Rudolph P. Bratty Family Collection Now Available Online
A major piece of Canadian visual history is now open to the public. The Rudolph P. Bratty Family Collection — more than 21,000 press photographs documenting Canadian life throughout the 20th century — has been fully digitized and launched in a new online portal, making it freely accessible to researchers, educators, and the public for the first time.
From Archive to Online Portal
The collection, drawn from the archives of The New York Times, was promised in 2017 by Chris Bratty, President of Land Development and Investments at The Remington Group, to The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University. Spanning political milestones, wartime history, travel photography, and portraits of notable and everyday Canadians, the archive was assembled from the work of Times staff photographers, freelance photojournalists, international wire services, and Canadian government agencies over the course of the century — a rare, wide-angle view of the country as it was seen, and photographed, in the moment.
This year, that archive reached a wider audience than ever before. The Image Centre was awarded a $300,000 grant from the Department of Canadian Heritage to digitize the full collection, including its original captions, tear sheets, and attached ephemera. The project was carried out in partnership with acclaimed Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky and his team, using Burtynsky’s ARKIV360 digitization table to scan the collection at museum-standard quality, with AI-assisted cataloguing applied in both English and French. The result is a searchable, publicly accessible digital home for a piece of the country’s history that had, until now, existed only in print.
A Family Legacy, Rooted in Downtown Markham
For The Remington Group and the Bratty family, this moment builds on a story that began years earlier. In 2018, a curated selection of images from the archive found a home of their own at the newly opened Toronto Marriott Markham Hotel in Downtown Markham. Installed throughout the hotel’s public spaces, each grouping was arranged around a distinct theme — from noteworthy Canadian figures and the country’s regional landscapes to its military history and everyday life — with accompanying plaques noting original publication dates and descriptions, preserving the authentic editorial markings of the prints themselves.
That early exhibition offered guests and visitors to Downtown Markham a first glimpse of the archive’s scope and significance, long before the wider public could access it. With the collection now fully digitized and available online, that story comes full circle: from a promised gift, to a hotel gallery in Markham, to a permanent digital resource for the country it documents.
The Rudolph P. Bratty Family Collection online portal is available through The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University.
