The Photographs of Daniel O'Neill

The Daniel O'Neill Photograph Collection

Clockwise: VPL #84992, #85581, #85155, #85715

"Photography can be a wonderful aide memoire ~ it can evoke feelings and memories about past places and times, both real and imagined. What was it like to live at a particular time? What did people do? What did they see every day? Photos can give us a rich view of ordinary life.

Ever since I was a kid of three or four, I remember looking through my parents' photo albums and wondering about people and places in the past."

Daniel O’Neill was born October 7, 1958 in New Plymouth, New Zealand. He has worked as a travelling salesman for a pharmaceutical company, as Editor of BRMC News, the newsletter of the Border Riders Motorcycle Club, and has spent a number of years as a community AIDS activist. He also spent some time working in the Historical Photographs Department of the Vancouver Public Library where he accessioned the Dominion Photograph Company Collection of Percy Bentley.

Daniel O’Neill is a self-trained photographer who learned by reading books and pamphlets about photography.

"I also learned a great deal from the many photographers who visited the Historical Photograph Section in my time there. I make no claims as to my own ability, but I think that studying photographs is the way to see what works and what doesn't."

The collection includes photographs of O’Neill’s travels through British Columbia, as well as photographs of Vancouver in the 1970s and 1980s, an era not previously covered in the VPL collection. The Daniel O’Neill collection consists of a collection of black and white medium format and 35mm negatives as well as over 800 high resolution digital scans made from his original colour negatives.

The Special Collections Department is scanning Daniel O'Neill's black and white negatives. Digitization of collections is an ongoing activity in the Special Collections Department which assists in preserving VPL's photographs, as well as making them accessible to the public through the Library's online historical photograph collection database. Daniel O'Neill's colour photographs will be the first digitized colour image collection in the database.