u201cNative Peoples\u201d 39). The hotel\u2019s existence is premised upon the abstraction of all this ordinary business of survival.<\/p>\n
Did Riggall travel with the Niitsitapi?[11]<\/a> Did he ask them to step aside so they were outside of the frame, or did he just not see them as part of the world he was recording? The orphaned caption forces us to confront the absence of what we expect and know to be present. It asks us to imagine a different picture of the national landscape.[12]<\/a><\/p>\nDis-orientation<\/strong><\/h5>\nI count at least 31 attempts at replication in this selection of files, though she notes on the back of one of these Polaroids that she had, by August 3rd<\/sup>, 2008, made 49 photographs. She keeps a record for most of these pictures, sometimes noting only the date and other times listing weather conditions, exposure number, siting clues, and the occasional feelings of frustration, despair, and tedium. On August 3rd<\/sup>, 2008, she writes on the back of exposure 10:<\/p>\nHere is the thing. There\u2019s no viewfinder on the camera, really, so I\u2019ve been learning about it\u2014moving, pointing, exposing the film, walking to the research house, developing the film, going for coffee while it dries, scanning it, overlaying it with a scan of the original, making calculations, going back, walking up the hill, shooting more photos. They all look like it, none look like it. Riggall apparently had a tripod threading for the camera on his saddle horn. Failure provides openings, all the otherwise begin to take shape.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
She follows him\u2014obsessively, compulsively. She uses parallax to stand in his shadow and see through his eyes, but what she learns from parallax is impossibility.[13]<\/a> The reasons for this are both concrete and abstract. First, the concrete: the town has grown in size; the snow in Riggall\u2019s picture has melted away; erosion has altered the shape of the hill; and trees have come and gone.[14]<\/a> As markers of climate change and human intervention, the environmental shifts are significant clues for measuring all the material reasons she will never replicate Riggall\u2019s photograph. Philosophically, however, Slavoj \u017di\u017eek reminds us that with parallax, \u201cthe observed difference is not simply \u2018subjective,\u2019 due to the fact that the same object which exists \u2018out there\u2019 is seen from two different stations, or points of view. It is rather that\u2026subject and object are inherently \u2018mediated,\u2019 so that an \u2018epistemological\u2019 shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an \u2018ontological\u2019 shift in the object itself\u201d (17). She cannot see through his eyes. Riggall saw himself in every picture he made, just as she sees herself in each attempt at replication. In her eyes, he will always be spectral and her Waterton will vibrate with all of the histories that he could not picture.[15]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/h5>\n
As soon as the idea of a debt to the dead, to people of flesh and blood to whom something really happened in the past, stops giving documentary research its highest end, history loses its meaning. \u2013 Paul Ricoeur (qtd. in Merewether 68)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Riggall and Smith: His Adventures and Her[1]<\/a> Desire<\/strong><\/p>\n F. H. \u201cBert\u201d Riggall (1884\u20131959) took photographs. He was also a \u201cmountain guide, outfitter, hunter, trapper, rancher, naturalist\u2026writer and gunsmith\/loader in southern Alberta\u201d (Fonds Whyte). Sometime in the early 1900s, Riggall photographed Waterton Lake from the Prince of Wales Hotel. He used a Kodak Panoram No. 1 to record this serene view of a lake bounded on either side by mountains, thus producing a now-classic picturesque vision of the Canadian landscape as uninhabited and majestic.[2]<\/a> Grazing horses on the far left\u2014presumably members of Riggall\u2019s party\u2014constitute the only sign of life here beyond the vegetal. The copy of Russell\u2019s image in Trudi Lynn Smith\u2019s archive is in the form of a postcard\u2014that classic structure perfecting the miniaturization of experience. Picture postcards were at the height of their popularity in the early-20th<\/sup> century. For an imperial power such as Britain (and Canada as inheritor of its visual traditions), the picture postcard functioned as a carrier of national mythology (see Engle; Wollaeger; Wong).<\/p>\n Smith found the picture postcard in the archives of the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies.[3]<\/a> She placed the card, all alone, in a file labeled \u201cWaterton Lakes National Park (1895 \u2013 2015) \u2013 early 20th<\/sup> century photographs \u2013 FH (Bert) Riggall \u2013 Kodak Panoram No 1.\u201d She must have seen so many images in these Whyte archives, but somehow all manner of things converged for her with \u201cBert\u201d\u2014the shape of the clouds that day, her fatigue, the sound of the wind through the trees\u2026\u2014and she chose his vision as her object.[4]<\/a> She becomes Riggall\u2019s ghost, haunting his process in a quest to reproduce the photograph he made over 100 years before.