Visualizing the Tar Sands Through Time

Abstract

The Athabasca tar sands may have been born virtually overnight in the international media, but only after a decades-long incubation period during which the maternal side of Albertans shone. This incubation is captured – the baby itself in fact constructed – in discourse as much as in industriousness. And within this discourse, it is the images that have withstood the test of time, marking each trimester in vivid relief. Some would argue that the use of images in contemporary politics and social protest marks a recent “visual turn” in post- or late modern society. But modern analysts often overlook long-standing visual representations, in the case of the tar sands, well over 100 years of visual storytelling, which has established an authoritative industrial discourse in support of corporate investment, government assistance, the inevitability of commercial-scale exploitation, and ultimately human domination of a passive nature. As argued by Schwartz (2007), historic photographs embed the Canadian landscape with constructed meanings and inform the public’s normative and scientific imaginings of Canada’s northwest and its natural systems, and this is particularly true of the tar sands, a mundane naturally occurring seepage turned coveted national treasure.