This singular photograph has been selected from a picture library of 750,000 prints. The image has been transported here by multiple designated drivers; the photographer, picture editor, archivist, and curator. It represents not the end of the road, but one more stopping point on its onward journey from working press archive to museum study collection. A significant part of the former Globe and Mail photographic library is being donated to the Canadian Photography Institute of the National Gallery of Canada.

The grease pen marking, coupled with the dated, black-and-white print, speaks of newspaper photography and the intervention of editors who have left hand-written traces of decisions made in a pre-digital age.

The photograph was commissioned in 1966 to illustrate the news of the opening of a new secondary highway 807, since re-designated as highway 634, in Northeastern Ontario. It returns to its point of origin, parked on the side of a now-obsolete and soon-to-be-demolished newspaper factory to act as a negotiated sign of something that is both a relic of the past and an enduring symbol of a quintessentially Canadian summer experience: a boat strapped to the roof of a city car driven to the edge of the wilderness.

Presented in partnership with the Canadian Photography Institute of the National Gallery of Canada, The Globe and Mail and the Archive of Modern Conflict, in conjunction with the exhibition Cutline.

Curated by Ellen Treciokas and Roger Hargreaves