The Notman Photographic Archives are composed of about 200,000 glass plate negatives, 400,000 prints and hundreds of record books and ledgers produced by the Montreal studio founded by William Notman in 1856 and operated by his sons until 1935. They constitute a rare, largely intact record of a prolific nineteenth-century photography studio operating at a time when the medium was developing into an industrial form of image making. As the repository of hundreds of thousands of portraits, landscape views and cityscapes executed over eighty years, the Notman Photographic Archives bear witness to an evolving Canadian society.
