8 January 2007
Book Captures Rich CPR Legacy
Portraits of Canada: Photographic Treasures of the CPR
by Jonathan Hanna, Robert C. Kennell and Carol Lacourte
Fifth House Press, 212 pages, $34.95
Railways played a vital part in the economic and social history of the country by shipping natural resources and moving settlers West
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
A new book attempts to convey that rail companies such as the Canadian Pacific Railway also played a vital role in other less familiar
aspects of Canadian history - areas like the visual arts.
As well as subsidizing the travelling costs of Canadian artists like the Group of Seven so that they could criss-cross
the nation and document the new country, rail companies created a visual sense of nationhood with iconic poster campaigns.
From the company's beginning in the 1880s, CPR hired a series of well-known photographers who spent the next 12 decades
taking a mind-boggling 800,000 photos, says Jonathan Hanna, a former corporate historian and archivist with the railway.
Hanna is one of the authors of an expansive book called Portraits of Canada: Photographic Treasures of the CPR, which explores
this Eldorado of historic images taken by CPR photographers.
"What struck me as I worked with the CPR archives starting back in the '70s is that there's a lot more there than just
photographs of trains," Hanna says.
In addition to the documentation of momentous events in Canadian history, the rail company's archives had scores of photos of famous
people who had visited Canada by rail.
Celebrities photographed by CPR shutterbugs, says Hanna, include Eleanor Roosevelt, Helen Keller, Marilyn Monroe, Ginger Rogers,
Japanese Emperor Akihito when he was Crown Prince, and a 1953 photo of then U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie.
This breadth of images was partly due to the fact that the CPR was "more than just a train company" and had extensive
holdings that ranged from trucking and airline concerns to investments in oil and gas, real estate, and the running of a ginger ale
and spring water plant in Ontario, Hanna says.
Another factor in the desire to take so many photographs was the realization by pioneering CPR president Sir William Cornelius Van
Horne that the "image was the thing" in publicizing its business.
"In the very early days of the CPR they had no time for photographers, which means that you have few pictures of them building
the railways, but that changed early on when Van Horne realized the value of tourism to his company, particularly the people who
travelled first class."
To that end, the CPR started documenting the vast, sublime expanses of Canada linked by its nation-spanning rail service.
"They were encouraging Canadians via these pictures to travel across the country and see what this nation was all about,"
Hanna says. "At the same time they were developing Canadian national parks like Jasper and Banff as tourist destinations,
building the grand railway hotels, and lobbying the government as to where the parks themselves should be
located."
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