Background Photographs Work in Museum Exhibits

A Case Study on Claude Tidd’s Photograph of Vuntut Gwitchin Chief Peter Moses in the First Peoples Hall

Introduction

I have never been to a museum that did not have photographs, in some form, in its exhibits. However, without a spotlight on the photograph, I do not usually think twice about why it is there. The purpose of photos in exhibit spaces is usually left unquestioned as they work to serve the curator’s narrative. They are there for context, to authenticate a story, or, perhaps, to help with aesthetics. Regardless, they are chosen and placed to work in a specific way. Upon my last visit to the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Québec, I noticed the many photographs in the First Peoples Hall, a permanent exhibit since 2003, and the little context surrounding them. As I walked through the hall, I let my eyes weave between the information below me, the artifacts in front of me, and the background panels covered in groupings of three photos. This paper is a case study on one of the background photos that struck me. Upon initial viewing, I found it difficult to connect its contents to the exhibit where it is placed. The picture, titled “Peter Moses, Chief of Old Crow stretching animal pelts, 1946, Courtesy of the Yukon Archives – Claude Tidd Fonds” is the first image displayed on the dark blue panel in Figure 1. As a photograph deployed in the background of the First Peoples Hall, this paper brings this image to the forefront to examine how it works, how its rich history does not work and, further, how it resists the exhibit’s narrative. As such, this photograph is an example of how background photographs in exhibit spaces can serve to work with, oppose, and resist the exhibit narratives in which they are placed.

Figure 1. Photograph by Patricia Roussel, Untitled (Exhibit space in the First Peoples Hall with a toboggan and five snowshoes in front of four background panels with groupings of three photographs and a bilingual quote), February 8, 2025, Personal Archive, Gatineau, Québec.

The Photo Working

When I entered the windowless First Peoples Hall, I noticed that there was no direct path for visitors to follow. The exhibits, on either side of the hall, are presented in three layers: information panels contextualizing the artifacts behind them, the artifacts themselves, and background panels with groupings of three photographs and quotes [1]. Many of these artifacts work to highlight the lives of famous Indigenous individuals and traditional Indigenous ways of life. The national mandate of the Canadian Museum of History has heavily influenced the broad themes present in the First Peoples Hall, as this space aims to “…share stories of First Nations, Inuit and Métis in Canada, from time immemorial to the present day [2]”.

As I walked past a display case with fringed clothing, bows and arrows, and stone tools, I found an upright toboggan next to five pairs of snowshoes. Here, I assumed this display highlights Indigenous technologies for winter transport, though this theme is not explicitly stated. As I glanced over the toboggan and snowshoes, one photograph caught my eye at the top of the background panel. The black and white photograph depicts a middle-aged man’s side profile, in a black hat and white long-sleeve shirt, smoking a pipe, and holding a stretched animal hide. Behind him, there were rows of these hides stretched out on racks. There was not an obvious connection between this person in front of the animal hides and Indigenous transport technologies.

So, why is this photograph here?

Figure 2. Photograph by Claude Tidd, Peter Moses, Chief of Old Crow stretching animal pelts, June 1946, Canadian Museum of History, Gatineau, Québec.

In search of answers, I returned to an information panel with 15 miniatures of the background panel photographs with their titles, locations, and accession numbers. The title of this photograph states that the man present is Peter Moses, the Chief of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, in 1946 and that he is standing in front of stretched animal pelts. Still puzzled at how this title fits into the exhibit narrative, I returned to the photograph panel to search for more context clues. I found it challenging to focus on the photograph. Although this image had been enlarged, it was still about eight feet away, making its specific details impossible to see. According to English sociologist Laurie Taylor, print sizes cause problems with displayed visuals because looking at them from a distance makes it harder to take them in in their entirety [3]. Similarly, historian Glenn Willumson argues that museums intentionally remove the viewer from the object to remove any trace of its previous trajectory [4]. Together, Taylor and Willumson would agree that the First Peoples Hall curators put this photograph in the background so their narrative would be the visitor’s overall takeaway. This then leaves the possibility for visual interpretation out of reach and out of sight. 

From my distant view, I searched for this photograph’s most visible features. Peter Moses was one, and the animal pelts behind him were the other. Then, I noticed that the two images below also show stretched animal hides. This must be what links these photos and why the curators displayed them together. The photograph of Chief Moses is currently working to support this narrative of animal hide stretching as an Indigenous technology, as this pattern directs viewers' attention to the feature that connects these three images. According to French literary theorist Roland Barthes, this pattern has made the photograph “…subject spectacle to the civilized code of perfect illusions”[5]. In this way, the photograph has become a spectacle or aestheticized in a code that affirms this exhibit narrative of animal hide stretching as a traditional Indigenous technology. 

