My dad, a dr., was an award-winning photographer, but would never take money for his work. He got his photos in National Geographic calendar and other places, won contests, etc, but wouldn’t take a dime.
I’m going through his photos (he took, developed them himself, start to finish), have to get rid of a ton bc we can’t take them to Canada, 100s of mounted 11x14s. I’ll share some soon.
& if you’re very very good, I’ll also share a pic of me at 19 that he took in London. 😊 Maybe even more.
@GottaLaff Sorry to hear this, and that nobody can help. I'm not as well-travelled, but mounted my pics for photography competitions. Less than 20 takes up awkward space, and were a pain to move and store, so I started reusing the mounts.
I framed ~4, and will dispose of the rest, as I think they'll not come out again. I went through the same 'disposal' ideas you probably did, and none were viable (e.g. venues didn't want them; wrong format for charities, too much work to sell them online).
@GottaLaff@j5v You know, it’s such a hard thing when u realize that there are good and useful things that we or people we love that will be left behind — and that nobody else will find of any value. It’s sobering and humbling, and sad-making.
Nobody wants them. We’ve been to museums, libraries, galleries, etc. They’re not digital, they’re bound and mounted on heavy photo board, and it would take me a year of doing nothing but snapping pics of them to save them all.
It’s deeply upsetting that we have to get rid of the photos, but that’s the way it is. I’m saving a few, and of course, family pics, albums and albums of those too.
@GottaLaff@Eetschrijver It’s very difficult. I just moved myself. The sorting and decisions of what to do with all my family stuff was something else. No one helped me and no one knows what I did. I felt like I was erasing lives. There’s still more to decide on for me, but wanted you to know that I empathize.
@GottaLaff There are services that will digitize them for you. Prices seem to run around a couple of dollars an 11x17 page. (I'm looking at 7 boxes of mom's photos and albums and trying to find something.)
If you have a reasonably modern phone, you might find that Adobe Scan (free I think) will allow you to capture lots and lots of the photos with surprisingly high quality very quickly. You point it roughly at the "document" and it does an amazingly good job of getting the four corners right and making good use of your device’s cameras to get a whole lot of bits. And, once again, very quickly.
@timbray Again, it would be a full time job, literally. There are SO many, it’s not practical. I’d have time for nothing else. So I’m saving some and leaving the rest. @samloonie
How long do you have before you have to get rid of them? There must be a solution. With a proper camera and lighting setup, photographing them to create a digital record would go quickly.
Are there thousands of photos? We have a photo room in our family business with pro lighting, an excellent camera, etc. If they're flat mounted photos, it would literally be place the photo, click, place the next one, click, etc. I'd guess one could easily take a photo per minute and probably twice that. 5,000 photos would take a couple of weeks, probably less.
Then post them online, sell to your followers here, maybe donate proceeds to charity and your dad's work is preserved.
Have a good night. If absolutely nothing else is possible, ship them to us and we'll sell them through the Museum of Beadwork as a long-term fund raiser. I bet it would work if absolutely nothing else does.
Glad you're not moving next week!
Please share some more photos, I'll show them to my daughter and the woman who directs the Museum of Beadwork for us. It's a registered non-profit so I imagine there's a potential tax deduction there. Cost of shipping could come from sales. All that stuff can be worked out I'm sure. If all the photos are like those, I can't believe people wouldn't buy them if reasonably priced--for the photos, to support the museum, and for the story of your dad. We can discuss more tomorrow.
@bkahn Okay. But even getting them shipped would be major. We may not even be up to it, physically. We’d have to crate them, I think, because of their weight. We’d have to transfer them to the post office/UPS, wherever. It’s a huge undertaking. Mr. Laffy balked.
I cannot begin to tell you how appreciative I am. Yes, all the photos are like those, they’re masterpieces.
You're killing me. ❤️
Masterpieces should be preserved somehow.
