Photographs
In her poems, Atwood uses photographs to explore identity,
particularly the facades women adopt to conform (at least superficially)
to society. “This is a photograph of me,” the first poem in her
first collection, plays with the conventional equation of appearance
and reality. The photograph obscures, rather than reveals, the speaker’s mysterious
identity and history. Similarly, the speaker of “In the Tourist
Centre in Boston” reflects on the perceived discrepancy between
photographic images of Canada and her own memories of the place.
The speaker’s “private mirage” takes precedence over the glossy
colorized certainties depicted in the photographs. In the poem “Girl
and Horse, 1928,”
from Procedures for Underground, the speaker contemplates
an old photograph of a girl, “someone I never knew,” and tries to
imagine what the girl was thinking. In the end of the poem, the
speaker turns over the photograph, whereupon the girl waves and
rides “out of sight.” Thus photographs are no longer static recorders
of a fixed history in which “nothing can change, grow older.” Instead,
photographs represent the truths a viewer chooses to invent. More
than a decade later, in “Postcards,” Atwood describes a photograph
only to comment on its inability to capture the realities of a place.