[v<\/a><\/p>\n clouds<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 erasure<\/strong><\/p>\n The file folder is labeled with these words\u2014clouds erasure\u2014on an index card paper-clipped to the folder. Inside this file, I find a piece of tracing paper made to look like a postcard, several photographs of varying sizes made from different cameras, and four pieces of photographs that have been cut and orphaned from their contexts\u2014tiny fragments sliced from one environment and laid into this one.[6]<\/a> Among the ephemera, an index card is paper-clipped to a small, square image consisting almost entirely of an inky, interior darkness. Details of the room are vague at best, but in the centre of the photograph, seemingly very far away from the camera, a rectangular window beckons. Yet the window does not open onto any discernible vista\u2014it is backlit by a light so opaque it may as well be black. The light refuses its essential function and shuts out all clues to the outside. Shooting from an impalpable interior, the photographer directs her focus outward to a window that appears too distant to reach, almost like a portal to another time that eternally recedes. Trapped inside the darkness of the present moment, she cannot get close enough to see beyond this stain of light.<\/p>\n Typed on the index card to the right of the image is the following text: \u201cWaterton Lakes was first \u2018set aside for future generations\u2019 on May 30, 1895 when official recommendations were made to parliament.\u201d The caption invokes time. Past and future intermingle in text generated by an actual typewriter, a technology now distant enough to appear archaic. Having all but vanished from contemporary practice, the typewriter is entirely foreign to my students. If a machine I used 30 years ago is too distant for memory, what is 1895 to the future-nows?<\/p>\n I think of W.G. Sebald\u2019s Austerlitz <\/em>(2001), in which photographs appear amidst narrative without any explicit connections made between them. They sit as silent interruptions in Austerlitz\u2019s quest to retrace history. The images are suggestive, but in the end they give up nothing to the reader who is destined to remain just outside the narrator\u2019s experience. What does the establishment of Waterton Lake National Park have to do with this inky room?<\/p>\n At first I think that light is the aim of this image, that the photographer evokes the struggle to escape the blackness of the interior through the \u201clight-writing\u201d of technological reproduction. Yet as I continue to look back and forth between window and caption, I begin to picture the photographer setting up camp for an extended stay inside this darkened room. She is not trying to escape into the light; she knows that light is blinding and deceptive. She has learned, as Walter Benjamin learned, that light is a trickster (Benjamin, \u201cLittle History\u201d).[7]<\/a><\/p>\n She sent it by post. I came home one day to find a box hand-delivered, containing a selection of 10 files from her archive. On the front of each file she has attached, with a paperclip, an index card containing a few typed phrases guiding the viewer as to each file\u2019s contents. These indexical phrases are more or less concrete. For example, \u201cFH (Bert) Riggall \u2013 attempts to replicate view \u2013 the darkroom \u2013\u201d reproduces a conventional labeling system in which the index refers quite literally to the file\u2019s contents, copies of her multiple attempts to reproduce Riggall\u2019s photograph. Other titles follow a less linear logic. \u201cWaterton \u2013 the Nondescript\u201d provides no semantic clues to the images and ephemera contained within: photographs of photographs, a piece of tracing paper with what seems to be an impression of the mountains surrounding Waterton Lake, and all manner of index cards attached to small photographs marking different moments from her quest and her haunting of his trajectory. To say that she has sent me multiple narratives is insufficient, for she has done much more with this box. She has generated an infinite number of ways this story can be told, for each folder opens up to a different starting point and branches off into any number of histories, memories, and musings. I start to think of the box as a shell for a living nervous system, one that can generate new synaptic connections with each combination and recombination of its elements. As in Chris Ware\u2019s Building Stories<\/em>, the brilliant box of multiple individual fragments of stories that combine and recombine to form related but unique narratives, one chooses a starting point in Smith\u2019s archive without any context for the implications of that choice.[8]<\/a> The stories that different readers begin to assemble contain the same elements but differ in focus and perspective. These are not puzzle pieces that fit together, but rather fragments of an unfulfilled desire that, in its failure to be realized, indicates the pure contingency of a moment archived as history.<\/p>\n Inside the file\u00a0 clouds<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 erasure<\/strong><\/p>\n I find a piece of tracing paper she has turned into a postcard. She has inscribed with pencil all the usual elements: a dividing line between address and message spaces; the word POSTCARD (which reminds me of Magritte\u2019s insistence that ceci n\u2019est pas un pipe<\/em>[9]<\/a>); a small rectangle in the upper right-hand corner indicating the place for a stamp; and a tiny caption printed neatly along the side that refers to an absent image. The sender\u2019s message reads: \u201cnote little town at right colour of mts in early morning is marvellous [sic] a small lake \u2013 Linnett \u2013 is near \u2013 [indiscernible] me \u2013 fed by springs many birds around it.