Paulette and Gary Boyd walked through the Fredericton Exhibition Centre recently. Pointing at the poster-sized photographs attached to the walls, they are part of a photo exhibit titled Memory Lane.
The photos show life in Fredericton from the 1860s to the early 2010s.
Paulette stopped at a black-and-white photo of the Victoria Health Centre. She pointed up at a window on the left side of the building.
“I can picture him standing at that window,” referring to her husband. She and Gary met at the hospital.
In 1966, on the day of her high school graduation, Paulette — wearing her graduation dress — went to visit her uncle, who was recovering from a heart attack.
“We visited for a while and he said, ‘I’m just going to rest my eyes, why don’t you talk to this nice young man in the next bed. He doesn’t have many visitors.'”
The young man was Gary. He had been hit by a car and was in the hospital for three months.
“She kept coming back to visit her uncle and her uncle would say you can visit that nice young man,” Gary said.
Paulette would visit and bring him cookies. In the fall, she began her nurse training at the hospital and continued to visit Gary.
Today, they have been married for 57 years.
Paulette said many of the photos brought back memories of her life in Fredericton. She’s glad someone took the time to capture it all.
“We didn’t seem to take photographs as much. I don’t think anybody expected things to change so much, or time to go as fast.
John Leroux, manager of collections and exhibitions at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, said he worked with the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick to select the 92 photos from their collection. He wanted to choose lesser-known photographs.
“There would definitely be a couple of dozen in there that no one may have ever seen,” he said.
Leroux printed the photos as large as possible. He wanted visitors to feel as if they were surrounded by the past.
“It’s like you’re looking at a photo album but it’s filling a wall almost like a mural size,” he said. “There’s a mental sense that when you’re in the space, it’s a big space. The walls completely envelop you with these photographs.”
Leroux said he went through thousands of photos to curate the show, but one photo of Blighty Fish and Chips along the river was a special request from his mother.
He hopes that although there have been many changes in the past 175 years, visitors felt a connection to the faces captured in the photos.
“We can often see ourselves and things that really relate to us even in our present day,” he said. “It could be an image from 150 years ago.”
The exhibit formally ended this weekend, but the photos are expected to be displayed for a few more days.