I bet if you do a poll of your followers it'll be 90% or higher in favor of saving them. Maybe because we have a little business and ship stuff daily, packing and shipping doesn't seem daunting. UPS can pickup from your address. Someone can be hired to pack stuff. I'm nagging you, sorry!
I'd love to see a few more samples of the photos...pretty please?
@bkahn You’re assuming I don’t want to save them? Of course I do. (Re: the poll)
I used to have a small business too. I know how to do this, but again, it’s heavy, bulky, and a lot of them. So yes, daunting. It’s not like packing up a shoe box. One album is heavy. Well over 100? Daunting.
You will definitely see more! I need to snap them on my iPhone, and I haven’t had time. Time is another daunting obstacle.
I think I have a solution that will save the images, require minimal effort on your part, and be at least somewhat elegant. However this is an awkward forum for discussing it, so here's a masked email you can use to contact me and then we can chat privately. I'll share my idea and you and Mr. Laffy can tell me to go away, or shout "Brilliant!" and we can make it happen. Here's the email:
safe.zone3833@fastmail.com
Hey, at age 75 I know more than I want to about time. ❤️
@GottaLaff There are people who collect photos including unknown families. There are some Facebook groups, people pick things up at flea markets and thrift stores or buy them on eBay. You probably couldn't get much money, but someone would be so delighted to have them!
@EarthIsOurHome Logistics are an issue. I’m also not on FB. And this is so beyond flea market worthy. I don’t want money for them. I want a home for them. My friend will take 5 albums, so that’s good. Now about 200 to go, lol
@GottaLaff I know what you mean. So many family things had to go. I was crushed to have them go to auction, but the people who got them (cheap) were so excited to have them. Good luck
3/ Thank you all for your kind suggestions, but as I said, we have 100s, maybe 1000s of BIG, mounted photos, no negs, no digital. We exhausted all our choices back in 2014 when my dad passed away. That’s why I took them to begin with.
So as much as your ideas are awesome, we’ve been there, done that. Logistics, $$, storage, among other things, are the obstacles. Trust me, we’ve tried.
@GottaLaff Put the entire collection up as a single lot. It has to be worth a shot and has to be better then just junking them. There must be SOMEOME who would want them enough?
@GottaLaff Question: do you have the original negatives? These might be easy to store for the. Future. There are devices like a 3600 dpi negative scanner which can create a digital image sometime in the future. Just a thought.
@GottaLaff
Not sure if this was suggested before, but having prints or negs scanned into digital format can be done at scale unless the print sizes vary a lot or they are cupped or ragged.
A hopper-fed scanner can do a pretty sizable number per hour
@mloxton No negs. The photos are bound into books, mounted on photo board. And it would be hugely expensive and time consuming. That’s what I mean in my thread when I said we’ve tried everything. The logistics too. But thank you so much
@GottaLaff
Yah, for mounted pieces, the logistics will be the barrier. Scanning in thousands of prints that are loose and not damaged, the autofeeders are amazing, but if each has to be positioned on the scanner bed and held while it does its work, then the time taken stretches to infinity and so does the cost.
Best of luck, I hope you find some comfortable balance
@mloxton@GottaLaff FYI, you might try calling the George Eastman House, here in Rochester, NY—as they know a few things about photography (‼️)—and might (🤷🏼♂️) be interested in the collection?
@GottaLaff They sound like photos others might like. Perhaps you can share a sample and then offer them to people here. If they are that good, people will pay something for them. Make it worth your while to ship them out.
Bummer. OK, I'm sure you did a lot of thinking over the years.
It can be very hard to sell piles of photographs. I did the hard thing when I moved 11 years ago and pretty much destroyed my entire collection of photographs and recycled all the mats and backing. It's heartbreaking, but I couldn't truck all of it with me.
@GottaLaff If you were near to me I know I could make a lot of people happy with youe Dad's prints. From the Veterans home to Homeless Shelter. Junior College students to families just starting out. On our street we have lots of workers. Put anything out from furniture to flower pots and they're gone usually within an hour ir so. NextDoor and Facebook marketplace.
