Tod Ainslie was just a kid at the time, visiting his father in Binghamton, N.Y., but his memories have remained vivid all these years later.
The two of them would be walking through farm fields and along riverbeds, searching for arrowheads and talking about the War of 1812.
“We took Hogtown, you know,” his American father would say.
For a boy then living north of the border with his Canadian mother, it was all a kind of provocation.
“My back got up,” says Ainslie, who has equally pristine memories of childhood visits to Fort York, which had briefly fallen to the Yanks in 1813. “I always had a sense of roots.”
Now 66, Ainslie has translated that lifelong fascination with history into an arresting series of black and white photographs, each depicting prominent sites from the War of 1812.
All were taken with one of the three pinhole cameras that Ainslie eventually crafted for the project. The primitive devices — essentially containers with a tiny hole on one side, through which light travels onto a sheet of film — were chosen precisely because the images they produce end up looking ancient, almost milky in parts.
“There are some blurs and ghosts going through,” says Ainslie, whose career included a stint teaching art and photography at a Burlington high school.
The aim, after all, was to produce images as if seen through the eyes of the combatants, using a technology that was as true to the era as possible.
So, while the roots of modern photography only date from the 1830s, many of Ainslie’s pictures do look as if they’d been taken just decades after the war.
Depending on the natural light available, the subject and the visual effect Ainslie wanted to achieve, he’d use exposure times ranging from 90 seconds to nearly 20 minutes. The film, in turn, could be positioned 3, 6, or 12 inches away from the pinhole.
For panoramic shots, Ainslie even developed a camera with six pinholes, with film lined up behind each of them.
Over the course of nine years, he ended taking roughly 2,000 photographs of various sites related to the War of 1812, 25 of which were recently bought by the Royal Ontario Museum. A selection of 19 Ainslie images is now showing at Toronto Image Works on Spadina Ave. until Oct. 1.
“It really brings you in touch with your ancestors, and reinforces any interest you had before,” Ainslie says.
When he was photographing one of the bastions at Fort Erie, Ont., for instance, Ainslie spotted two, tiny objects on the ground nearby, one black, one white.
The former turned out to be the flint from a musket, while the latter was a tooth, which Ainslie took to his dentist, who in turn pronounced it very old and likely to have belonged to someone who was just 21 years old at the time.
“That just floored me,” says Ainslie.
“These places are hallowed ground. A lot of people gave everything they had there.”