Free Homes and Cheap Railway Lands!

photographer unknown

1890
23.0 x 10.5 cm
FC 3204.1 C214 1890

Published by the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1890, this brochure provides another example of the way that the CPR packaged and sold the land of Canada, and of the role that photography played in that process. Here, actual land is advertised as available for purchase, whereas the album CPR 1887, created just three years earlier to commemorate a CPR investors' trip across Canada, packages and sells an idea of Canada’s landscape to investors. 

This brochure also demonstrates the challenge of printing photographs and texts side-by-side at this time and calls attention to some of the strategies used instead. Here, captions accompanying each illustration promise viewers that the pictures are based on photographs and are therefore “photographic,” even in the absence of actual photographs. This was a common approach used in illustrated newspapers throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, until the halftone process came into widespread use.

Citation

photographer unknown, “Free Homes and Cheap Railway Lands!,” Bruce Peel Special Collections Library Online Exhibits, accessed November 21, 2024, https://omeka.library.ualberta.ca/items/show/3136.