THE MACLEAN'S LENS ON CANADA.

TORONTO (Ont.); ONTARIO; CANADA

The "Maclean's" photo archives reveal a country in the making. The magazine's visual record stretches back into the 19th century (born as "The Business Magazine," "Maclean's" celebrates its centenary in 2005), to a time when Canadian city streets were unpaved, and progresses into the 1900s and the days when there was only one hotel (Ottawa's Chateau Laurier) with an indoor swimming pool, and when our hockey idols boarded in local houses. As photo editors at Maclean's, we frequently encounter such extraordinary images in the course of helping to assemble the magazine. We've selected 87 pictures, all collected between 1905 and 1975 (the year "Maclean's" made its transition to a newsmagazine), for an exhibition called The Maclean's Collection: Pictures from a Golden Age, running at Toronto's Mill Street Brewery from May 8 to June 8 as part of Contact, the city's annual photography festival. In all cases they are working images, remnants of day-to-day magazine production in the pre-digital era, and they represent both that process of page layout and design, and our personal, eclectic look at the magazine's visual history.