Historical pictures

Amazing photos from the past

Pictures hold something truly special—a speck of time that once was and shall never be again. They’re the closest thing we have to a time machine, allowing us to glimpse through a window of film and into the past.

Construction Workers Lunchtime 1931 St Johns Bridge N. Portland Oregon historic bw photo by Ray Atkeson

Photographer Thomas Annan captured Glasgow between the 1860s and 70s, at a time when the city had transformed and rapidly grown

This was the view as the iconic tower slowly climbed above Paris and straight into history.

In the mid-2000s, historian Anna Pegler-Gordon said that visual media often seems more accessible to her students than the written record. They claimed images make the past seem more accessible, giving concrete shape to a world that sometimes seems intangible. Not to mention the immediacy of the image, which often conveys information more quickly than a primary document written in an unfamiliar, or even a foreign, language. But according to Pegler-Gordon, this immediacy also works well in…

Different perspectives from the historical and modern era that you may have not seen.

Rosie the Riveter, the bomb girl with the bulging biceps, is an iconic image. During World War Two, one million Canadian women worked in factories.

The city's Department of Records has digitized more than 870,000 photos that date back to the mid-1800s taken by city engineers, photographers and police detectives.