All the (Canadian) pictures fit to print
Some 25,000 New York Times’ photos of Great White North donated to Ryerson University
Chris Bratty was standing in a Manhattan boiler room in 2007, wondering why he had agreed to visit the New York Times’ basement on a spring afternoon.
But, once he dug into the newspaper’s archival photos of Canada, he was smitten, he said.
“It was just fascinating to see the history of Canada unfold.”
Bratty, a GTA real estate executive, ended up buying the Times’ Canadian photo collection. In the coming months, he will donate the nearly-25,000 images to Ryerson University’s photography collection.
“It’s an incredible improvement of our collection and an incredible resource for studying Canadian history,” said Paul Roth, director of the Ryerson Image Centre.
The photos span nearly the entire 20th Century, from the years leading up to the First World War through the 1990s.
Each frame captures a specific time and place in Canadian history, as seen through an American newspaper’s lens. There’s William Lyon Mackenzie King, the Avro Aero, Mary Pickford, Trudeaumania and so much more.
Bratty said he considered donating the images to the Art Gallery of Ontario or the National Gallery in Ottawa, but the idea of giving them to a university appealed to him.
“It was very educational going through the photos (and) I thought there’s got to be a way this can serve a purpose to inform,” Bratty said. “I thought, ‘Give it to the university and let them expose young minds to it.’ ”
Opened in 2012, the Ryerson Image Centre has, to date, been based primarily around the Black Star collection, over 290,000 black and white photos from the archives of New York-based Black Star photo agency.
Roth called the collection an “extraordinary resource,” which has stocked the Ryerson Image Centre’s exhibitions on everything from U.S. prohibition to the American Civil Rights movement. But Black Star falls a little short on its portrayal of Canada, Roth said.
“We wanted a resource (of Canadian images) that would be equally strong and equally appealing to outside scholars,” he added.
The Ryerson Image Centre will exhibit a selection of the New York Times photos from Sept.13 to Dec.10. After that, the images will be sorted and added to the Centre’s permanent collection, where they can be viewed by appointment by any member of the public.
Titled The Faraway Nearby, it will delve into the “special relationship between an American newspaper and (Canada), this big unruly subject which is too large for any one newspaper or certainly any one exhibition or book to cover,” Roth said.
A handful of Times shots will also be incorporated into the exterior de- sign. Currently, the building’s façade is adorned with Black Star portraits of non-Canadian luminaries like Muhammad Ali, John F. Kennedy and Gloria Steinem.
This spring, they will be replaced with Bratty-donated photos of Pierre Trudeau, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Marshall McLuhan and others — figures who, Roth said, “represent what we think of as the very best of Canadian life and history in the 20th century.”
Bratty said the photos are a glimpse at all that Canada has to be proud of.
“We never toot our own horn in Canada, and when you look at (the photos) you think it’s probably unCanadian to be anything but humble about what we’ve accomplished,” Bratty said. “But we should be proud of the stuff we’ve done . . . There’s just so much there.”