Exhibit brings Old West to Musée

It’s nearly time to mosey on down to the museum and take a gander at some old-time pictures.

A new exhibit of photographs is set to roll into town on Tuesday. In Focus shows a series of more than 30 images taken by intrepid early photographers on the Alberta and Montana frontier between 1870 and 1930.

The show is reminiscent of a few other exhibits that have been hosted at the cultural institution in the recent past. Back in September 2008, the public was treated to the early promotional shots of Prints from CPR Magic Lantern Slides: 1885 to 1930, and a few months after that, the city’s local history was on display in the gorgeous black and white images of Looking Back: Fabulous Photos from St. Albert's Past.

Now, there’s a chance to take a look at the people who populated the real Wild West. Curator Joanne White said that she jumped at the chance to sign up for this travelling show from the Glenbow Museum in Calgary.

“With the travelling exhibits, often we’ll just see something and we’ll say, ‘Oh, that sounds really interesting’ and it fits with some of our local history and it’s relevant,” she began. “It was more than we saw that it was available.”

The images are immediately transportive, taking the viewer back to the old days of cowboys, Indians and the North-West Mounted Police, the predecessor to the modern day Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The NWMP was established in 1873, 12 years after St. Albert was founded.

There are pictures of cowboys, one of which looks very much like a Clint Eastwood character from a spaghetti western movie, his gun holstered on a belt with spare bullets. There are Blood and Blackfoot Indians, some holding rifles and weapons.

Some scenes of ranchers and other men show what life was like in their time. One fellow sleeps under blankets in the middle of a field, his horse tethered to a post nearby. We see the full regalia of the NWMP as a squadron of officers practice marches and formations in large fields.

In Focus also has the benefit of some additional artifacts borrowed from the Royal Alberta Museum and Musée Héritage Museum to add more detail to the stories.

One of the more interesting aspects of these old photographs is the only one that can’t really be seen. Behind the scenes, the photographers were working in tough conditions with cumbersome equipment. The glass plates were fragile and shattered easily and frequently. Everything was susceptible to the winds and weather of the prairies.

That, and the cameras took a long time to work. Subjects were forced to hold their poses to accommodate the long exposure times, leading many end results to feature some rather stoic and humourless individuals.

“There’s some really neat things and panoramas. It’s that mixture of the actual photography, which was incredible for its time, what they were able to do, as well as the subject matter that is also fascinating.”