Canberra Museum and Gallery's latest exhibition has been, in a sense, more than 100 years in the making.
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It's quite a saga.
In 2013, the Fairfax Media Archive - a collection of press photographs shot for Fairfax publications between 1913 and 1994 - was sent in its entirety to the US to be digitised by a company in Arkansas.
Partway through the process, the company was liquidated and the archive sat in limbo in a warehouse.
The images ended up in the Duncan Miller Gallery in California, which contacted Australian institutions as it sought to return the invaluable collection to its home country.
Several institutions welcomed the images including the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House, the Don Bradman Museum - and CMAG.
In 2018, CMAG acquired 3560 of the gelatin silver prints, all relevant to Canberra.
Staff digitised, accessioned and catalogued them during the COVID lockdown.
More than 150 of those images will be on display in Capturing Canberra: CMAG's Press Photography.
This is one place where history really is black and white.
"It's the pre-colour era, pre-digital," CMAG social history senior curator Hannah Paddon says. But there were plenty of changes. The glass plates used in photography were replaced by slide films in the 1930s and in 1963 the Nikon F 35mm camera, which was to become a favourite of professional photographers, was introduced.
The exhibition tells stories large and small of Canberra as well as documenting the way press photography changed over eight decades.
Many of the images in the exhibition were taken by photographers for The Canberra Times, which was acquired by Fairfax in 1964.
The photos - arranged with the themes of Early Canberra, Building Canberra, Politics, Parliament and Public Servants, Science and Technology, Activism, Captivating Images, Disaster and Leisure and Tourism - bring to life much of the history, character and culture of the ACT during most of the 20th century.
Paddon says the photographs document the history of Canberra during a major period of development and growth.
They cover everything from major events such as the naming of Canberra in 1913 to then-new notable buildings such as the Academy of Science (nicknamed the Martian Embassy) and Black Mountain Tower as well as the construction of Lake Burley Griffin.
"A radiation scare at ANU in 1960 was featured on five different pages of The Canberra Times," Paddon says.
What Paddon calls "the three Ps" associated with Canberra - politics, parliament and the public service - are well represented.
But there are also images of people simply enjoying themselves, such as one depicting bathers at the Molonglo River.
"For me, they show the breadth and depth of the stories about Canberra, its people and places," Paddon says.
"There's a local scale and a national scale."
Sometimes there's also an international scale, or even bigger: seeing Tidbinbilla Observation Tracking Station (Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex) in 1965 is a reminder of Australia's contribution to the first moon landing.
CMAG's exhibitions and collections assistant director Rebecca Richards says the show is "a great nostalgia trip for Canberrans and it also shows the evolution of press photography".
The photographers whose work is featured in Capturing Canberra might have had to develop their images in a motel bathroom and transmit them via telephone to the newspaper office, Richards says.
"Now, everyone with a mobile phone is potentially a press photographer."
Richards says the most memorable images for her are those of activism and protest - including nuclear disarmament, women's rights and Vietnam - indicative of Canberra's prominence as a place of political debate and demonstration.
Graham Tidy worked in Adelaide for 18 years before coming to Canberra. During most of his 27 years at The Canberra Times he was chief photographer. Some of his images are in the exhibition as well as pieces of the equipment he used while shooting pictures, often clicking dozens of times to capture the ideal shot for a story.
"There were some big ones," he says.
In 1989, his first year in Canberra, he took photographs of a memorial service for the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing.
The same year, Rosemary Follett became the ACT's first chief minister when self-government was introduced and the Canberra Raiders won their first grand final.
And Tidy was there to capture these and many other memorable events on film.
As well as the images - some blown up in size for greater impact - the exhibition also has a darkroom to show how negatives were developed into photographs, a newsroom where budding journalists can use a typewriter to write a breaking news story and caption a press photograph.
A Capturing Canberra photo competition will provide secondary school students with the opportunity to shoot their own images.
There are audio recording of photojournalists, including Tidy, talking about their careers and experiences and a display of vintage press cameras including Graflex, Thornton-Pickard, Leica and Nikon models.
CMAG is seeking more information about the images, including the names of many of the photographers who worked, tirelessly and anonymously, on staff or as freelancers, to produce them.
If you can help, please email cmag@act.gov.au.
Capturing Canberra: CMAG's Press Photography Collection is on Canberra Museum and Gallery from July 8 until January 28, 2024. Admission is free. See: cmag.com.au.
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