\u201d<\/p>\n Two observations about this gossamer object: the absence of the traditional recto\/verso structure\u2014she has superimposed the verso on to the recto\u2014and the neatly printed caption, CANADIAN ROCKIES HOTEL CO., references a non-existent photograph, a sign with no referent. The superimposition of front and back shows the entanglement of public with private, national visions with personal messages, and mass production with singular experience (see Derrida, \u201cThe Post Card\u201d; Engle 54). The absent image implies a process of abstraction: something material and tangible has been taken away. This blank square on the tracing paper is not merely empty space; it marks a removal so apparently complete as to leave nothing but a ghostly whiteness behind. The caption suggests that the missing image is most likely a reproduction of a devotedly touristic space, the Prince of Wales Hotel on Waterton Lake, since this hotel sits on the same hill as Riggall\u2019s and Smith\u2019s photographs. The hotel promises an experience of the classically picturesque:<\/p>\n A true historic icon, the Prince of Wales Hotel offers an experience like no other. Views from the hotel lobby and lawn are magnificent panoramas of Waterton Lake and the surrounding mountains. The Prince of Wales Hotel is the perfect place to escape the everyday and immerse yourself in the magic of the mountains and the history of Waterton Lakes National Park. (\u201cPrince of Wales Hotel\u201d)[10]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Beyond the observation that these views seem to exist to be consumed, the everyday is also pictured as alien to this lovely scene. The deep irony in the hotel\u2019s ad copy\u2014that tourists can experience history here while leaving behind their ordinary everyday\u2014is of course the fact that this place had been a location for an indigenous everyday for at least 10,000 years before contact (Reeves, \u201cNative Peoples\u201d 39). The hotel\u2019s existence is premised upon the abstraction of all this ordinary business of survival.<\/p>\n Did Riggall travel with the Niitsitapi?[11]<\/a> Did he ask them to step aside so they were outside of the frame, or did he just not see them as part of the world he was recording? The orphaned caption forces us to confront the absence of what we expect and know to be present. It asks us to imagine a different picture of the national landscape.[12]<\/a><\/p>\n I count at least 31 attempts at replication in this selection of files, though she notes on the back of one of these Polaroids that she had, by August 3rd<\/sup>, 2008, made 49 photographs. She keeps a record for most of these pictures, sometimes noting only the date and other times listing weather conditions, exposure number, siting clues, and the occasional feelings of frustration, despair, and tedium. On August 3rd<\/sup>, 2008, she writes on the back of exposure 10:<\/p>\n Here is the thing. There\u2019s no viewfinder on the camera, really, so I\u2019ve been learning about it\u2014moving, pointing, exposing the film, walking to the research house, developing the film, going for coffee while it dries, scanning it, overlaying it with a scan of the original, making calculations, going back, walking up the hill, shooting more photos. They all look like it, none look like it. Riggall apparently had a tripod threading for the camera on his saddle horn. Failure provides openings, all the otherwise begin to take shape.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n She follows him\u2014obsessively, compulsively. She uses parallax to stand in his shadow and see through his eyes, but what she learns from parallax is impossibility.[13]<\/a> The reasons for this are both concrete and abstract. First, the concrete: the town has grown in size; the snow in Riggall\u2019s picture has melted away; erosion has altered the shape of the hill; and trees have come and gone.[14]<\/a> As markers of climate change and human intervention, the environmental shifts are significant clues for measuring all the material reasons she will never replicate Riggall\u2019s photograph. Philosophically, however, Slavoj \u017di\u017eek reminds us that with parallax, \u201cthe observed difference is not simply \u2018subjective,\u2019 due to the fact that the same object which exists \u2018out there\u2019 is seen from two different stations, or points of view. It is rather that\u2026subject and object are inherently \u2018mediated,\u2019 so that an \u2018epistemological\u2019 shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an \u2018ontological\u2019 shift in the object itself\u201d (17). She cannot see through his eyes. Riggall saw himself in every picture he made, just as she sees herself in each attempt at replication. In her eyes, he will always be spectral and her Waterton will vibrate with all of the histories that he could not picture.[15]<\/a><\/p>\nFigure 1.\u00a0Panoram\u00a0<\/em>by Frederick Herbert (Bert) Riggall, in collection\/courtesy Trudi Lynn Smith<\/p>\nFigure 2.<\/p>\nFragility<\/strong><\/h5>\n
Postcard<\/strong><\/h5>\n
Dis-orientation<\/strong><\/h5>\n
<\/h5>\n