For almost 30 years the Mountain Legacy Project (MLP) has been using repeat photography to examine landscape level change in the Canadian mountain west. Working with Library and Archives Canada, provincial archives, museums, and individuals to uncover historical mountain images, MLP teams seek to determine the location they were taken from, go to the same place, and rephotograph them as accurately as possible. The historic and modern images are then aligned, analyzed, and made available for use by scholars, students, government agencies, the public at large – in fact, anyone interested in exploring Canada’s mountain heights.

MLP repeat photography has been used in many forms, most of which have been well placed in academic and land-management venues. But as climate change overtakes us we need to tell mountain stories that reflect the awe of experiences in mountains, and reminds us what is at stake in a rapidly warming world.

We will unveil for the first time our Mountain Voices project, a book-length tribute to the mountains of western Canada. Fifty authors are matched to fifty pairs of historic and repeat images to create compelling narratives of change. The “head” (the science of Mountain Legacy repeat photography) is joined to the “heart” (personal essays on the transformative power of mountains). The result is a compelling new work which directly lifts and connects extensive mountain archival imagery with a diverse range of personal mountain interactions.

The themes unlocked through these historic/modern images pairs include: Indigenous ways of knowing the land, national history, forest ecology, glaciology, wildfire science, geology, anthropology, spirituality – to name just a few. Through the lens of several “head + heart” themes this session will lay out the processes, digital assets, and networks behind each. It will end with a call to the challenging task of reaching out to those who care deeply about mountain homelands and environments.