@kwheaton@GottaLaff Craigslist, NextDoor, Facebook marketplace, for sure. Though expect your Dad's photos to crop up at flea markets and eBay uncredited....
@GottaLaff if they are labeled, and if you as the heir would be willing to license them under a wikimedia-compatible free license, I'd be willing to pay for shipping and having them digitized and upload them to wikimedia Commons, to help educate the world.
@GottaLaff@storkk Would it be possible to find a company that could come and do the packaging/shipping to some place like Wiki Commons? A GoFundMe might cover the costs (I know I would contribute).
Wish there was more that could be offered, as having to discard them is just painful.
@thomnottom It's way too much time and effort when we have so much more in our lives right now. Great ideas, though, but I don't want to ask for money, and it takes more than most understand to do all of this. @storkk
@thomnottom They couldn't be sent to Wikimedia directly, it would have to be to a specific volunteer. I'm open to being that volunteer, but if most of them couldn't serve an educational purpose (however broadly defined), then it might not make sense.
Have to let @GottaLaff, who knows the contents better than anyone, make that call.
@GottaLaff I'm so sorry for your loss - fresh or not, it's hard to miss a parent. Your dad sounds like a wonderful man. I would love to pay to send a big chunk here, and I would gladly take pictures of them and send them to you. These sound like something everyone in our family would really enjoy.
@GottaLaff I would take a couple that you selected as artistic. (My dad was a doctor too, but he wrote rather than photographed as his art; and Carol was a photographers' rep for a while in L.A.) At least you'd know they were somewhere where they were appreciated! (And I'd pay shipping.)
He mostly shot portraits of amazing faces from all over the world, some landscapes, and some other unique shots of all the places they visited. So it’s not like there are “artistic” shots per se. They’re more like thoughtful observations and candid moments, along with beauty shots. Here’s one from a photo show. He used to snap models, too:
@GottaLaff Oh, my God, that photo"s AMAZING! His wisdom in focusing on the photographers rather than on the woman; her odd relative size and submissive posture could make it a commentary on the male gaze and media culture and colonialism.
@GottaLaff Theme doesn't matter, although we do love travel art. What really matters is impact and composition. The ones you've already shared online show that you have good taste that way, so anything you want to send us we will happily take, and probably frame and hang a couple (or more). And if for some reason you didn't want to keep that one with all the photographers and the bowing woman...
@msbellows There's a second one of another model with the photographers. One sec, I'll find it.
It's entire albums, so I can't separate the photos. You'd take whatever is in the album. I'd flip through to see the best for you, though. To frame them, you'd have to remove them from the spiral binding and cut off the holes part.
@GottaLaff
I'm late to this topic so forgive me if this was among the suggestions. Refugee resettlement agencies like World Relief set up apartments sometimes with less than a day's notice of an arriving family. One fam. I met at airport was delivered to an empty apt. I helped get the beds 12 hrs later. Eventually they are equipped with essentials. But wouldn't a couple of framed high quality photos of almost any subject on a couple of the bare walls be welcoming? Might eventually be (more)⤵️
@GottaLaff Off the cuff suggestion: Craigslist? Even if you give them away, they're going to people who'll appreciate them. Logistically that might not work, but you didn't mention you'd tried it.
They might be interested, and have the facilities for digitizing photos, books, old recordings, etc., and for storing the originals. They are a marvelous resource for anyone doing research.
@GottaLaff They are more than that. They digitize books and photo collections. They have also started digitizing 78 rpm records. Their mission is to preserve media history, and make it available to everyone.
@GottaLaff We’ve got — I say we, not even sure which relative has them — probably hundreds if not thousands of slides from my grandfather. An amateur but, (I say, biased) pretty great photographer, well-traveled but also documenting life around him.
It’s tough. We know nobody’s interested. Not even we are in going through them. We’re kicking the can down the road.
