The Jim Ryan Fonds

Big Jim Ryan in action at Swiftsure,  Victoria B.C.

For the last few years at the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives we have been talking about cold storage.  One of our goals is to acquire or build a facility for records and other materials that require cool and cold storage.  On the archives side, this mostly means negatives, both nitrate and acetate, slides and transparencies, prints, Polaroids and motion picture film.  Without appropriate storage, these are at risk to anything from colour fading to complete disintegration.

With over 5 million photographs in the BC Archives alone, this is no small task. In December 2010 Archives staff began the arrangement, description and safe housing of over 100,000 photographs that made up the Jim Ryan fonds in preparation for the eventual move into a cold storage facility. 

Jim Ryan was a well-known Victoria character who settled in Victoria, BC in 1949 and joined the Daily Colonist as a full-time newspaper photographer.  He was fired in late 1953 but given a freelance position.  Jim received a weekly retainer from the Colonist in exchange for first choice of his photographs in the paper.  He also had photograph published in Life, the Vancouver Sun, the Province, Liberty, the Toronto Star Weekly and Maclean's.

In 1955, Jim became a friend of, and official photographer to, Premier W.A.C. Bennett.  He took thousands of photographs of Bennett and in 1980 published a book of them entitled "My Friend, W.A.C. Bennett."  Jim was very successful throughout the 1950's and eventually formed "Ryan Bros. Photo" with his brother, Don.  They handled weddings and portraits as well as news assignments and political work.  They also branched out and made films about Victoria's centennial celebrations in 1962 and BC's centennial celebrations in 1971. 

In 1973, Jim joined the Victorian, a small paper which had a brief boom during a printing strike. He stayed with the paper until it closed in November 1977.  He continued to freelance for other papers and magazines and worked on various books of photographs.  Jim died of cancer on July 4th 1998 in a Victoria hospice.

Three staff members and one intern worked on the two large and complex accessions for seven months. The collection was originally housed in various boxes, with rusty paper clips, degrading elastic bands and acidic envelopes holding negatives. Each box was opened, sorted, counted, placed into new envelopes and information from the original source was transferred. Photographs were arranged according to Jim Ryan’s own filing system and described using our new collections management system.  For a while it did seem we would never be finished but the happy day came at last when we put the final labels on sixty-seven boxes of photographic materials. 

Below are a few samples of some reference scans of a few of our favourites of Jim's images, enjoy!


~ Ember Lundgren, Bev Paty & Katy Hughes

Mother Cecelia of the Good Shepherd animal shelter
Photographer: Jim Ryan

Children enjoying winter play

Photographer: Jim Ryan

“Blond Bombshell” aboard HMCS Saskatchewan

Photographer: Jim Ryan

Chivalry in the 1960’s,
Cook and Fort Streets, Victoria B.C.

Photographer: Jim Ryan

W.A.C Bennett at home in Kelowna, B.C.

Photographer: Jim Ryan

Victorians frolicking in an early spring snow

Photographer: Jim Ryan

Wounded, but still on the job!

Photographer: Jim Ryan

Soue Kee, a local businessman, after he was attacked

Photographer: Jim Ryan

Wheeling into the past...

In honour of Bike to Work Week 2011, here are a few treasures from the BC Archives visual library. All of the originals can be found using the call numbers listed in the captions and the BC Archives search engine. Enjoy!

Worth a thousand words

From the desk of Sean Rodman, Strategic Partnerships Manager at the Royal BC Museum Is this a family photo with a group of aliens? Perhaps a field of cartoon ghosts?

Sometimes pictures from the past aren't very self-explanatory. This photo actually comes from Osoyoos, and was taken in 1943. It's a field of Zucca melons, which can grow to be over 100 pounds in weight! (More about the brief craze for Zucca melon growing can be found here and here.)

This is an example of one of the challenges that museums and archives often face: a photograph may be an accurate reflection of a moment in history. But determining what exactly was going on in that moment can be difficult.

One modern way of overcoming this is through the use of "crowdsourcing", as can be seen on the Flickr Commons site. The Commons shows you the hidden treasures in a range of public photography archives, and uses your input and knowledge to help make these collections even richer.

In the Commons, you aren't meant to be a passive viewer. You can view, tag, and annotate photographs, adding your own knowledge to the broader collection. Here's an example: a picture taken by one of the Royal BC Museum's early staff, William Newcombe, which has been submitted to the Commons by the Smithsonian.

Photographs are worth a thousand words...but sometimes those words are a conversation. Hope you join in!

....and a Happy New Year!

From the desk of Ann ten Cate, Reference Archivist at the Royal BC Museum

Continuing on with my festive theme, I went looking for some seasonal archival photographs which would show us how people celebrated New Year’s in the past. I was amused by this image [C-07336], which was inscribed “New Year’s Eve at Mrs. James Fell’s home.”

Unfortunately, this image came to the Archives more than 50 years ago, and very little information about the photo was collected at the time. We don’t have a date (possibly around 1900?), or the names of the people in the photograph (although I’m pretty sure that Mrs. James Fell must be the dowager at the front). Nonetheless, I think it captures an interesting moment – and one that wasn’t easily documented 110 years ago, as an interior, night-time shot was technically challenging.

It’s also surprising how much extra information we can glean just by studying the image closely. For example, the man on the left is smoking a pipe, and wearing a very smart dressing gown over his clothes to protect them. The gentlemen and ladies appear to be “in their best”, but the household looks fairly modest. The cane-seated chair on the right has seen better days and has holes in the back and seat. Two heavy curtains, used to keep heat downstairs on cold nights, are visible on either side of the staircase. The door to a hallway closet is open, showing a variety of household products – a sight not often documented in family photographs of this, or any, era!

When analyzing photos for content, it is also useful to ask the “Who, What, When, Where and Why” questions so that we understand the context of their creation. In this instance we know why the image was created – to record a celebration, and a gathering of friends and family. We know that all the people in the photo are connected in some way to Mrs. James Fell, and since the photograph probably originated with a family in Victoria I think it’s likely that it was taken inside this house, which is identified as James Frederick Fell’s house on Pandora Avenue in Victoria [D-04044].

We can make an educated guess about the year of the New Year’s photo based on the clothing, and the specific date (December 31) is implied in the title. All of this information “adds value” to the image, and makes it worth keeping.

Can you spot anything else in either photograph that you find noteworthy? Or do you know anything more about this family? Do let us know! You can email me directly at ann.tencate@royalbcmuseum.bc.ca. The more we know about images like this, the more valuable they become as research resources. (And if you print up any of your own pictures of this past New Year’s Eve, remember to label them lightly, and in pencil, with the date, place and names of the people in the photo. Rename and add information to your digital files too. You might save some future archivist or family historian a whole lot of head-scratching if you do!).