The largeness of Canadian Photographs – both its physical largeness and its largeness of vision – is deliberate, and even polemical. It goes beyond an obvious mimicry of our nation’s vast geography to stake a claim on representing our not-always-happy past and our not-always-bright future. It is an Old White European man’s vision, but it has the particular uninvolved self-awareness that can come of age and does come only with age. Both glimpses of James that we are permitted in the book’s early pages show him reflected in shop windows that display historical dioramas. His face, already largely obscured by the camera held to his eye, virtually merges into a display of miscellaneous emblems of national identity. He has made a book about Canada that eschews easy sentiment and landscape photography.

Nature appears in these photographs incidentally or at a remove – in a mural or a billboard, for example, or in a snapshot pasted on a jail-cell wall. Nothing is pristine: culture comes before nature. Shops are shuttered, buildings are abandoned, houses look quaintly dated, and streets are worn and vacant. Industry has fled to parts unknown. Lachine Canal, Montreal, QC, 2023 shows successive generations of transportation infrastructure piled one upon another, with layers of road and canal, railroad, and expressway intersecting each other and impinging on the form of adjacent buildings. The historical link by water to New York that once made Montreal the great Canadian city is so thoroughly obsolete that it now seems like an artefact of an ancient culture. The city awaits refurbishment in the next round of industrial nostalgia, and it hardly seems to matter whether it becomes a museum or condominiums.

James is noted for his gimlet-eyed views of vacant urban scenes both old and new, but in this book there are just as many photographs that teem with people in social situations. Most simply show pedestrians on sidewalks, casually loitering in plazas, or waiting about, but others show groups celebrating graduations, joining in processions, parades, rallies and demonstrations, and attending fairs. The First Warm Day of the Year, Dundas Square, Toronto, ON, 2012 stands out as one of James’s greatest pictures of public space. The raked scene is as formally coherent as an Old Master tableau; every figure is fully legible and every cluster is elegantly arranged, and they interact with the delicate eloquence of an allegory. There is a pervasive sense that each person must represent a social type in an elaborate theatrical fete; the three young women on the left, for example, are so nearly identically dressed and coiffed that they seem to belong to some obscure subculture; they even move as one. A supine figure draped across the steps just right of centre, a slim, pale young man dressed in grey whose attire seems to parody a businessman’s, inspires the uncanny thought that he might be an apparition. The whole serene youthful ensemble could have been cast by a social service agency to display the happy outcome of the Canadian policy of multiculturalism. The moment is so perfect that it is difficult to accept that it is not contrived. The aim is undoubtedly far from James’s mind, but the picture effectively refutes Jeff Wall’s macabre Vampire’s Picnic (1991), both in the generous optimism of its vision of society and in the confident simplicity of its artistic method.

The art in a book of photographs is not exclusive to its pictures but consists also of their juxtaposition and sequence. Canadian Photographs begins and ends with images that are like heterogeneous parentheses. The first one in the book, From the Train, Fraser Valley, BC, 2019 is the view out of the back of the final, empty carriage of a train. The car is furnished with vintage blue lounge chairs, decorated with a potted orchid and a bowl of fruit, and has an impressive stainless steel door flanked by panoramic windows set at angles to enhance the view. The train stands still, and the rails it must sit on are nowhere visible outside, nor is there any sign of the slowly fading scar that the railway carved across the country. The end piece, Rivière-du-Loup, QC, 2012, is a starkly artless picture of a colossal, crudely sculpted, and garishly painted head of the sort that once appeared at scenic lookouts and roadside attractions – in this case, alongside the St. Lawrence River. It is a caricature of a man who might now be politely called a member of the First Nations, but who at the time the sculpture was erected was surely described as an Indian Brave.

James has evidently chosen this image to acknowledge the people who were displaced by Canada’s colonization, but also to record the gross indignity of past public commemorations of Indigenous peoples made by the aggressors. Its days must be numbered. It is a deliberately embarrassing conclusion to the book, undoubtedly selected in humbling recognition of the unfinished project of reconciliation. The first picture memorializes the role of the national rail system in uniting the country and in permitting James to survey it, alerting the viewer to the many pictures from trains to follow. It is, however, a distinctly recessional photograph that prepares the reader for a dizzying, retrospective vision of the country slipping into the distance and vanishing from view. It is tempting to imagine opening the train’s rear door and peering out into that space; the magical circularity of the book format makes it feel like it might just open onto the face of the Indian Brave, so intently does he gaze back upon the disaster he witnesses.