Sun and Province photo trove going public
The Vancouver Sun and Province are donating their collection of photographic negatives to the Vancouver Archives in the largest donation in the history of the civic institution.
The donation of an estimated two million images spanning more than half a century will more than double the archives’ collection of 1.6 million negatives.
The negatives include all photo shoots from the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s, when the papers switched over to digital photography and electronic archiving. There are also many negs from the 1960s, some wonderful images from the 1950s, and a few from the 1940s.
The collection documents every facet of life in Vancouver, from politics to people, entertainment to sports, buildings to cityscapes.
The cache includes Ken Oakes’ dazzling 1960 shot of neon signs on Granville, Deni Eagland’s photos of the Beatles and their fans at Empire Stadium in 1964 and a famous Ralph Bower pic of Muhammad Ali pummelling George Chuvalo at the Pacific Coliseum in 1972.
There is an iconic George Diack photo of a naked Doukhobor woman watching her house burn after she set it on fire during a protest in the Kootenays in 1962, a treasure trove of aerial photos of Vancouver and British Columbia that Bill Dennett took in the 1950s, and Ian Lindsay’s stark black-and-white portrait of Andy Warhol from 1976 that seems to capture every single pore on his face.
Brian Kent documented By Bailey scoring the first touchdown in B.C. Lions history on Aug. 28, 1954. Colin Price took a marvellous photo of a Habitat building painted in a Haida motif by the artist Bill Reid as it was being torn down in 1978. Roy LeBlanc photographed legendary strongman Doug Hepburn lifting a half-dozen Vancouver Canucks on his back at the Forum in 1954.
Many images have historic importance, such as a file of 1942 negatives documenting Japanese internment camps in the Interior during the Second World War. Others are just cool, like a Dan Scott photo of workers removing the streetcar tracks in the 200 block of East Georgia in Chinatown in 1962.
“The Vancouver Sun and Province have a rich history of photojournalism that continues to this day,” said the Sun and Province’s editor, Harold Munro.
“Many of the iconic images of Vancouver were captured by our amazingly talented photographers. I’m proud that our gift to the Vancouver archives will make these treasured photos more easily accessible to the public.”
The Sun and Province moved to the Broadway Tech Park last May when their 20-year lease downtown expired. Storage space for the collection became an issue, as did the need to preserve the images in perpetuity in a highly specialized, temperature-controlled environment. The Sun and Province approached the archives about donating the collection. Terms of the donation took several months to complete, in negotiations between the newspaper editors, Postmedia Network Inc. (which owns the papers) and city archivist Heather Gordon.
“We’re very happy that Postmedia has agreed to donate the negatives,” Gordon said. “Here, they will be preserved for future generations.”
Archives conservators will review the collection and those negatives considered to be at-risk will be stored in the archives’ frozen storage vault.
Gordon cautioned that the public shouldn’t expect to walk into the archives next week and be able to access the Sun and Province negatives — it will take a while to process the collection.
“We’re going to do our best to get the descriptions up in a timely fashion, and then we will tackle digitization project by project,” Gordon said. She expects the first photos in the donated collection will be available to the public in 2019.
The archives has 130,000 scans available for viewing and downloading on its website, which is about eight per cent of its collection. Scans are done when funding comes in — this year the archives hopes to add another 20,000 images online.
Postmedia will retain the copyright to the images. The negatives being donated can be accessed by the public, and downloaded once they have been scanned. The donation is not intended to make the images available for commercial use; in the case of such requests, permissions from Postmedia would be required and fees would apply.
The Sun and Province retain the newspapers’ print archives, which is where many of the papers’ oldest images are.
Countless hours preparing for the transfer were logged by newspaper librarians Carolyn Soltau and Sandra Boutilier.
“This is bigger than us, bigger than anyone currently housing the archive,” said Boutilier, who recently took a buyout from the papers.
“It’s the history of the city. It’s a great gift to the people of Vancouver.”
Soltau, the last of generations of press librarians, felt it was important that the collection remain in Vancouver.
“That was one of our considerations — should they go to the provincial archives in Victoria, the national archives in Ottawa or the Vancouver Archives?” Soltau said.
“We think they should stay in this city because they have local relevance. It is a unique collection, a micro-history of Vancouver. You never know what you’re going to find. It’s little slices of life — it’s not just politics and government. It’s fashions, neighbourhoods, nightclubs and how people lived.”
This isn’t the first time the Sun and Province have donated images to the City of Vancouver Archives, which is located at 1150 Chestnut in Kitsilano.
The archives has about 500 prints and 9,000 negatives from The Sun that were donated in the 1960s, probably when The Sun moved from the Sun Tower to 2250 Granville in 1965-66. The Vancouver Public Library has many photos and negatives from the same era that were donated by The Province, including a gorgeous Bill Cunningham photo of Marilyn Monroe at the Vancouver airport.