Above: a view of Toronto's historic landscape [BL: HS85/10/35818]

Team Americas were invited to take part in today's Visual Urbanisms conference in the Library's conference centre and there are few prizes for guessing what we talked about. Picturing Canada may have been completed a few years ago but we still like to show the work to new audiences and think more about what the collection tells us.

Above: history lives on and is performed around us; Toronto streetscape [image by PJH]

With that in mind, the conference was an opportunity to think about the contemporary life of these photographs and how they influence our understanding of the modern city. Crucially, historic images can also directly impact how the urban infrastructure develops, inspiring acts of conservation and building works that speak to a past heritage preserved by the camera's lens.

Above: rest assured, the kittens still made an appearance.

Picturing Canada aimed to open up the Library's Canadian photographs to a new audience by collaborating with Wikimedia UK to release high quality images on a  Public Domain license. The result has been a collection used in historical research, to illustrate Wikipedia articles, furnish urban infrastructure (including a bar in Calgary) and to get people thinking about their local history.

For more about the collection and today's talk you can read the slides by clicking here:

Download Canada by Postcard.

[PJH]