Project Naming

photo collections

• Photographs from the North: Library and Archives Canada Collections
• Royal Canadian Mounted Police
• Geraldine Moodie photographs taken during the 1904-1905 Hudson Bay expedition
• Department of Indian and Northern Affairs
• National Film Board of Canada
• Department of National Health and Welfare
• Private Collections

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Photographs from the North: Library and Archives Canada Collections

By Beth Greenhorn, Library and Archives Canada

The Canadian North has fascinated and inspired generations of photographers from the South since the latter half of the 19th century. Drawn by the austere beauty of the Arctic and the people from this region, they captured images that provide a visual legacy and a link to the past.

Navy personnel and topographers on Arctic expeditions were among the first photographers to document the people and the landscape of the Northwest Territories, or what is now Nunavut. An early example in the collections of Library and Archives Canada (LAC) is a photograph by Thomas Mitchell, who was a member of the 1875-1876 Arctic expedition to the Baffin Island (Qikiqtaaluk) region. Geraldine Moodie's photographs from a 1904-1905 Hudson Bay expedition are among the few images from the North, in the collection, taken by a woman during this period. Other examples of late 19th- and early 20th-century Arctic photographs include works by Walter Livingstone-Learmonth and Albert Peter Low, as well images in the collections of Captain Joseph-Elzéar Bernier and Rudolph Martin Anderson.

These photographs are examples of some of the earlier photographs depicting Inuit in the LAC collections.

View earlier photographs: Royal Canadian Mounted Police collection; Geraldine Moodie photographs taken during the 1904-1905 Hudson Bay expedition.

The photographs scanned for Project Naming come from both public and private collections, and range from the early 1900s to the 1970s. A number of these images were taken by federal government personnel during annual Arctic expeditions. Others were taken by professional photographers, who were hired to record the life and culture of the Inuit  --  a race that was believed to be rapidly disappearing.

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