Canada between the photograph and the map: Aerial photography, geographical vision and the state

Abstract

This paper examines the survey and geographic uses of high-altitude photographic images in Canada between the 1880s and the 1960s. While photographic surveying was practiced in the late nineteenth century, it was not until the 1920s that airplanes provided surveyors with a mobile vantage point from which to view and map the earth below, revolutionizing the production of geographical knowledge. Using aerial photographs, photogrammetrists were able to accurately map remote portions of the nation, while photo-interpreters deciphered human settlement patterns and located the resources previously impossible to locate from the ground. I argue that new forms of vision offered through aerial photographs were not only the result of technological development. In surveying at the close of the nineteenth century, between the photograph and the map lay an epistemological gulf: each testified to a different kind of knowledge, and each guaranteed representation by a different framing of objectivity. Combining the two into a new object, the aerial photograph, required new understandings of the relationships between photographic and cartographic ways of seeing, and between technologies, bodies, and truth. As modern Canada increasingly depended on aerial photographs to map and locate resources, geographers positioned themselves as expert readers of these images, thus forming important connections between the practice of geographical seeing and the aims of the state.