Photos

This album of photographs records a "Northern Buffalo Hunt" in Alberta, as shown by a news clipping taped to the album's back cover and by the photographs, including one taken at the Embarras Airport in Northern Alberta. The album includes both black-and-white and colour photographs.

Colour photography was made practical in the twentieth century with the introduction of autochrome and Kodachrome film, but printing in colour was still prohibitively expensive for families before the second half of the twentieth century. It was cheaper to print Kodachrome film as slides, which was one reason why family slideshows were popular in the middle of the twentieth century. 

Though technological advancements such as the introduction of colour prints appear to offer a more realistic view of the world, it is important to recognize that the colours produced by photography are the result of chemical processes. These processes favour certain colours, and therefore certain skin tones, leading to what art historian Sarah Lewis has called  “the racial bias built into photography.”

This album is part of the Prairie Ephemera Collection housed in Bruce Peel Special Collections.