Notman Photographic Archives added to UNESCO Memory of the World International Register

Ottawa, May 13, 2025 – At its 221st Executive Board session, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has inscribed the Notman Photographic Archives on the Memory of the World International Register. The register serves to safeguard and promote access to documentary heritage of global significance: archives that chronicle the history of the world and the heritage of humanity.

The Notman Photographic Archives, preserved at the McCord Stewart Museum in Montreal, consist of 200,000 glass plate negatives, 400,000 prints and hundreds of record books and ledgers produced by the Montreal Notman studio between 1856 and 1935. This vast collection includes hundreds of thousands of individual and group portraits that demonstrate the unique aesthetic and innovations William Notman brought to portrait photography, earning him an international reputation as the most prominent Canadian photographer of his era. The Notman studio pioneered several experimental techniques, including using magnesium to create an early form of flash photography, printing photographs on pages with letterpress text, and large composite photographs made by combining different photographs into a larger image.

At its height, the Notman studio employed almost sixty people, including many women. The studio’s photographers, in addition to documenting Montreal’s development into a major urban centre, were sent across the country to capture cityscapes, landscapes, and major development projects such as the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The images of majestic mountains, lakeshore living, industrial and port workers, Indigenous communities, and urban development were sold as souvenir prints to locals and tourists and widely circulated in magazines and books such as The Canadian Handbook and Tourist’s Guide (1866), contributing to shaping national and international notions of Canada both pre and post Confederation.

The McCord Stewart Museum facilitates public engagement with the collection through its exhibitions and by making many images from the collection accessible online. Among other initiatives, its artist-in-residence program invites critical analysis of its collections, including the Notman Photographic Archives. In that context, contemporary artists Marisa Portolese, Kent Monkman, and Michaëlle Sergille are among those to have explored the Notman studio’s output, focusing on representations of women, of Indigenous peoples, and how issues of race and identity are reflected in the studio’s indexing system. This exploration has become the basis for their own original work. The museum’s current exhibition Pounding the Pavement: Montreal Street Photography, on until 26 October 2025, includes six Notman works.

“The vast number of studio portraits captured and methodically catalogued by Notman are invaluable documentation of 19th century Canadian society. He photographed not only the white business and political elite as might be expected, but also artists, sports clubs, tradesmen, Black railway porters, nannies, and former slaves to create an important historical record of Canadian multicultural society. I am pleased that the inscription of the Notman Photographic Archives on the Canada Memory of the World Register in 2019 served as a stepping-stone to this international recognition.”
– Yves-Gérard Méhou-Loko, Secretary General, Canadian Commission for UNESCO

“The Notman Photographic Archives, the rare holdings of one of North America’s most prolific photographic studios, provide a wealth of remarkable information on the technological and commercial innovations of its founder William Notman and his successors, the role of images in the construction of individual and collective identity, and the development of Canada between 1856 and 1935. The inclusion of this invaluable documentary heritage on UNESCO’s Memory of the World International Register is an honour for the McCord Stewart Museum, which has been its custodian since 1956 and is actively involved in its dissemination, notably on the web, in publications and in exhibitions.”
– Anne Eschapasse, President and Chief Executive Officer, McCord Stewart Museum

“The Notman Photographic Archives are endlessly fascinating, as evidenced by the many contemporary artists who research its visual content and use it as source material in their own work. The photographs provide artists with a tool through which to engage in a critical dialogue with the past.” – Zoë Tousignant, Curator, Photography, McCord Stewart Museum

“What researchers from around the world appreciate about the Notman Photographic Archives is that the whole scope of the Montreal studio is available for study: the plates, but also the record books that facilitated return business and reprints, and today tell us who these clients were and what they wanted. Notman and his staff looked to the future, as did their descendants who kept these vast records together. As I research the history of photography in Canada, I am always astonished at this prodigious act of memory, as it informs us of the history of Montreal and Canada as a whole, but also shows clearly how photography was understood in its essential nature as an industrial product that could also be the mortar of nation-building.”
– Martha Langford, FRSC, Distinguished University Research Professor, Department of Art History / Research Chair and Director, Gail and Stephen A Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, Concordia University