Like the Seams of a Coat investigates the role landscape photography played in the processes of nation building and the construction of a Canadian visual identity firmly rooted in the myth of superabundance. Alexander Henderson (1831-1913) was a Montreal-based photographer who documented transnational railway projects in the years after confederation, tasked with making images of major benchmarks in their expansion across the country. 

Growing alongside a young nation, photography’s development as a commercial, social, and representational tool determined how Canada was seen, and by presenting scenes as natural and given, nineteenth century landscape images “mask[ed] how labour binds human and nonhuman nature.” Following in Henderson’s footsteps, my images work against idealized representations of land seen in commercial photography at the time, to identify sites of human intervention in nature, the residual effects of resource extraction industries, and traces of colonial violence..

Dawson Cox