Robinson, Ian

English

Public (E-Journal, York University)

Mediating a Common Sense of Place: The Toronto Archives'"A Visual Legacy: The City of Toronto's Use of Photography, 1856-1997"by fan RobinsonFig. 1Looking north fromKing and Yonge Streets;City ofToronto ArchivesFond, 1498, Item 16The Toronto Archives' recent public gallery exhibition,entitled HA Visual Legacy: The City ofToronto's Use ofPhotography, 1856-1997," consisted ofarchival photographscovering over one hundred years of Toronto's history.The exhibition traced the City ofToronto's official use ofphotography, from the gra1l1y black-and-whitestreetscapes of downtown Toronto (submitted to theColonial Office in support ofToronto's bid for selectionas capital of the Province of Canada in 1857) to imagesof official ceremonies welcoming Pope John Paul II andthe Dalai Lama in the 1980s and 1990s.The historic photographs of the city are strangelycompelling; the spectator is drawn in by images ofde-familiarized urban spaces. In particular, the earliestphotos ofToronto are some of the most captivating. In1856, the Toronto firm Armstrong, Beere and Hime("Land Agents, Engineers and Photographists") created a12-image photographic panorama of downtownToronto, covering roughly 300 degrees from the top of ahotel at the intersection of :King and York streets. Theimages display a topography of Toronto that is barelyrecognizable today. Visitors of the exhibition are calledupon to engage in their own detective work, piecingtogether the fragments in order to re-establish a sense ofspatial and temporal continuity among the photographsand our lived experience of the same spaces. The spectatorsearches the images for reference points in the present,yet the landmarks are few. Quick recognition of the frontof Osgoode Hall in one image (Fig. 1, looking northfrom :King and York streets) provides only slightly morereassurance of historical continuity than a more provi-sional inference of St. Michael's Cathedral in another(Fig. 2, looking northeast from :King and York streets).To some extent, the old photographs demand thatviewers accept their inability to redeem the images withpersonal and collective experience and memories of thecity. These are images of a place from which we havelittle historical memories to draw upon. As one proceedschronologically through the exhibition, the city becomesmore recognizable. With the images of the constructionof the Bloor Street Viaduct and the new City Hall, andvisits by the royal family and the pope,Toronto's referenceIan RobinsonFig. 2Looking northeast from Kingand York Streets; City ofTorontoArchives, Fond, 1498, Item 18points are ilnmediately visible. However, even these photosdemand a certain historicist approach to viewing, forthey are always someone else's images of the city andneed to be decoded as such.However engrossing one finds the visual historicalrecord of the city, what unifies the exhibit is not simplya fascination with urban history, but rather a historicalrecord ofToronto's attempts to document its spaces andcivic events. By mounting a display of Toronto's officialattempts at archiving its history, the exhibition providesa critical site for reflection on the processes by whichphotographic documents of the city are strategicallyemployed in the framing, mediation, and production oflocal history and collective memory. While the images ofthe city's past carry great "exhibition value" as historicalartefacts, "A Visual Legacy" quietly reminds us of the var-ious instrumental processes and sometimes conflictingvalues through which a record of collective history andthe public archive are created.In his short essay "Photography," written in 1927,Siegfried Kracauer reflects on the capacity of the mediumof photography to relate historical knowledge to thepresent. For Kracauer, the proliferation of the photographiclinage in the early twentieth century is emblematic ofmodernity's attempts to eternalize the present moment.In documenting the spatial configurations of precisemoments in time, photography reduces the meaningfullived history of the world to a sequence of isolablefragments. Whereas an image of the past survives inhuman memory because it bears personal significance inparticular lived historical contexts, the photographicimage is unburdened by personal or cultural meaning.Kracauer finds much in common between photographyand historicist thinking: as photography aims to presentthe world in terms of a "spatial continuum," historicismattempts to present the past as a "temporal continuum"driven by a belief that historical reality can be grasped by"reconstructing the course of events in their temporalsuccession without any gaps."1 On the other hand,memory constructs an image of history through quitedifferent means. In Kracauer's words,Photography grasps what is given as a spatial (ortemporal) continuum; memory images retain whatis given only insofar as it has significance. Sincewhat is significant is not reducible to either merelyspatial or merely temporal terms, memory imagesare at odds with photographic representation2Our everyday grasp of history is thus the product ofcognitive, as well as social and cultural, filters. An under-standing of history therefore represents and brings to lifethe meanings and values of the past. Conversely, thephotographic image displays only a spectral presence ofa reality that cannot be experienced, and thereforeremains estranged from us. "The old photograph," writesKracauer, "has been emptied of the life whose physicalpresence overlay its merely