Cities, Towns, Villages, Environs
Photographs by George Hunter
After working as a photojournalist for the Winnipeg Tribune in the early 1940s, George Hunter became a photographer for the National Film Board of Canada. In 1950, he earned his pilot’s licence, bought a small plane, and started his own business. Crossing Canada several times a year, he shot aerial views of cities and towns for Crown corporations and private companies. His images were published in magazines such as Time, Fortune, and National Geographic and reproduced in encyclopedias, textbooks, and atlases.
Hunter’s extensive corpus of images is a unique record of Canadian urban landscapes in the particular socio-economic context of the 1940s through 1970s, a long period of growth in the country. The photographs above are selected from two series, Canada, Cities, Towns, Villages, Environs: Heritage Images and Communities: To House Industrial Workers.
We have 153 photographs by George Hunter in our collection, 151 of which make up the two series mentioned above.