You can see more Ruddy photographs in the E. L. Ruddy Company collection at the City of Toronto Archives. It contains 9,558 black and white prints, 152 cyanotype prints, and 3,540 colour prints — 13,250 photographs total — taken by the company in its various forms between 1909 and 1968.
The vast majority of the images document the company’s outdoor advertisements — signs, posters, billboards, and neon signs — and also, conveniently, the buildings and streets around them.
The collection is also a fascinating record of how businesses and their sales tactics changed through the central chunk of the 20th century. There’s a record of everything from ads for the Parkdale Roller Rink and Quaker Oats to posters for Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
A small percentage of the images can be viewed online at the City of Toronto Archives website.
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