To many, the North is a familiar but inaccessible place. Yet images of the region are within easy reach, in magazine racks, on our coffee tables, and on television, computer, and movie screens. In Northern Exposures, Peter Geller uncovers the history behind these popular conceptions of the Canadian North.

This book examines the photographic and film practice of the Canadian government, the Anglican Church of Canada, and the Hudson's Bay Company, the three major colonial institutions involved in the arctic and sub-arctic. In the first half of the twentieth century, visual...