Inuit, the Crown, and Racialized Visuality: Photographs from the 1956 Canadian Governor General’s Arctic Tour

Abstract

This article examines the role of visuality in both the imposition of settler colonial authority and its contestation. As a specific case study, I discuss a group of images made by photographer Gar Lunney under the auspices of the National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division (NFB) during the historic 1956 Arctic tour conducted by then Canadian Governor General Vincent Massey. I argue that these images thematize visuality itself and, as such, expose the colonized North American Arctic of the 1950s as a field of racialized visuality. In the first part of the essay, I closely read Lunney’s 1956 images and their histories, with particular attention to indications of the gaze. In the second part of the essay, I turn to recent decolonizing strategies for approaching the colonial photograph, again using Lunney’s photographs of the 1956 tour as a case study. I identify two key decolonizing strategies: first, attention to the agency of the sitter in the photograph and, second, recent Inuit re-narrativizations and remediations of images.