Ontario photographer ‘in shock’ after losing millions of photos from van break-in

An Ontario man is picking up the pieces of a lifetime’s work after hard drives containing over a million photos were recently stolen from his van.

For the past decade, Wayne Adam has been travelling around the east coast of Canada, taking pictures of historical sites.

The self-proclaimed history buff said that he decided to go and see all of the Parks Canada National Historic Sites but then realized there was more to be discovered.

“The Parks Canada National Historic Sites is just a fraction of all the national historic sites,” he explained.  There are all these wonderful federal heritage designations, and most of them are in private hands.

“They’ve each got a red federal plaque. And I just said, ‘OK, I’m going to go out and document as many as I can.’”

For the past few years he has been travelling across all corners of the Maritimes, Newfoundland and Labrador to document them.

“I had covered pretty much with a few exceptions, the whole eastern half of the country,” Adam explained.

“And that is what was documented in my pictures. I was hoping to create a series of guidebooks for each province on all the national historic sites and designations.”

But that dream went up in smoke on Sept. 7 in Montreal at around 6 p.m., when he returned to his car after taking pictures of the Christ Church Cathedral and found that items in his van had been moved.

“I’m like, ‘What the hell? Maybe I piled my stuff too high?” he explained as he got to his car which was parked on Aylmer Street next to the Hudson’s Bay store.

“And then I looked — shards of glass. I’m like, no. no. Walked around to the other side. Broken window. Bag gone. Laptops gone. Hard drives gone. Everything but the camera that I had on me.”

He was left to shield his car from the pouring rain which was pouring through the hole in his window.

“Thankfully, it stopped, and I was just in shock,” Adam said. “I just had to comprehend, what have I just lost?

“All that effort, all that work, the things that people will never get to see if I can’t retrieve these items.”

Adam has been living in his van for the last several years as he has pursued his work so the thief made off with a number of important items including his passport, a couple of Macbooks and a camera.

”The three hard drives, though, are the real treasure,” he said. That’s what contains all of my photos.”

Adam said he filed an online report the next day and visited police stations a few times in order to spur them into action.

He said that police were able to obtain footage from the HBC store which showed the thief wearing a hoodie and walking north on Aylmer Street with his bag.

“So far they have not been able to get additional helpful images from other cams,” he said.

Adam also noted that the police are dealing are spread thin as they deal with a large number of these types of incidents every day.

The photographer has also been searching for his missing images since they went missing both on- and offline.

“I have talked to everybody I can think of,” he said, noting that he has talked with people on the street across the city.

“I’ve gone to all the pawnshops I can think of. Electronics shops, repair shops, downtown and beyond. I’ve offered a reward. I’ve made a flier. I’ve posted downtown.”

He also said he has posted on Facebook Marketplace, Kijiji, Craigslist and Reddit in hopes of getting his pictures back.

With Adam living out of his car, he did not have any other place to comfortably leave one of the drives for safekeeping and concerns over costs of backing them up online prevented him from taking that measure.

“I’ve got so many darn pictures. About 1.2 million images over the past 10, 12 years,” he said.

“I thought, you know, to store them and to pay them month to month, I thought it might be expensive.”

It was a measure he considered the night before his car was broken into.

“The universe was telegraphing me something because I had these thoughts the night before that you know, I should take an extra step and protect, you know, these hard drives and maybe move one to a different location,” he recalled. “And sure enough, the next day, bang! Gone.”

While Adam is attempting to return to his craft as he hopes someone finds the cache of images.

“I’m taking pictures even now but part of me wonders ‘why?’” he said. “Part of my heart’s been ripped out with this having happened and I’m just wondering, you know, do I continue?

“But what else do I do? I mean, it’s what I do. It’s part of who I am.”

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