spatial configuration ... fromyear to year its semiotic value decreases. The truthcontent of the original is left behind in its history; thephotograph captures only the residuum that history hasdischarged."3The photographic image wages an "assault"Fig. 3Southwest corner of Louisa and Elizabeth Streets; City ofToromo Archives, Series 372, Sub-series 55, Item 45on memory and history as the lived truth of an era, suchthat "the resemblance between the image and the objecteffaces the contours of the object's 'history.''' It is to a worldwhose past is thoroughly mediated by the photographicimage that Kracauer directs the polemical remark, "neverbefore has a period known so litde about itself."4Kracauer's evaluation of the decline in "semioticvalue" of old photographs is especially pertinent when itcomes to viewing images of spaces that have been com-pletely transformed. In 1912, City Photographer ArthurGoss set out to document a block of downtown Torontothat was to be demolished for the construction of theRegistry ofDeeds and Land Tides (Fig. 3, southwest cornerof Elizabeth and Louisa streets; Fig. 4, postcard depictingthe Registry in 1918). The modest block betweenChestnut, Elizabeth, Albert, and Louisa meets was entirelyremoved from the city's grid. The streets, restaurants, andshops preserved in the archival photos are the only tracesof a history to which we have litde direct access. Withthe demolition of the Registry in the 1960s to buildNathan Phillips Square and the new City Hall, thecollective memory of the site was even further displaced.In a formidable shot taken during the construction ofCity Hall in 1964, the facade of the Registry remains theonly part of the building left standing, a reminder of thecontingency of the city's built landscape and our commonestrangement from history (Fig. 5).However, in Kracauer's analysis, photography maintainsthe potential to teach us something about the passing oftime, even if its images work to increase the distancebetween the spectator and the meanings of a past era.Moreover, in depicting a world stripped of subjectivemeanings, it is this alienating quality of the photographicimage that calls into question the "natural" arrangementof elements in space. As Kracauer writes, "a shudder runsthrough the viewer of old photographs. For they makevisible not the knowledge of the original but the spatialconfiguration ofa moment."S That shudder is the reactionof the viewer who confronts a world from which she orhe is completely absent. Rather than redeeming a senseof the world as it was lived, replete with meaning andvalues associated with given objects and spaces, thephotograph from the past shows the contingency of theworld and its spatial configuration, which is taken forgranted in everyday life. The city that "once clung to uslike our skin" is alienated from us in the old photo-graph.6 It is in the uncanny images of the past that wecome face to face with the radical contingency of historyFig. 4Postcard depicring rhe Registry in 1918; City ofTorol1to Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 1222Fig. 5Site of the new City Hall and Narhan PhiUips Square; City ofTorol1to Archives, Fonds 1268, Item 462163Fig. 6City of Toronto Archives, Serie 372, Sub-series 32, Item 313and memory. Here we are provoked to reconsider notonly the foundations of our historical knowledge, butthe taken-for-granted meamngs and associationsattached to the spatial configurations of the present thatwe inhabit everyday.At stake in our encounter with the city's historythrough the Toronto Archives exhibit is what RaymondWilliams refers to in his cultural analysis as the "selectivetradition."7 According to Williams, in the analysis ofculture we must distinguish between the "lived culture ofa particular time and place," the "recorded culture" of aparticular period as it is documented, and the "selectivetradition" as the set of complex processes that articulatethe lived reality of a period and its documentation.8 Partof the intrigue of the historical photographs ofTorontois that they rarely, if ever, succeed in conveying whatWilliams refers to as a "structure of feeling." Instead,viewers are left with a series of fragments; frozen imagesthat we desperately attempt to put into context.In the chronological display of the city's official useof photography, we encounter the instrumental andpolitical processes and values by which history is con-structed. Until the 1950s, much of the city's photographywork consisted ofproducing images for all city departments,including health, parks, property, hydro. A strong focuswas placed on the documentation of official departmentinitiatives and associated infrastructure. The photographicrecord from this period reveals attempts to define the roleof public infi-astructure and social provisions in the city.Much of the photography therefore had political valuefor reform-minded officials. Between 1911 and 1929,photographs produced for the Department of HealthPUBLIC 37documented overcrowded and substandard housingconditions in the city centre, and initiatives such ashealth education, public nursing, and medical inspectionsin schools (Fig. 6). At the same time, the ParksDepartment documented the provision of public spacesand facilities intended to promote good citizenship andcombat the maladies of slums, poverty, and delinquency.The construction of a modern city is celebrated inphotos of the Bloor Street Viaduct (built between 1913and 1918) and the R.e. Harris Water Treatment Plant(built between 1937 and 1941). In these