However, the side profile of Chief Moses is in the foreground and takes up most of the left side of this picture. Is the pattern that curators have created powerful enough to bring viewers’ attention to the background of this image? According to William JT Mitchell's perspective on Barthes concept of "denotation," referring to the most easily “read” features of the photograph, the pattern here allows visitors to denote a common narrative, which shifts the focus from Chief Moses to the animal pelts because they are the easiest readable feature among these three images [6].  As such, this photo’s place in the animal hide pattern is how it is being worked to support this vague narrative surrounding traditional Indigenous technologies.

The Photo Not Working 

Though the animal hides in this photograph are highlighted by this exhibit’s narrative, its history is largely silenced. I noticed the suppressed parts of this picture after I read its title. Besides the fact that this was the first time I saw any of Yukon’s 14 First Nations mentioned in the First Peoples Hall, the descriptor left me with many questions. Why would a chief, someone of such high social stature, be placed in the background of an exhibit that had seemingly nothing to do with this picture? What nation was Peter Moses part of? Who is Claude Tidd? And why is his collection housed at the Yukon Archives? 

Returning to this photograph on the banner, its animal pelt narrative gave me none of these answers. The pattern that curators have created to group these photographs together has suppressed their individual histories. This is echoed by scholars Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, who argue that images displayed with ionization and repetition delimit the rich interpretative possibilities that their past can open and enable [7]. How would this image change if it is removed from this pattern? How would knowing its history enrich the viewer’s interpretive possibilities of it? 

I based my search for answers on the photograph’s title. Peter Moses was the Chief of Old Crow, a northern, small-knit Yukon community on the traditional territory of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation. It is the northernmost non-Inuit Indigenous community in North America and was settled in the late nineteenth century at the confluence of the Porcupine and Old Crow Rivers for its rich population of muskrats [8]. Peter Moses was the Chief of the Vuntut Gwitchin for 18 consecutive years between 1936 and 1954, meaning that this photograph was captured in the middle of his leadership [9]. Alongside Chief Moses’s significant leadership tenure, he is also remembered for his efforts in international aid, receiving the British Empire Medal on behalf of this community in 1943 after sending support to English children left orphaned by the Blitz [10]. None of Moses’s legacy is expanded on behind the toboggan and snowshoes in the First Peoples Hall. 

Another key piece of information attached to this photograph is that it is part of the Claude Tidd Collection at the Yukon Archives. This photograph of Peter Moses is one of over 2000 photographs and audio-visual recordings in the collection [11]. Claude Tidd was born in England and moved to Canada in 1914, where he enlisted in the Royal North West Mounted Police and was stationed in the Yukon with his wife, Mary, between 1914 and 1946 [12].  During this time, the couple was stationed in several small Yukon communities, including Old Crow. At these postings, Claude and Mary became active community members and captured much of their life on camera. Their records were donated to the Yukon Archives by Mary Tidd’s brother in 1977 and have since become one of the archive’s most well-known and well-used collections [13]. Like the history of Chief Peter Moses, Claude Tidd has also become an anonymous identifier here, as his life’s work and significance in the Yukon Archives has been censored to fit this exhibit’s vague narrative. 

The exhibit’s background use of Tidd’s photograph exemplifies Susan Crane’s argument that museums are guilty of using pictures to “just be there”[14]. Of Crane’s four classifications of photographs in museums, this case study falls under her category of photos being used as display design. In other words, this photograph has been reproduced as an exhibition design element, leaving visitors to experience it aesthetically and emotionally rather than historically or ethically [15]. The reproduction and cropping of this photograph support Crane’s critique, for it has been completely stripped of its historical identity, leaving viewers with an uncomfortable half-view of it. My many questions surrounding the historical context of this image prove my discomfort with its current display. As this reproduced photograph takes on an enlarged form in the background, its history is almost completely lost in this aesthetic pattern. By shifting our focus to elements of this photograph that do not fit this pattern, like Chief Moses’s leadership or the significance of Claude Tidd's photography, the history of this photograph emerges and proves not to work in its current exhibit narrative on Indigenous technologies.

The Photo Resisting 

This paper has established how this photograph both does and doesn’t work in this exhibit. Now, we must also consider how this photograph’s history acts to resist its current narrative. When we know its history, this photograph works differently. Our eyes will not bypass Chief Moses to look at unknown animal pelts and establish a pattern with the other images. Rather, we see one of the most significant and longest-reigning chiefs of the Vuntut Gwitchin looking out at one of the Nation’s most sacred resources, muskrats. Also, we see this image through the photographer’s gaze and recognize the Tidd Collection as an archival treasure of mid-twentieth-century Yukon life. With this, viewers’ attention fades from the animal pelts to engage in a much more personalized understanding of this photograph’s history and trajectory. Glenn Willumson argues that when museums deny the historical trajectory of displayed photographs, they fail to make a critical link between the institution, the artifact, and the visitor [16]. As a proposed solution, Willumson encourages museums to trace a photograph’s history like a personal biography to offer familiar experiences for audiences to follow [17]. With this case study, Willumson would agree that this photograph’s personal biography is almost entirely overlooked, leaving it severely underworked. 

