Canada's most famous photos

hello friends my name is jj everybody's favorite and in today's video we are going to be talking about the idea of iconic national photographs that is to say the most famous photographs in the history of a country i feel like a famous photograph can be a national symbol every bit as important as like flags or foods or songs or whatever maybe even more so in fact because of course photographs have this whole pretense of being these perfectly accurate frozen slices of reality even though i think we all know that in practice a photograph can be every bit as artificial or biased or deceptive as anything else so in my opinion to truly qualify as a national photo the photograph has to meet a few criteria one it has to be a very specific photo of a very specific thing that has some broad relevance to the country's history or culture two it has to be so synonymous with the thing it depicts that it is basically the only photo that is ever used to depict that thing the photo will always be used in school textbooks for instance and if you type in the name of the thing into google image search that one picture is what will fill up the results page three the picture should be widely sentimentalized if it is a happy photo it will be reproduced in monuments and souvenirs and art while if it is a more bleak photo it might be widely used in political propaganda in any case it will certainly be widely parodied in cartoons and satire this is because the iconic status of the photo will be so powerful that reproducing or recreating it will be an easy way to evoke certain ideas or emotions so in an american context if i had to pick five photos that fit this bill they would be the soldiers with the flag at iwo jima the sailor kissing the woman after world war ii marilyn monroe on the air vent president truman with the dewey defeats truman newspaper and that one of all of the construction workers sitting on the high beam more recently i would say that photo of the firefighters raising the flag after 9 11 would be a good contender as well although you could also very easily say that that photo only became famous because it reminds people of the iwo jima one anyway for the rest of this video we are going to talk about the five photos that i consider to be the most famous in canadian history and how they got to be so famous and since i know i have a very international audience as you watch this video i want you to be thinking about what would be some examples of the most famous or iconic photos in the history of your country you guys are really good at doing these sorts of assignments so i'm hoping that i'll be able to make a sequel video next week but first canada so many would argue that this is the most famous photograph in all of canadian history they call it the last spike and it has probably appeared in every canadian textbook ever made and is even in the canadian passport so what does it depict well in the mid 19th century there was this big plan to bring all of northern north america under canadian control to unite all of the other british north american colonies and empty land into one giant unified country and the easiest way to do this said canada's first prime minister sir john a macdonald was to tie the entire northern half of this continent together with a big ribbon of steel which meant a big east-west railroad rail of course being the most high-tech form of transportation available at the time and in 1885 this crazy dream was finally completed a giant railroad was built stretching all the way from nova scotia to vancouver trudging through untold miles of harsh canadian wilderness and rocky mountains in what was one of the most remarkable engineering feats of the age and on november 7th 1885 the corporation that built this railroad the canadian pacific railway company staged this little photo op where the president of the company hammered the final nail into the final piece of track right here in kregalahi british columbia the small town that just happened to be the union point between the eastern and western construction crews and this photo accordingly became very symbolic of the day that canada truly became a country because it represented the moment in which canada was finally united in a practical sense rather than just a political one as the canadian historian daniel francis says in one of my favorite ever books on canadian history national dreams other countries have produced romantic images of citizens storming the barricades clutching the flag of freedom canada's version is apparently these photographs showing a man in a top hat and a wall suit banging at a nail a few years ago i was on a road trip with some friends and we actually passed through craig gallahy british columbia which is now this little tourist trap you can nail in your own spike or get your photo taken in one of those things with the face hole and generally just wallow in the patriotic majesty of that time a privately run corporation completed their money-making project of using chinese labor and british funds to build a quickly outdated transportation system through miles and miles of unseated indian land all right next photo skipping ahead a bit this is a photo from 1940 entitled wait for me daddy it is easily the most famous photo associated with world war ii in canada and was also taken right here in british columbia in fact it was taken not far from where i live so i can just go there and show you so the photo was taken right here in the city of new westminster and it depicts a bunch of soldiers coming down that street there they were marching to this train station here to be shipped off to war it's some sort of terrible pub now and you can see that across the way they've erected this little memorial statue thing to the photo now i feel the symbolism of this photo is pretty obvious particularly if you give it a really blunt name like wait for me daddy but contrary to what you might expect this photo actually has a happy ending daddy did come back and the kid in this photo is still alive to this day they tend to wheel him out every so often for ceremonies and things like when the royal canadian mint made a special commemorative wait for me daddy two dollar coin in 2014. all right and now the next photo we're gonna look at is this one of the paper boy with the newspaper that says that the war measures act has been invoked now this photo was taken in october of 1970 which was a very tense time in modern canadian history i will probably do a full video on this someday but basically in the late 1960s canada experienced a rash of terrorist attacks led by french canadian extremists the main group was something called the quebec liberation front or the flq and in the name of quebec independence they bombed a great many things which you can hear summarized in this clip from this very excellent documentary called action 1970. the national revenue building the rcmp headquarters the canadian national railways the blackwatch armory the royal