Parents made a wall of 14 of their favorites of his prints, it’s really beautiful.
@GottaLaff perhaps reach out to https://photowings.org they or a charity they support might be interested in the archive. My friend founded this charity years ago and one (of many) things they do is help preserve photographic archives.
(They are well funded - my friend’s husband was one of the top investors in the world for many many many years)
@GottaLaff No worries, I understand. I was reminded of a similar situation. An acquaintance of mine whose partner, a professional photographer, suddenly passed away. They were able to donate all to a museum the photographer had been connected to.
I'm sad to hear so far a solution has not been found. Hoping you have it sorted soon.
@GottaLaff There are Buy Nothing groups on Facebook. Hyper local to your neighborhood. Post and people will come to your house and get them. Normally same day.
I’m also antiFacebook, but these groups are pretty awesome.
We have a woman in our neighborhood who rescues all the books they throw out at her job. Once a month she fills her driveway with books and the neighborhood buy nothing group comes and picks through them.
Are the photos in some sort of order? If so, perhaps you can do a catalogue. For example, Historic Eygpt; Roadsides of Cornwall; Lighthouses; Graveyards of the Scottish Borders; Street Vendors of Hong Kong.
@GottaLaff This is such a tactile part of the grieving process with parents. The “things” that helped define them for us are so important. Yet, absent a 50k sq ft warehouse, we usually have to let these very things slip away. This process is hard. I’m sorry it’s your turn.
@PattyHanson It’s 100s or even 1000s of 11x14s mounted. I couldn’t afford to send them, let alone pay for any service to scan that many. This is a HUGE undertaking.That’s what I mean when I said we’ve covered all the bases. But many thanks for trying.
Here's an odd thought, if someone on #Mastodon wanted to send you money for the shipping of a book of #photos and they got a surprise bundle, then you'd know someone got them to enjoy. Would there be time to do this before the move? Would you have help bundling them and sending them out?
It's the only thing I can think of that you may not have. It does sound like you've already tried everything else.
A grab bag event for photo enthusiasts might work.
@GottaLaff@human3500
Even if 10 of the thousands go the way of a grab bag / paid shipping scenario you'll at least know that those pieces are being enjoyed by someone.
Good luck with it all no matter the outcome.
And note, those photographs have already served their purpose. Your dad enjoyed the process. It gave him and your family wonderful memories. It's OK if not all of the photos find a home. You represent your dad far better than the photos ever did. They can go if they're a burden.
@GottaLaff if they're mounted you might consider keeping the ones you want and selling the rest online. Either for yourself or a fundraiser for the org of your choice
@GottaLaff well that sucks :( I'm probably going to get to that point once my family settles on who wants what of my mother's artwork. Right now we have over 200 pieces in storage. Not looking forward to that :'(
@Adventurer I’ve tried everything. Nobody wants them. They’re VERY heavy, big 11x14 on photo board mount. I can’t send them anywhere. I can’t store them anymore. We’ve asked museums, libraries, galleries, etc. They’re not digital, so… They’re from all over the world. My parents were world travelers.
@GottaLaff@Adventurer
That's sad. The man that owned my house prior to me was a photographer. He left several prints in the attic. I kept my 2 favorites. An old steam engine train and a fantastic close-up of a diamond back rattlesnake that he must've taken at a zoo. I am partial to black & white photos.
@Atticus1956 My dad started w/ black and white. I grew up in his darkroom. After he developed and printed them, he’d sit at the kitchen table hand spot every single one with vegetable dye and a fine brush to eliminate dust spots. @Adventurer
@DrGeof I’ve been lucky enough to live with them my whole life. He used to rotate them on our walls at home, on gallery boards, so I’ve been able to enjoy them forever.
But my brother won’t even take them, there are too many.
@GottaLaff We traveled a lot in MI when getting my PhD (very tight budget), and my BW took many pics of lighthouses all around MI. If I had to part with them...
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