Get out those shoeboxes; Beaver wants readers' historical snapshots

It's not that unusual for magazines to have photo contests, but retrospective ones -- that's not so usual. The Beaver, Canada's National History magazine, is asking people to get out their albums and rummage through those shoeboxes to illustrate that they were a "witness to history". The contest ends June 10th.

“We were interested in providing a breadth of perspective on how history is recorded photographically by showing readers the history as it is marked by those of us on the other side of the professional lens,” explained Mark Reid, editor of The Beaver magazine.

“We’re well aware that some of the best visual evidence of Canada’s more recent past is likely to come from the letters, photographs, and other keepsakes of individual Canadians that are passed down from one generation to the next and we wanted to find a space in the magazine to draw attention to the value and importance of those collections.”

Winners will get one of three Olympus digital cameras and have their photograph published in the August/September 2008 issue of The Beaver magazine as part of a special feature called “The Photographs That Changed Canada” as selected by a panel of Canada’s top photo editors. Entry in the contest is free and more information is available at the magazine's website.