This photograph also appears in an online exhibit titled A Yukon Romance based on the lives of Claude and Mary Tidd. The photograph is present at the bottom of a page titled “Whaddo I do with myself?” surrounded by excerpts from Claude’s diaries and text accrediting these portraits of the Vuntut Gwitchin as some of his best work [18]. Comparably, there is less resistance in this presentation as more of the photograph’s personal biography is present to justify why it is there and how it contributes to the exhibit. In this photograph’s current place in the First Peoples Hall, its rich history resists the vague narrative it currently serves. My initial discomfort towards this photograph and the many questions I have posed and attempted to answer throughout this paper proves its active resistance as it invites viewers into its history, which unleashes its interpretive possibilities.

Conclusion

On my next visit to the First Peoples Hall, whether I am by myself on a weekend study break or visiting with friends and family, my eyes will again weave between information, artifacts, and images and land upon this photograph of Peter Moses. Only this time, I will think about it differently. I will acknowledge how it works in this exhibit, within the animal pelt pattern, how it does not work, with much of its history silenced, and how its personal biography resists this space. This case study exemplifies that the work of a photograph is much more than what meets the eye in its current setting. Rather, photographs work in the narratives they support, the feelings they evoke, the history they hold, and how they resist their prescribed narrative. This perspective is one that highly enriches the stories held in photographs and their placement in museum exhibits and, with respect to the limitations faced by museum curators, should be one carefully considered before placing photographs in the background of exhibit spaces.

Endnotes

[1] First Peoples Hall, (Gatineau, Québec: Canadian Museum of History, January 2008).   

[2] “First Peoples Hall,” Canadian Museum of History, October 10, 2024, https://www.historymuseum.ca/exhibitions/first-peoples-hall.

[3] Laurie Taylor, “Chapter 3: The Size of It,” in The Materiality of Exhibition Photography in the Modernist Era: Form, Content, Consequence (Routledge, 2021), 82. 

[4] Glenn Willumson, “Making Meaning: Displaced Materiality in the Library and Art Museum,” in Photographs, Objects, Histories: On the Materiality of Images, ed. Edwards and Hart (Routledge, 2004), 76.

[5] Roland Barthes, “Chapter 48,” in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 119.  

[6] William JT Mitchell, “The Photographic Essay: Four Case Studies,” in Picture Theory, (University of Chicago Press, 1995), 284. 

[7] Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, “Incongruous Images: ‘Before, During, and After’ the Holocaust,” in History and Theory 48, no.9 (2009), 24, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25621435. 

[8] Mary Jane Moses, “Old Crow,” in The Canadian Encyclopedia (March 4, 2015), https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/old-crow. 

[9] Paul Doehle, “Old Crow Chief & Councillors 1920-2006,” 2008, http://www.oldcrow.ca/cc.htm.

[10] Vuntut Gwitchin Government Heritage Branch, Old Crow Historic Sites Walking Tour (Government of Yukon, 2018), 12, https://yukon.ca/sites/default/files/tc/tc-walking-tour-old-crow.pdf. 

[11] Michael Gates, “History Hunter: Claude Tidd, the Mountie who got his lady,” Yukon News, September 4, 2021, https://yukon-news.com/2021/09/04/history-hunter-claude-tidd-the-mountie-who-got-his-lady/. 

[12] Gates, “History Hunter.”

[13] Claude and Mary Tidd fonds, [ca. 1900]-1947, 1973, 1,700 photographs and other material, yuk yuk-858, Yukon Archives, https://edit.albertaonrecord.ca/claude-and-mary-tidd-fonds. 

[14] Susan Crane, “Photographs at/of/and Museums,” in Handbook of Photography, ed. Gil Pasternak, (Routledge, 2020), 494.

[15] Crane, “Photographs,” 498. 

[16] Willumson, “Making Meaning,” 80.

[17] Willumson, “Making Meaning,” 81. 

[18] “Old Crow - ‘Whaddo I Do with Myself’,” Yukon Romance - A Virtual Exhibit, accessed February 10, 2025, https://www.yukonromance.ca/en/romance/oldcrow/whaddo1e49.html?topNav=rom&subNav=old.

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List of Illustrations

Figure 1. Photograph by Patricia Roussel. Untitled (Exhibit space in the First Peoples Hall with a toboggan and five snowshoes in front of four background panels with groupings of three photographs and a bilingual quote). February 8, 2025. Personal Archive, Gatineau, Québec.

Figure 2. Photograph by Claude Tidd. Peter Moses, Chief of Old Crow stretching animal pelts. June 1946. Canadian Museum of History, Gatineau, Québec.