Project Lead: Lia Tarachansky 

Year: 2019

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The video is an mplacement of the first panoramic photograph of Toronto, taken in 1857 by Armstrong, Hime, and Beer as part of Toronto’s bid for capital of Canada before Queen Victoria. The project can be viewed in 2D and 3D on location (King St. & York St). It is accompanied by a geo-located soundwalk. To listen, click here.

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The Story: 

In 1856 Kingston, Ottawa, Toronto, Quebec City and Montreal sent bids to the British Crown in the hopes of becoming the permanent seat of government of Canada.  The Common Council of Toronto decided it would be favourable to include a series of images to illustrate the city’s advantages over its competitors. Armstrong, Beere, & Hime was then a brand new company. In its first year its photographers took first and second prize for the best collection of uncoloured photographs, and second prize in the coloured category at the Twelfth Annual Exhibition of the Provincial Agricultural Association at Brantford. In 1856 the Committee paid them £60 (equivalent to roughly $75,000 CAD) for 100 views of Toronto. 

 

At the time  the tallest building in the city, the Rossin House Hotel was still under construction. The three men lugged their equipment to its nearly finished top and took a series of thirteen photographs, moving their camera from one view to another as they circled around the hotel’s roof.  For unknown reasons, the Crown never saw the images and Ottawa was named the seat of government. The photographs and bid were filed away and “lost” in an office in London. Shortly after taking the images, the three men went their separate ways. William Armstrong (1822-1914), the better known of the three, went on to work as a watercolour artist and engineer and later joined the Wolseley expedition as its official photographer. It was, in effect, a military force authorized by Sir John A. Macdonald to confront and subdue the Red River Rebellion of Louis Riel and the Métis in 1870. As one account writes, the expedition, led by General Wolseley “arrived in the Colony in August 1870 and promptly proceeded to instigate a reign of terror against the Metis”. The expedition also helped settle the Red River Colony in what is now Manitoba. 
 
Armstrong’s nephew and fellow photographer at the firm, Daniel Manders Beere (1833-1909), also set off in search of colonial adventure when in 1863 he became the official photographer of a Waikato Militia in New Zealand. These were white militia paid by the British to displace the indigenous Maori on the island. Fighting and photographing in the 4th Regiment alongside his brother, Beere was rewarded with generous properties in Auckland, the lands of the indigenous people he helped to displace. As the Encyclopedia of 19th Century Photography writes “One of his most striking images from this period is a staged reenactment of the Maori War party advancing across an open piece of ground with clubs and hatches held at the ready!  More common are his studies of settlers posed in front of their cottages. His name is commemorated to this day with a suburb called Beerscourt in the city of Hamilton, New Zealand.” Joan Schwartz, the archivist who discovered the Panorama in the Colonial Office in London went on to write a biography of Beere and to analyze their work.

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Since the colonial history of Canada and New Zealand became connected in this way, I connected the two landscapes through a soundwalk in Echoes. As listeners walk down either York or King streets in Toronto or down Beerscourt Street in Hamilton, as they enter the St. Andrew Subway station on University Avenue or stroll along the Waikato River they can learn about how the two places are connected, the panorama, the Rossin House Hotel, Toronto’s bid for capital, and even hear excerpts from the 2009 novel Consolation, written by American-born Canadian poet, playwright, and novelist Michael Redhill (The novel was inspired by the panorama but fictionalized its story, alleging that a fourth, unnamed photographer was the one who actually took the series, but that his materials sank with the ship he was traveling on in a storm off the coast of the Toronto harbour). In the future I hope to contribute more content specific to New Zealand, looking at how Beere’s work impacted the doxa of that space. 

 

The third of the photographers, Humphrey Lloyd Hime (1833-1903), also served on a colonial mission. In 1858 he was hired on the Assiniboine and Saskatchewan expedition led by Henry Youle Hind, a politician intent on proving Canada should be colonized westward. Perhaps the clearest analysis of how Hime’s photography, and perhaps the logic behind the 1857 panorama as well, contributed to the colonial gaze Joan Schwartz writes, “In the early autumn of 1858, Humphrey Lloyd Hime set up his camera and darktent not far from what is now Winnipeg, Manitoba, coated a sheet of glass with collodion, and produced a view, which was subsequently titled, The Prairie, on the Banks of Red River, looking south.  It presents a quintessential image of prairie topography, one which has come to be an enduring image of regional identity. In it, the landscape has been reduced to what Canadian novelist W.O. Mitchell has called “the least common denominator of nature”: earth and sky… by seeking to comprehend this photograph—by looking at it, by looking through it, and by thinking with it—in terms of the meanings that swirled around it, we can achieve a clearer and fuller understanding of time and place, landscape and identity, image and reality. When returned to the action in which it participated—when contemplated against the history of nineteenth-century American expansionism that took root with the Louisiana Purchase, when considered in terms of the need to open up east-west lines of communication to link Canada to the British territories at Red River and on the Pacific, and when weighed against the opportunity presented by the imminent expiration of the Hudson’s Bay Company lease on Rupert’s Land— the power of this image to stir economic hopes and fuel political dreams among Canadian expansionists and British imperialists becomes clear.”

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By analyzing these men’s art, the political forces that drove their careers and migrations, and the events behind the panorama coming in and out of the narrative of Toronto, we can understand how colonial forces function and to construct plurality around the contemporary landscape. It is also significant that their choice of medium - a panorama - served to convey a kind of presence, capturing as much of the city as possible from its tallest man-made point. It is an image of expansion and triumph; an image of conquest, and opportunity. Five years later the Rossin House Hotel burned down. Though it was rebuilt, it suffered a slow decline until it was finally demolished, along with much of the Toronto of 1857. Looking at the thirteen images today, only a handful of sites remain standing in the contemporary landscape. The city of Armstrong, Beere, & Hime is barely recognizable.