Museum Piece

In January 1967, Yousuf Karsh photographed Marshall McLuhan inside the Royal Ontario Museum’s recently opened hall of invertebrate fossils. In the portrait, McLuhan sits before a bank of telephones mounted on a dimly lit wall resembling a seabed, rakishly holding the camera’s gaze, his smile teasing some tantalizing secret. The innovative exhibition offered visitors touch-friendly facsimiles, sand underfoot, recorded sounds, and the smell of the ocean. It was acclaimed in the press as an example of how McLuhan’s ideas about sensory engagement could shape the future of museums. He may have been the poster boy, but the architect behind the new paleontology wing was his lesser-known collaborator, Harley Parker.

That Parker, who led design and installation at the ROM for ten years, was never photographed in his own exhibition is an injustice reflective of how he was viewed in relation to McLuhan (the New York Times called him a “disciple”). Parker was a man of...