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The photos look north towards downtown, when the Marine Building was the tallest building in the city and there was a big Shell sign on top of the Vancouver Block on Granville near Georgia.

Photo by Henry Tregillas / PNG

The negs were scanned in 2015 by some UBC library and archives students for a “professional experience” program. One of the aerials was accidentally put in backwards, and when we flipped it, we discovered Tregillas was shooting a three-part panorama that could be stitched together.

Many of the colour photos in the cache are setup shots, perhaps because colour film was slower than black and white and was harder to use for news photos.

But as time went on, colour photo technology improved. In June 1962, George Diack was able to shoot some amazing colour photos of a Doukhobor home in the Kootenays that had been set on fire by members of the Sons of Freedom sect.

One of the photos shows a naked Doukhobor woman watching her house burn. It’s quite famous because it was used in a Simma Holt book on the Doukhobors, Terror in the Name of God. But there are four more colour shots that may never have been printed, or seen.

The 91-year-old Diack vividly recounts the photos.

Photo by George Diack / PNG

“She set fire to the (house) and said, ‘Come on inside and get a good picture,’” he said.

“So I went in and it was a complex, like a hotel, (home to) many different families. I went down the corridor and she said, ‘Here! And she flung a door open and I looked in and there were flames on the table, flames on the chesterfield, flames on the curtains. There are flames all over the place, the whole room was on fire.