The Trace of History

How do you make a photographic portrait of a country? It is a question Toronto-based photographer Phil Bergerson has been asking himself for the last three and a half years as he has travelled back and forth across Canada. In that time, he has visited 1,700 cities, towns and villages and taken 20,000 photographs. The result of his extensive travels will become Trace Remains: A Portrait of Canada, a book of 250 images published by Goose Lane Editions in the summer of 2026 and an exhibition of photographs in which a number of Canadian art galleries have already expressed an interest. Bergerson recognizes the scale of the project he has set for himself—“I realize the thing I’m trying to do might be impossible”—but if past accomplishments are an indication of his ambition and persistence, he might well be able to deliver his impossible mission.

Bergerson has been a shaping presence in the art of photography in Canada. He taught at Ryerson (now Metropolitan University) from 1975 to 2005, where he organized a national conference on Canadian photography, the first symposium on contemporary photographic theory, and initiated the influential Kodak Lecture Series in 1975. He has also published three significant books: Shards of America, 2004; American Artifacts, 2014; and Phil Bergerson: A Retrospective, 2020. The photographs in these books focused on the United States and the way in which the fabled American Dream was an aspiration more than a realization; from that perspective his recognition of his images as shards was a revealing one.

In his new project he is concentrating on his home country, and the naming of this work-in-progress suggests a different story. The difference between a shard and a trace raises an important distinction: a shard is a broken thing; a trace is an indication that something remains to be found. Bergerson already senses a different tone in the Canadian photographs from what he discovered in America. He says, “The spirit is of a very different nature; there is a humbleness, a softness, sweetness and beauty to the people in Canada. It is not the hard, gritty thing that you encounter in the States. If there is a Canadian Dream—and we’re not used to asking anyone, ‘What is your dream?’—the answer has to be ‘all-inclusive and accepting.’”

Bergerson’s working title also carries a darker resonance; remains are visible throughout the book and frequently their trace is a problematic one. His is an eyes-wide-open journey into this country’s history; if you’re looking you will find incriminating evidence. The photograph of the trailer memorializing the 50th anniversary of the destruction and relocation of the Black community of Africville in Halifax is a reminder of the unequal application of human rights, but how are we to read the photograph of teepee structures and a large dreamcatcher sitting on the manicured lawn of the National Heritage Site on the Mi’kmaw Nation’s territory at Potlotek, Nova Scotia? Whose version of culture—Indigenous or settler— are we seeing here?

Bergerson’s camera asks us to make our own determinations and settle on our own reading of his images. But he brings to the book certain of his own interests: he is fascinated by the vernacular; his background in painting seems to have predisposed him to be on the lookout for photographs whose subject is art; he is enamoured of distressed surfaces and the left-behind (the deteriorating camping trailer near Swift Current, Saskatchewan); he likes colour (the competing greens of the B&G Tarp Store in Olds, Alberta); he has a refined sense of the absurd and images that play with surrealism (the red and green truck in a farmer’s yard near Fort Macleod, Alberta, looks like a toy); and he is attracted to what he calls “the collaging things that I’m encountering.” He is also intrigued by photographs that use language to the exclusion of image. Sometimes the messages are inexplicable, like the one on a door in Montreal that says, “300 billion years ago a spaceship crashed into a church.” But they can also be poignant; on a red brick wall in Cornwall, Ontario, someone has written, “Please sign the wall of forgiveness.” The wall, sadly, bears no signatures.

The book is still in the process of being put together, and Bergerson continues to visit and revisit places he hasn’t been and those he has. What he is discovering is the inescapable complexity of his project and the rightness of the name he has given it. “Trace” is a word that measures loss and, equally, attests to persistence. Remains are loss and remains are promise. What he makes of those conditions will become the substance of his national portrait. ❚