canadian air force the queen victoria monument the grenade shoe factory the ball survey arena dominion textiles standard structural steel eaton's murray hill chamber transport the montreal city hall the bank of nova scotia the quebec ministry of labor the canadian army the montreal stock exchange the queen's printers the shadow frontenac the industrial acceptance corporation medrapo's residence loyola college mcgill university the bank of montreal and many others were bombed but despite all these bombings the flq actually killed very few people and certainly no one famous that is until october of 1970 in which they kidnapped and murdered the deputy prime minister of quebec pierre laporte and in response to that prime minister pirellia trudeau in ottawa invoked something called the war measures act which gave the federal government the power to round up and detain suspected subversives without warrant which they did in large numbers again this is a very controversial and complicated story but the point is that this photo of the paperboy which really looks like something from a movie you know with the extra extra and all that it kind of represented the peak moment of anxiety in this whole period of national drama several years after this crisis ended the war measures act was repealed and replaced with something known as the emergencies act which gives the federal government a lot fewer unchecked powers to use during times of national crisis the very phrase war measures act is now permanently associated with that dark period in october of 1970 with this photo which of course literally has the words war measures act in it the most iconic embodiment of that moment on a happier note let us now talk about this photo from 1972 the most iconic sports photo in canadian history depicting one of the most iconic sports moments in canadian history this picture depicts a guy named paul henderson shortly after he scored the winning goal in something called the summit series so in the 1960s the soviet union had emerged as a major force in ice hockey at the olympics and other international competitions and a lot of north american hockey fans of the time said that this was only the result of a giant loophole scam that the russians were pulling in those days professional hockey players in north america which is to say members of nhl teams were not allowed to compete in international competitions because the logic was that international sport should be reserved exclusively for amateurs but for some commie reason or another in the soviet union everything worked backwards and their amateur players were actually the ones who played hockey full-time and were the best this then led to the creation of the so-called summit series of 1972 a special one-off tournament that would allow canadian nhl players to play against the soviet amateurs this was seen as a much more fairer fight than what previous international competitions had offered but despite some initial canadian cockiness the competition was not resolved swiftly but instead dragged on for seven games with the canadians winning three and the russians winning three with one tie this made the final game eight super exciting and important and it wound up being a very close game which made it even more exciting with the score tied and only 34 seconds to go a guy named paul henderson scored the winning goal and clinched the tournament for canada fell [Applause] and this moment of celebration on the ice with paul henderson being hugged by one of the other players wound up being the iconic image of the entire summit series the photo was very widely reproduced and there were like posters and art and stuff made of it a coin too of course at one time the summit series was very sentimentalized is like the moment that brought the country together and every canadian could remember where he was when he was watching it and this sort of thing but of course these days you have a ton of canadians from the prime minister on down who have no memories of anything that was going on in 1972 younger canadians will probably have much stronger feelings towards things like when canada won the gold medal in hockey in the 2010 winter olympics or maybe even when the blue jays won the world series in 1992 so i would say that the epic henderson goal of 1972 is sort of fast becoming mostly an artifact of a kind of boomer nostalgia an artifact tied not only to like memories of their youth but memories of the tensions of the cold war and stuff like that for some of my friends in other countries i'd be curious if this rings true to you as well this idea that some of the great sporting victories of the past are starting to feel increasingly outdated as patriotic symbols as they fall deeper and deeper into history all right and now let us look at one more photo this picture from 1982 so as anyone who has watched videos on my channel will know there are something like 20 different moments that you could cite for when canada became a country the last spike of course being one but the moment in which canada became completely utterly legally politically independent didn't happen until 1982 that was when the british government surrendered its last remaining power over canada the power to change the canadian constitution the british government of margaret thatcher passed that reform on march 25th 1982 and queen elizabeth agreed to sign it into law on canadian soil on april 17th so the queen flew over to canada and the ensuing photo op of her sitting at this big outdoor table in this 70s era green outfit with the old man trudeau produced one more iconic image of canada achieving nationhood almost exactly 100 years after the railroad photo like most of these photos this one has of course been widely satirized over the years for example check out this political cartoon drawn by the great canadian cartoonist duncan mcpherson which appeared on the cover of a 1987 collection of the year's best editorial cartoons this is a cartoon making fun of prime minister brian mulrooney who spent a lot of his second term pushing for unpopular amendments to the canadian constitution so by depicting mulrooney literally muscling in on trudeau and the queen the cartoonist is implying that he is this sort of arrogant character with no respect for the finality of what trudeau and the brits had so painstakingly worked out okay so having heard all of that i now want to hear your nominees for the most iconic photographs in your country's history the ones that everyone would recognize and have been the subject of endless reproduction commemoration and satire i am looking forward to using them to make a fun video for next week

Channel: J.J. McCullough

Views: 133,961

Rating: 4.9334512 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: R92Iq5ZIszk

Length: 14min 56sec (896 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 15 2020

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The legendary Man with the wristwatch from Koudelka in '68 is missing here.