photographs,taken mostly by city photographer Goss and his successorHoward Macdonald, emphasis is on the construction ofnew urban infrastructure and social programs in order tocreate a new form ofpublic citizenship. In the 1950s and1960s, the role of photography shifted from its focus ondocumenting the activities of various departments to therecording of civic events and the provision of publicrelations photos. The official role of photography, as theexhibition notes point out, shifted from an active role incity-building to a function of the city's offices of publiccommunications and records management.To argue that the photographic images by themselveslack an inherent capacity to convey meaning is not tosuggest that the exhibition fails to communicate a senseof Toronto's collective history. What the exhibitionreveals is the selective tradition of how the city has beendefined throughout its history. While Kracauer's distinctionbetween the 1~1emory image and the photographic imageis still relevant, in "AVisual Legacy," the process by whichcollective memory is formed and reproduced is madeexplicit. While viewing the archival photos, we comeface to face not simply with iconic Toronto scenes andforms in the midst of their construction (the Bloor StreetViaduct, City Hall, the CN Tower) or with indices ofToronto's historical existence (the barely imaginablestreetscapes in the city centre before the development ofhigh-rise towers, for one), but with the culture of theselective tradition itself.That is, what unifies the exhibitionis its emphasis on the ways that photography was officiallyused throughout history. In noting the shifting uses ofphotography for various city departments and agenciesthrough the years, we begin to catch sight of the con-struction of a historical record. The importance ofparticular subj ect matter to different city officials andphotographers reflects specific historical values indetermining what aspects of Toronto should be docu-mented. What is displayed is therefore no less than thearchival process itself, a selective tradition of what ishistorically significant.fan RobinsonThe archival record of the city's use of photographyraises the question of the motivation behind officialwork in the production of images and documentation ofthe city in the present. In the archives, photographsacquire new value as historical resources and objects forexhibition. The archiving and exhibition of historicphotos reflects the latest segment of the selective traditionof representing the city. Thus, at the same time that weencounter a spatial continuum that appears estrangedfrom us, we also are brought face to face with the activeconstruction of the city's public history-not as it isrecollected in memories, but as it is stitched togetherinto a collection of photographs.It is this very sense of detachment from historyinvoked by the photographs that creates the conditionsfor a collective space of critical reflection, not only on ashared geographic heritage, but on a common sense ofplace regarding the city. As Hannah Arendt argues in TheHuman Condition, the presence of a politically-activepublic realm requires the existence of a "commonworld," a shared objective Ineeting ground that articulatesa multitude of different positions, perspectives, andprivate experiences. Moreover, for a "public realm" toexist, a sense of a common world, or a common sense ofplace nmst transcend the subj ective experience of timeexpressed by Kracauer's memory images and Williams'structure of feeling. Rather, for a public realm of politicalactors to exist, the objective world of appearances aroundwhich it revolves must be understood as permanent.9The historical record of selected moments of Toronto'spast, to which citizens have little access beyond thearchive, evokes a sense of the common world of the city.Estranged from memory and the subjective experienceof "private" life, the photographic images in the archiveexhibit provide the constitutive basis of a public realmthrough their mediation of a common sense of place. Bycalling attention to the selective documentation of historyand the construction of the historical record in thearchive, the exhibit further reminds us of the role ofhistoriography in the constitution of the public and itscommon relation to the city. An enduring public historyand a common sense of place are possible only insofar asthe city is subj ect to continual public interpretation,exhibition, and scrutiny. By contributing to the collectiveproject of rearticulating Toronto's shared public historyand thereby fostering the conditions for an active publicrealm, "AVisual Legacy" fulfills a political and pedagogi-cal role in providing a site for critical reflection on thehistorical geography of the city.165NOTESSiegfried Kracauer, "Photography," The Mass Ornammt, ed.,tram. Thomas Y. Levim (Cambridge, Massachusetts: HarvardUniversity Press, 1995),49.2 Kracauer, 50.3 Ibid., 55.4 Ibid., 58.5 Ibid., 56.6 Ibid.7 Raymond Williams, The Long Rel)olution (New York:Columbia Unive~'sity Press, 1961).8 Williams,49-53.9 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958; Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1998).

Mediating a Common Sense of Place: The Toronto Archives' "A Visual Legacy: The City of Toronto's Use of Photography, 1856-1997"

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Mediating a Common Sense of Place: The Toronto Archives' "A Visual Legacy: The City of Toronto's Use of Photography, 1856-1997"

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