The Notman photographic archives

Abstract

Abstract When William Norman opened his photographic studio in a tiny redbrick house on Bleury Street in Montreal in late 1856,1 the 30-year-old immigrant could not have dreamed that this small beginning would one day expand into a vast enterprise spanning four Canadian provinces and six states in the eastern USA.2 Nor could he have known that the business would continue long after his death, and that the firm's production of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs would become the foundation of an archives of international repute and his pictures cherished by millions.