View of the Great Northern (Union) and Canadian National Stations and Thornton Park - © City of Vancouver Archives
Archives’ historic photos of Vancouver panoramas now online
March 4, 2011 – INFORMATION BULLETIN: The City of Vancouver Archives has brought a piece of our city’s past into the digital age through its recent completion of a photo-scanning project involving a collection of panoramic cityscapes from the early to mid 1900s.
Almost 400 images by photographer W.J. Moore were digitized and are now available for viewing and downloading at vancouver.ca/archives. A selection of higher-resolution images is available on the Archives’ Flickr photo site.
W. J. Moore worked as a commercial photographer from 1911 to 1953. He specialized in panoramic photography of Vancouver, and covered a wide variety of subjects including street scenes, events, buildings, construction, recreational activities, harbours and docks. His panorama shots were taken with a camera that produces negatives eight inches high and up to eight feet long, giving large, richly detailed images.
The digitization of archival images has allowed the Vancouver Archives to share with the public many images and negatives that are too delicate or difficult to display.
Vancouver Archives began its digitization program in 1997 and to date, has scanned an estimated 68,000 images from its collection.
The W.J. Moore photo project was made possible by funding from the British Columbia History Digitization Program at the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, University of British Columbia.