“The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.”
Elliott Erwitt – Advertising & Documentary Photographer, Filmmaker
From the earliest cameras holding glass plate negatives to modern digital captures on smart phones and mini cameras, photographers tell stories and document lives and nature.
The intrepid explorers who hiked their cumbersome photographic equipment up mountains and across unexplored territories or who toted their pocket cameras along on trips or special activities, all contributed to our ability to visualize and understand much about previous eras. From fashions and family, to streets and buildings in our settlements and towns, photographers help us see it all.
With luck municipal archives like the City of Edmonton Archives will have series of images taken from time to time of main streets and businesses. Amateur photographers will have captured parades, celebrities, and special events like Royal Visits and anniversaries. Sometimes studio photographers will leave their collections of interesting individual and group portraits to an archives which creates a record of members of a community at a particular time. Today photographers are capturing and sharing thousands of images of all kinds.
Researchers and Archivists love photographs. The trick is to collect the images which will help explain who we are today to people in the future.