The photographs of Banff’s most famous photographer, Byron Harmon, are now online and easily accessible.
Harmon’s photographs were withdrawn from the public eye to a certain degree when his granddaughter, Carole Harmon, closed her Harmony Lane gallery last year.
The gallery was always one place to go and experience the Byron Harmon story, along with the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, which holds a vast archive of Harmon photographs and negatives donated by the family.
Harmon was a 27-year-old photographer from Tacoma, Wash. when he first arrived in Banff in 1903. It was a short visit, but one that would draw him back to establish a photography studio.
Many of his photographs would become Rocky Mountain classics, instantly recognizable and offering a unique and valuable look into life in Banff and the Rockies in the early 20th century.
When Carole closed the gallery last year, the opportunity to see exhibitions of her grandfather’s work ended.
Now, with the launch of the website – byronharmonphotographs.com – photography and history fans alike can once again see Harmon’s photographs and learn more about the man behind the lens.
“I had to really rethink how I was doing things, even whether to represent all of the Harmon photography on the website or not,” Carole said. “It was a really hard decision to make and that held us up for months.”
With three generations of active photographers in the family, including herself, Carole said she has amassed a large volume of photographs and trying to pull all that work together into one website proved to be too confusing.
“It never felt right, it always felt confusing for people. They were usually interested in Byron, but not always. It was very liberating to make that decision and to go back to Byron’s old name too because Byron Harmon Photos was the name of his business,” Carole said.
Surprisingly, she said more has happened in the past year with her grandfather’s work than has happened since the late 1970s and early 1980s when she organized a large travelling exhibition and book featuring Harmon’s work.
The Rainbow Mountains exhibition, for example, toured to three communities – Jasper, Hinton and Edson – this past year and on Saturday (May 18) the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies will host Stoney First Nations Portraits by Byron Harmon with a reception from 1-4 p.m. with entertainment provided by The Wardens. The exhibition, which features 16 hand-tinted portraits of Stoney Nakoda people, ends July 19.
In fact, Carole said not having to worry about having a gallery has freed up time that is allowing her to do what she always planned to do with the gallery: focus on sharing her grandfather’s story.
“Running the gallery is a huge amount of work. I can now do more with less work and expense and take small selections of images, like mini-stories from his collection and put them up as a blog post with a few images and a bit of writing and talk about going to the Bugaboos with Tom Longstaff (British mountaineer) or various specific trips or themes within his collection.”
One of the other stories Carole is planning to share is Harmon’s journey to the World Congress of Alpinism, held in Monaco in the early 1920s, as a representative of Canada and of the Alpine Club of Canada.
As part of that, Harmon’s photographs were exhibited in the House of Commons, on the ship that carried the delegates across the Atlantic and at the alpinism congress.
Following the congress, Harmon toured Europe on a lecture tour. He took photographs as he went that are outside the scope of his mountain work, such as a series in a natural history museum.
“Why did he take them? Was it an assignment, did somebody ask him to do this or was he just really interested in them?”
Carole said she doubts she’ll ever get an answer to those questions, as the family knows so little about Harmon because so few written documents survived.
“There’s not anything written that has survived, so all we have are images and then all we can do is speculate.
“I really regret that there aren’t more written journals, letters, accounts, that sort of thing. On the other hand, you’ve got a body of work and you’ve got some published things, like the National Geographic article in 1925, that are really concrete things. Other than that, you’ve got a collection of pictures and accounts in the Alpine Club Journal,” she said.
It’s the same with Harmon’s feature length films. He was a filmmaker as much as he was a photographer, but his film work has not survived or is perhaps still tucked away in some hidden corner of the world.
“He was often setting up scenes to photograph, particularly in later years, much in the way a filmmaker would do and then photographing them. He was often filming them at the time, we just don’t happen to have the films,” she said. “There’s enough references to them to know that he made at least one feature length film of going to the Columbia Icefields.”
Along with the website and the blog, Carole said she’s planning more physical exhibitions that feature different aspects of the collection.
But with all of it, she said she’s striving to keep a balance between her grandfather’s and her father’s work and her own work. Her goal, however, has not changed: sharing her family’s connection to place and to the natural world.
“We need more than ever to have a real feeling and closeness to nature and a connection to wilderness. We’re more and more urban dwellers, with a few exceptions; people don’t have the experience they used to have of growing up in the countryside.”
