Pictures of Culture: Photographic Objects as Sites of National Identity

This thesis paper examines specific bodies of work by three Ontario-based emerging artists, Meryl McMaster, Basil AlZeri and Kristie MacDonald, who explore questions of depicting national identity in a culturally diverse country like Canada. Focusing on the passport, the postcard and the ethnographic portrait as objects of cultural significance, the artists and their works appropriate these sites of photography, and, in turn, their embedded histories, as ways to renegotiate them. The specific representations taken up by McMaster, AlZeri and MacDonald portray a variety of culturally specific perspectives and histories in relation to Canada. The artists in “Pictures of Culture” trouble the ideological imperatives of national identity by rethinking photographic representations as signifiers of inclusion, recognition and participation that arise from their distinct subject positions as Indigenous sovereign citizens or immigrants within national borders