A Place for Photographs: The Hudson's Bay Company and the Envisioning of Corporate History

In 1920, the Hudson’s Bay Company marked its 250th anniversary with a major pageant, parades, and a new public relations strategy focused on deploying history to connect the British-owned company to a distinctly “Canadian” past. This presentation traces how historical photographs were collected, displayed, printed as illustrations, and archived by the company as a means to “sell” its history to consumers.  The multiple uses of photographs demonstrate their malleability, but their uncertain status as representations of history also raised fundamental questions on finding a “place” -- materially and epistemologically -- for photographs within the company.  Photographs were “documents” of history, but were not stored with the company’s textual archive; they were material artifacts of the past, but separated from the material culture of the company’s own museum. As visual illustrations, the photographs found an archival home in files connected to the company’s internal magazine, The Beaver, but even here their deployment in print revealed different and contradictory understandings of how photographic indexicality represented the past. By tracing the movement of photographs across these different sites, the temporal connections of photographs to the past appear to be far less important in determining their “historicity” than the spatial relations within and between photographs.  For historians, studying photographs involves not only looking at images, but “placing” them as material objects embedded within circulatory networks.  Envisioning a corporate history required the Hudson’s Bay Company not only to publish and display photographs as illustrations, but also to find a “place” for them in the cracks and seams between the archive, the museum, and the public relations bureau.