My Dad, the Young Photographer

I've had this monstrous project looming over my head. Well, maybe not looming, because it's not a scary evil project. Just a long-overdue one. And it's big. VERY big.

I have not put pictures in photo albums (with the exception of small albums of my kids' photo shoots when we go to the zoo) since, oh, before Bill and I started dating. Which is going on eleven years ago. Actually, since, oh, since my sister's son - her firstborn - was born. So that's fifteen and a half (sorry, Mere) years ago. So you may or may not be able to imagine the tons and tons of photos throughout the house, just sitting in their envelopes, chatting with their negatives, waiting patiently for me to get my act together and put them some place where people (including myself) could actually sit and look at them from time to time.

And now that I've gone digital, which is going on...wow, two years this July...there are also all sorts of images in my laptop and the external hard drive I bought JUST SO I'D HAVE SOMEWHERE TO STORE THE PICTURES BECAUSE MY LAPTOP IS CONSTANTLY FULL that no one looks at but me because I don't print enough of them or upload to flickr on a regular enough basis, because I am disorganized or lazy or something.

Oh, and in addition to the pictures in all their envelopes, there is a good-sized box full of a huge melange of pictures and negatives that were caught in the flood in our basement in August of 2003. Yes. Four and a half years ago. There were pictures down near the floor - a box of them or something - oh, yes, I think I had begun to attempt to try to think about to hope to organize them back THEN. And they got wet along with anything else on or close to the floor. So I spent a bunch of that afternoon/evening laying out all those pictures on the furniture and floor in the living room and our bedroom, and fortunately they really didn't get too badly damaged...but they did get totally mixed together.

So anyway. On Sunday, I started working on this. I sat down on the floor in my bedroom and started just sorting envelopes of prints and negatives into boxes loosely categorized thusly: Before Bill. With Bill But Before Kids. With Kids. Black and White. Bill's Family Way Before My Time. They're broad categories, but it was the easiest way to begin, rather than with years, for example. And so far that's all I've done.

But while I was going through things, I came across a small envelope of some black and white prints my father gave me - copies of prints someone sent him, actually, of him (my dad) when he was a young photographer with a big ol' camera and before he had a wife or daughters.

Here's one: