Grief in archives: Handling the collection of photographer, Bruce RowlesGrief in archives: Handling the collection of photographer, Bruce Rowles
By Kat Hodgson
Featured Image: Bruce’s photo of his light table setup to view his slides.
Before beginning my internship at the Whistler Museum, I had never visited the town before. In October 2025, I arrived as an outsider. I also arrived grieving.
The day before I moved, my grandfather suddenly passed away, marking the fourth loss in my family in two years. As I settled into this unfamiliar place, the nerves and excitement that come with a new job and community were tinged with the constant weight of grief.
This mindset shaped how I approached the project of organizing the Bruce Rowles Collection. This collection of 35mm slides, documents, posters, and much more was generously donated by the family of Bruce Rowles in batches from 2024 to 2026. Comprising over 70,000 slides, it is now the largest photographic collection in the Museum’s archives. Working with it offered me the chance to get to know Whistler as Bruce saw it, while also viewing glimpses of the life behind the camera.
Bruce Rowles, often called Rowlesy by friends and family, was a prolific photographer and artist who spent more than three decades in Whistler. His photographs captured action-filled competitions and wild nightlife scenes, but also contained quieter moments, such as vast landscapes, meals and trips with friends, or photos of plants and insects that he’d found beautiful. Some slides were labelled with quips that let his personality shine through, hinting at the humour and creativity that guided his work.
For me, the most striking materials in this vast collection are three binders labelled “Lost Friends”. They contain portraits, sports shots, and candid photographs of individuals Bruce had known and later mourned. Nearly every slide is labelled with names and locations, already arranged in archival-safe sleeves as an act of remembrance as much as documentation. In assembling these binders, Bruce preserved not only the images of these people, but also the memories and relationships he had with each of them.
Working with these materials, I came to understand the collection through the lens of grief, both my own and that which he was expressing in each carefully arranged page. Scholars have described this response as “empathic grief”: the emotional weight archivists may feel when encountering records shaped by loss. All records are connected to lives, and often to those who are no longer with us. That persistent connection can make it difficult not to recognize and react to the emotions held in records, requiring the archivist to carry them throughout their work, sometimes even feeling them alongside their creators.
Bruce’s collection both captures and expresses several positive emotions – celebration, humour, excitement, and curiosity, to name a few – while also making space for absence. Over the past six months, I’ve felt all of them, allowing me to see the world through Bruce’s lens. His careful remembrance of others became, unexpectedly, a reminder that grief is part of the greater act of loving someone. In the midst of my own losses, that perspective helped shift my own grief from being purely painful into something that could also hold gratitude for the privilege of getting to carry memory forward.
Bruce wanted to ensure his life’s work would be remembered and appreciated. A selection of his photography will be exhibited at the Whistler Museum from April 24th to June 14th.
Kat Hodgson was the Assistant Archivist at the Whistler Museum this winter through the Young Canada Works in Heritage Organizations (YCWHO) program.
