A Ribbon of Highway: A Photographic Exploration of Canadian Identity

Review By Kirk Niergarth

March 26, 2025

This is a book mainly about place and space.  There are people in it – selfie takers in front of the city skyline on Mount Royal, NHL hockey players in miniature as viewed from the cheap seats, a snowplow driver waving as he passes, a friend glimpsed in the light of a blazing bonfire – but Roades’ camera’s eye is more interested in where people live and the space between those places.  This is a book therefore that features many examples of the most ubiquitous form in Canadian visual culture: the landscape.

Very few of Roades’ images, though, evoke the classic wilderness landscapes associated with the Group of Seven (with some exceptions such as Summer Tree, Lighthouse Park Vancouver and Winter Tree, Guelph). Though Roades does capture beautiful scenes of wildlife and wilderness, the book rarely evokes the Group of Seven ethos of seeking out a pristine “unsullied” nature as an escape from and antidote to modern urban society.  Nor, though, does she follow Edward Burtynsky in aestheticizing the ruinous legacy of industrial modernity upon the land with its quarries, and clearcuts, and tailings ponds.  Roades instead largely shows a land inhabited by people and other animals, who mark these spaces as they live in them and move through them.

The two-page spread following Winter/Summer Tree is indicative. On one side, Roades places an image of a sawmill in Telegraph Cove, B.C. set against a backdrop of an evidently logged and yet still heavily forested mountainside; on the other a photograph of the wood-lined interior of the curving staircases of the modern Calgary Public Library and beside that a photograph of two mortuary poles in Haida Gwaii.  Trees, Roades seems to be acknowledging, are not only picturesque but also underpin the work that renders them into wood, wood that gets put to use by people in diverse ways, monumentally and otherwise.

Roades’ photographs acknowledge the settler colonial history of the territories she photographs. One pairing of photos features a close-up of an antique rifle on a buffalo fur, clearly alluding to the early days of colonial encounter, and on the facing page a photo of a faded page of an early 1980s newspaper advertisement for an Eaton’s sale of fur coats, hinting at the legacy of that encounter in the spreading settler society that developed in its wake.  The site of a now-demolished Indian Residential School, photographed at night, acknowledges the dark elements of this history, but it is worth noting that in the backdrop of this photo there are lights on at the community centre. In other images – such as the bilingual (English and Kwak’wala) stop sign on ʼNa̱mǥis First Nation territory or the depiction of the youthful Heiltsuk making a lay up in a gym in Bella Bella in front of a wall adorned with a tremendous mural in traditional Northwest coast artistic style – Roades has also depicted the continuing and continuous Indigenous presence in this land.

Roades has an eye for visual puns.  The v-shape on a roadside sign echoes a mountain in the photograph’s backdrop; a rainbow, glimpsed from the roadside in Quebec is paired with a photo of rainbow flags hanging from windows in Toronto during a Pride Parade; some Canadian at work making sparks with a welding torch is across the page from an inverse image of Canadians on holiday under the sparks of fireworks in the night sky; a doll sized tractor on a weathervane in Alberta is juxtaposed with a tractor dolled-up with strings of holiday lights at a Christmas parade in rural Ontario; water thrown in the air vaporizing in the cold of the Yukon is paired opposite the Pacific throwing water into the air against the rocky shore of Pacific Rim national park:  It is a big and diverse country, Roades seems to be saying, but there are rhymes here.  One place is different from the next – and the people too – but not entirely so.

Pierre Bourdieu, provocatively, called photography a “middle-brow art.” Roades, it appears, has an appreciation, even an affection, for middle-brow Canadiana.  There’s a deer head on a wood paneled wall in a cabin somewhere; a paint-by-numbers watercolor of a Mountie and his dog under the northern lights on a similar wall somewhere else; the backlit sign advertises minigolf at the Prairie Oasis motel in Moosejaw.  The tourist landscape that Roades encounters in her travels across the country is subtly acknowledged – the coin-operated binoculars obscure the vista in Roade’s image of Sayward, British Columbia – and Roades offers her take on some oft rendered sites, namely Niagara Falls and Lake Louise, in a way that reminds one, in fact, of just why they are so oft rendered.  This is a book, too, I think, aimed at middling sorts.  There are no scenes of homelessness, but no mansions either and many small houses and cabins.  Only those who might have experienced a long-distance bus ride will recognize the depiction of the Greyhound pitstop in the “very early morning somewhere in Alberta” with a bleary-eyed memory.

A nation is an imagined community, they say, and part of the imagining is that the other members of that nation imagine it similarly – a collective delusion, perhaps.  I have traversed enough of the ribbons of highway in Roades’ book to know that this is not a book that will resonate the same way with everyone in this enormous country.  Multiculturalism is not just a policy in these territories, but an obvious social reality and race, language, ethnicity, region, class, gender, sexuality are only among the manifold markers of difference.  Yet, even so, it will resonate in some way with many of us who love the spaces and places Roades depicts – urban, rural, and wild; love them like an adolescent loves a parent – resistantly, critically, unappreciatively, perhaps, but nevertheless, fundamentally.