Danielle Strethsa is helping to scan and digitize 10,000 negatives from the Ottawa City Archives.
An Ottawa policeman directs traffic in the middle of a downtown street, accompanied by a large, tame bear named Rosie.
This photograph from April 14, 1954, can be found at the Ottawa City Archives and 10,000 of the collection’s pictures from 1954 and 1955 are scheduled to go online in the spring.
“Photographs are multifaceted interpretations of a moment in time,” says Danielle Shrethsa, a specialist at the archives.
Rosie the bear’s photograph, Shrethsa says, is one of her favourites, and provides a view into everything from fashion, to vehicles, to animal rights in post-war Ottawa.
In a presentation to the Friends of the Ottawa City Archives on recently, Shrethsa explained her task of digitizing 10,000 historic pictures taken by the Andrews-Newton photography company.
City Archivist Paul Henry says pictures from 1954 and 1955 are requested most often by historians and they make a good starting point for digitizing.
“They represent a time of great change in Ottawa,” he says. “There was a lot of growth away from the immediate post-war era.”
He says this growth included the termination of the streetcars in favour of Highway 417, the establishment of the Greenbelt, and the building of national monuments. If the Ottawa archives continue digitizing the collection, Henry says preserving photos from 1956 and 1957 would be the logical next step.
Besides its historic significance, Henry says the artistic value of the collection cannot be overlooked.
“Photography has been an art form ever since it was invented,” he says, “And that includes news photos. They’re artistic expression, and they’re telling a story.”
The Andrews-Newton photography collection contains tens of thousands of photos taken between 1946 and 1993. The company took photos for The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and the Ottawa Citizen, with which they had an exclusive contract until 1959. This means, Shrethsa says, they can give a comprehensive look at what Ottawa looked like in day-to day life – chronicling everything from natural disasters to weddings.
Shrethsa says the Andrews-Newton Digital Access Project, once finished, may function as a model for digitizing more photo collections in Canada.
Her work involves scanning low-resolution photos for the web, high-resolution copies that the public can request, and master copies for preservation.
Photographs, she says, are really only paper and chemicals, and so are a “self-destructing medium.”
The negatives, once scanned, will be placed in cold storage to slow the effects of time and reduce careless handling.
Grant Vogl, the collections manager at the Bytown Museum, says old photos can be extremely helpful to historians.
“A street scene can tell you something as simple as where a store was located, or something as complex as how the city has evolved,” he says. Archived photographs, he adds, offer the opportunity to rediscover the “hidden history” of the city.
Shrethsa says the project will offer an invaluable insight into Ottawa’s history, and she hopes it will open up a discussion about the value of photographic collections and the stories they can tell.