Archivist Jim Wolf's Royal City (Heritage $39.95) concentrates on resident professional photographers from 1858 to 1960.

A New Westminster Album (Dundurn $29.99) by Gavin Hainsworth and Katherine Freund-Hainsworth has a broader, folksy mandate.

But both books include the famous "Wait For Me, Daddy"; photograph taken on Eighth Street by Daily Province photographer Claude Dettloff-the one with five-year-old Warren Bernard reaching for his father's hand, running alongside a long column of soldiers, as his father, in uniform, reaches back.

Selected by Life magazine as "Picture of the Week"; in 1940, this iconic image ranks with the explosion of Ripple Rock, Malcolm Lowry with his gin bottle and Bannister/Landy's Miracle Mile as one the most-seen photos from B.C. But that's where similarities between the two volumes end.

For Royal City, Wolf reproduces the hitherto unheralded works of pioneers Frances George Claudet (son of eminent photographer Antoine Claudet), as well as F. Dally, filmmaker Hugh Norman Lidster, P.I. Okamura, Stephen Joseph Thompson, David Roby Judkins and others. Works by John Vanderpant and Horace G. Cox, both subjects of previous books, are also included.

Of these men, Paul Louis Okamura, originally named Tsunenojo Oyama, has perhaps the most remarkable storyline. Born in Tokyo in 1865, he was the second son of the last samurai in the Emperor's court. To avoid conscription, he was adopted into the Okamura family.

At age 26 he came to New Westminster and met Oblate Augustine Dontenwill who employed him as a Professor of Drawing for his St. Louis College and also St. Ann's Academy. Oyama converted to Catholicism and supplemented his income by drawing oil and crayon portraits based on photographs. He opened his first photography studio from his home on Royal Avenue in 1902 and remained working as a photographer until his death at age 72 in New Westminster.

[BCBW 2006] Album 1-55002-548-1; Royal City 1-894384-84-9