A commercial photographer worked out of a West Coast Canadian city from the late 1950s to the mid-1980s, operating under a variety of studio names advertising services for weddings, portraits, passports, restoration and commercial work. With no heirs, the bulk of the resulting image collection was rescued by friends and subsequently came to the attention of a local gallery; a sample was included in a 1994 exhibition, but the bulk of the archive, containing thousands of unprinted negatives, has yet to be seen. It stands as a rich social and historical document of middle-class urban life, unedited and with few 'final' images, also revealing the processes, client expectations, production methods and obsolete technology of the period. Commercial assignments took the studio out on location to document businesses, parades, nightclubs, boxing matches, countless weddings and beauty contests, though its forte was portraiture and glamour work, usually of attractive young women. This selection, restricted to particular genres and conventional formats, indicates a stylized sensibility and personal vision beneath its commercial and vernacular imperatives.