Product recommendations- City of Sydney Photo Archives

What you young people don’t know about our city!

This all started when we were trying to capitalise from the Black Friday sales and score ourselves some discounted wall art,. After our renovations, we threw out the old artworks which graced our walls (which came with the apartment as it used to be a hotel), and we wanted to replace it with artwork which represented us! Us being two youngish people who live in the CBD of Sydney, so we wanted images which reflected city living and our beautiful harbour city! But unfortunately, with art, my wife and I just couldn’t agree on anything! The ones which I chose were too touristy (dead centre colour shots of Sydney Harbour with the Opera House and Harbour Bridge featured prominently), while my wife’s choices were too abstract (Black & White drone shots of the Opera House from above, so it looked like a white blob surrounded by inky blackness). So, we decided to just give up on trying to agree on something before the sales ended, as why pay around $500 per piece, if one of us weren’t happy with the end outcome?

But then I was thinking, is there a compromise here? We both wanted images of our beloved city, but we didn’t want it to look like a glossy touristy postcard, while we also wanted something which looked a bit arty, a conversation starter when people see it for the first time. So, my mind went back to 25 years ago, when I was still sighted and my parents used to have a shop in the Queen Victoria Building (QVB), and in those days in the stairwells they used to have large, framed images of the QVB from back in the early 1900s, when men had huge walrus mustaches and women had huge, hooped skirts. And I thought that would be pretty cool, if we could find historical images of our favourite haunts (Darling Harbour, George street, Chinatown etc.), but in black & white! Or even more modern images, which captured some iconic moments from our city’s recent past, taken from angles we ourselves wouldn’t be able to achieve like an aerial view of the new year fireworks or a deserted George street during the Covid19 lockdowns.

And the perfect resource for this was the City of Sydney Photo Archive , and since finding this public resource I’ve been geeking out so hard over all of their collections! At first I was just compiling a list of potential images which we could use as our two framed A2 images, but now I’m just collecting images to show my wife as I just want to share with her these images that captured a place we’re familiar with, but from a time we’re not.

My collections which I’m most excited about are images of Darling Harbour during the 1988 Bicentennial celebrations (the first clear memories I’ve had from my childhood – I was 5 then); images of the Harbour Bridge while it was under construction in the 1930s (now that’s a different view of our iconic Harbour Bridge); images of Chinatown from the 80s (before either of us were born); or photos of the QVB from the 1940s with traffic moving along side it (I wonder what type of traffic that may be, cars? Or Trams?). And I say, I wonder…… Because I haven’t actually seen any of these images, because I’m blind. But thank goodness, someone in the City of Sydney Archive department painstakingly labelled each image, with quite descriptive descriptions of what each image depicts, so just reading the titles alone I could almost imagine what the photo might look like. So, now I’ve got over 30 links to images, and waiting for a chance to sit down with my wife so we can go through them together and she can describe them to me and hopefully we can use one or two of these images as our statement art pieces. I just hope she finds this as fascinating as I do!

The one pic which I did show her the other night, was an image of the Chinatown gates on Dixon street from 1980, and I asked her if she could tell that the image was from a by-gone era? And she said, yes, as the photo quality was crap, and it was all pixelated. Now, that can’t be good, if we’re intending to blow it up to an A2 size…….. But here steps in Artificial Intelligence! I was chatting to a colleague about this and was telling him I was wondering if there was an AI tool out there which could enhance image quality, and within a minute he sent me a link to a free AI tool SupaRes        , we haven’t had a chance to test it out yet, but that would be so awesome if it could enhance these super old images which have just been scanned into a computer from physical photos.

And let’s just say, if we could eventually agree on 2 images which we both like and the image enhancement does work, then how should we go about printing it and framing them? And from our initial Black Friday research, I think we like the idea of printing on Canvas rather than paper, as even on high-quality print paper, it does feel too much like just framing up a $12 poster which you had as a kid. And checking out what’s out there in terms of printers, Canvas Factory seemed promising, although a print at the size we want it to be, was still going to cost upwards of $300. So, this entire exercise isn’t turning out to be much of a cash savings, when compared to purchasing prints from a renowned photographer, but I guess it’s all about the process of getting there!

So, if you too are thinking of decorating your walls with some conversation starting pieces, or if you’re a bit of a history buff and want to check out Sydney like you’ve never seen her before! Spend some time at the City of Sydney’s digital Photo Archive, you youngins might just learn a thing or two about our beloved city!