Almost 40,000 photographs of Dundee, cataloguing the city’s changing image from the 1950s through to the 1990s, have been preserved for future generations.
The project to safeguard and document the photos, entitled A City in Transition: A Photographic Record of the Second Half of the 20th Century, has just been completed and the results handed over to Lord Provost John Letford at the city chambers on Wednesday.
Teams of volunteers, coordinated by Dundee Civic Trust in conjunction with the Tayside Family History Society, spent hours putting the thousands of negatives and transparencies on a database.
The unique photographic record is of a period during which the city underwent some of the most radical changes in its history, and contains a wide variety of images, including architectural recording, street scenes and events.
The locations of many of the buildings pictured were unknown, and many of the buildings photographed have since been demolished, yet, project officials say, they constitute an important and irreplaceable record of Dundee during the second half of the 20th century.
Some of them are the last known images of particular areas prior to their demolition, and in some cases they are the only known images.
Jack Searle of Dundee Civic Trust handed over the photos to the lord provost, while the original film stock was passed to the city archives for long-term storage.
Mr Searle said: ”It’s been a long project a record we’ve curated which future generations will find both interesting and useful.
”It was an enormous task. There are almost 40,000 images and it was a unique resource of negatives and slides that needed dealing with.
”Most of the images came from the city council, many were planning pictures which were surplus to requirements, but we felt it was a historic record that required documenting.”
Dundee Civic Trust and Tay Valley Family History Society were determined to ensure the unique collection was made accessible to future generations and put together a project costing some £20,000, with assistance from the National Lottery Fund.
They then put together teams of volunteers to digitise and identify some 8,923 black-and-white negatives, 28,336 colour negatives and 17,245 colour transparencies dating from the period 1950 to 1990.
Copies of the database hard disc drives were presented to the lord provost for handing over to the city archivist and the local history section of Dundee Central Library, which has agreed to make the database available to the public in the near future.
In the meantime, you can browse old photos of Dundee at the Dundee Photopolis site.