One of the tasks of the photographer working for the Western Cape Archives and Records Service is to capture images of contemporary events, buildings, the evolving urban landscape and life in Cape Town. The Digital Collection follows the CA (Cape Archives) Collection (black and white photographs).

The AG (General) Collection contains 19 000 photographs and were donated to the Cape Archives by various donors over the years.
These photographs include portraits of individuals, families, buildings, towns, transport, nature, war, etc.

Ray Ryan was a well-known Cape photographer and the 1078 photographs in his collection deals mostly with historical houses and buildings, churches, nature, mountain passes, monuments and statues, etc. He was also an instructor at the Ruth Prowse School of Art and his particular focus was the architecture of the Western Cape. In his book 'Beautiful Homesteads of the Western Cape' (1972) his enthusiasm for our endemic architecture may be seen.

Malcolm Cobern was the photographer of the Cape Archives during the 1970’s. Much of the photographs in the CA Collection were taken by him. The photographs, slides and negatives in the Coburn Collection were donated to the archives in 2003 by his widow.
1 – 599 colour slides: Cape Town buildings and streets 1960s – 1990s
600 – 1555 black and white negatives: Train stations; trains; Copper Railway and mines in Namaqualand; towns and caravan parks in Namaqualand, West Coast, Karoo and Namibia; museums; ships; battlefields; and trains and railways in German South West Africa (Namibia).

Ds Henry Charles Hopkins (Heidelberg, 3 April 1918 - Cape Town, 20 November 1992), a Dutch Reformed Church minister and archivist, collected the photographs and negatives, mostly portraits of individuals and families taken during the late 1800's. The collection was donated to the archives in 1994