In 1963, Jean-Louis Anctil purchases a Nikkorex 35 and begins taking slide photos of his environment in Quebec City’s Upper Town. He goes on to take thousands of images that are not only a family archive but also a small-scale representation of Quebec’s modernization and the Quiet Revolution. Born in 1923, he enlists in the RCAF at a young age and flies in four-engine bombers over Europe. After the war, he returns to Quebec City to lay the foundation of a quiet family life along the St. Lawrence River. During the mid-sixties, new social mores begin to appear in Quebec City society driven by outside forces such as U.S. television and magazines, a reforming Catholic church and many new consumer products now available to a growing middle class. This selection of 101 photographs reveals a time in history when change is inescapable and also highlights what makes Quebec City a travel destination: the majestic river, the harbour, Quebec Winter Carnival, and traditional neighbourhoods. Family life is also represented: birthdays, Christmas and New Year’s, winter sports, and summer holidays. Fifty years later, this bygone, seemingly simple era appeals to our emotions and is close to our hearts.

Pierre Anctil is an award-winning author, a member of the Royal Society of Canada since 2012 and a full professor at the Department of History of the University of Ottawa, where he teaches contemporary Canadian history and Canadian Jewish history. He has written at length on the history of Montreal’s Jewish community and on the current debates on cultural pluralism in Canada. His most recent English-language titles are Jacob Isaac Segal: A Montreal Yiddish Poet and His Milieu (2017) and A Reluctant Welcome for Jewish People: Voices in Le Devoir’s Editorials, 1910–1947 (2019), both at the University of Ottawa Press.

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