In the 1885 Canadian Militia Gazette, an anonymous writer proposes that “circumstances alter photographs”. Taking this deceptively simple statement as my starting point, I investigate visual practices of the 1873-74 International Boundary Commission survey by focusing on one scientific photograph, found inside present-day Waterton Lakes National Park, a federally protected area in western Canada. The photographic methods - and circumstances - through which the Boundary Commission construct knowledge are embedded in contemporary visual practices: The photograph “Waterton Lake Alta., from the north shore. 4 miles North of Boundary line and 757 miles West of the Red River (August 1874)”, produced for scientific purposes and associated with objectivity, truth and reality, resonates through the visual practices of the 350,000 tourists, scientists and professional photographers who pass through the park each year. These visitors use photographic practices to re-enact the myth of wilderness in Canadian National Parks, a myth that accrues power through repetition. In this paper I draw on ethnographic research of photographic practices that I undertook between 2002 and 2010 in Waterton to trouble this myth: the idea that national parks are stable, pristine, unchanging spaces that exist outside of the liveliness of the world and outside of human influence. This paper joins the proliferation of new relational ontologies following on the important work of Haraway and Latour that seeks to replace humans within the world, to reveal the endless enmeshment of the human and more-than-human. To focus on the various powerful agents at play in photographs is to refuse the categorization and purification of photographs and parks as images or objects, science or art, nature or culture but to place attention on the process of flow and transformation in the making of a scientific photograph (Ingold 2012). I explore the making of “Waterton Lake”: an assemblage of wind, conversation, humans, technology, sun, all agents with their own uneven force (Bennett 2010). This conception has the power to undo the binaries of nature-culture, subject-object as too simplistic and to provide articulation for what escapes representation in the experience of national parks in Canada.