Manufacturing national park nature: Photography, ecology and the wilderness industry of Jasper National Park (Alberta)

This thesis introduces the concept of National Park Nature through a discussion of tourist photography in Jasper National Park, one of Canada's best-known vacation destinations. National Park Nature can be understood as a particular way of visually ordering the nonhuman world and underscores the primacy of visual culture in the construction of environmental knowledge. The following discussion considers some of the ecological implications resulting from the dominant ways in which photographic images have shaped National Park Nature in Jasper since 1907, the year this landscape was first set aside as a Federal forest reserve. In particular, I am concerned with how imagery perpetuates certain discourses of the nonhuman world at the expense of others, as well as how the production and consumption of these images have necessarily shaped the physical environment of this region. My analysis takes into consideration both "images of ecology" and the "ecology of images," and in doing so aims to further an environmentally informed art historical methodology. Through this case study I demonstrate that a direct link exists between the way a landscape is pictured and the way a society chooses to treat it. Fundamental to this position is the assertion that visual imagery has played a key role in sustaining a power relationship between human and nonhuman realms of existence.