ELORA – A pair of murals that were slated to become just a memory are getting a second chance due to a local architect and photography lover’s ultra-high quality photos taken of them to donate to the museum.
Two murals on the side of the now closed Elora Cafe at 175 Geddes St. in Downtown Elora would have been lost along with the building as it faces demolition to make way for a four-storey 19-unit apartment building with ground floor commercial space.
The two murals depict local history. One painted in 1982 depicts parts of Elora and its history including the Tooth of Time, the David Street Bridge, the mill and several town founders. The other was painted in 2008 by a Grade 7 class from Elora Public School featuring Salem founder Sam Wissler.
Robert Turner is the principal architect at Fryett Turner Architects, the designers of the new building that made it necessary to demolish 175 Geddes St.
In a phone interview, he explained he had heard the community lamenting the loss of the murals and decided he could do something about it as a photophile — someone who loves photography and cameras.
He ended up taking very high-resolution photos using Fuji chrome film.
“The film I use is five by four inches in size, it’s a sheet of film, and it goes into one of those old fashioned looking cameras that you disappear under a black cloth and focus it manually,” Turner said. “Basically it is entirely analog photography.”
This film had to be developed in Montreal as it is the nearest place that develops film like this and Turner recently received them back.
When he scanned the photos, he found they were 320 megapixels in quality, meaning it captured 320 million pixels. Comparatively, he said a DSLR camera would take 20 to 40 megapixel photos.
“It’s a pretty high resolution of the images … it could almost be printed out half life size and it would look pretty good,” Turner said.
Turner acknowledged Elora is changing very quickly and there is an active heritage group there too. He figured some of the school children who painted the one mural are still in the area and even ran into someone who knew one of the three artists of the older mural while he was taking the photo.
“I thought it was worth preserving because it’s a piece of the history we have here,” Turner said. “It’s still in living memory and I think it’s still worth preserving.”
Turner will be scanning digital copies and donating them to the Wellington County Museum and Archives along with the original film copies.
