Capturing the Soul

The idea for Capturing the Soul came after I began sorting through the over 10,000 photos my father took in his lifetime.  He got his first camera when he was fifteen and his family lived in Phoenix.  There are no photos of his family prior to that.  He and his family moved to San Diego in February 1939.   The photos are of his parents and siblings and of my mother and sisters and I in San Diego during the 1940′s through to the millenium.  There were thousands of pictures of plants and animals taken at the San Diego Zoo and the county fair. His navy pictures make up a few hundred images.  These were taken when he was a staff photographer for Rear Admiral A. G. Noble, on the USS Blue Ridge, AGC-2.

As I sorted the photos I saw what was there and what was missing–for example, my mother and aunts we’re rarely included with his parents and their grandchildren.  There are no photos of me as a baby–I was sick until I was five or six months old.  I also saw him change from the vibrant young man to depressed adult.  This was expressed not just in the pictures of him, but in the quality of the pictures he made.

When my cousin Ri looked through the album of family photos his comment on the photo of my father as a happy young sailor was”look, that was taken when Donnie still smiled”.

I will write about the different things I see in my family’s photos and about looking at family photos in general.  This is about looking beyond the stories to get a sense of who the subjects of the photographs really are–seeing their souls.

Exploring Family Photos

Looking through the photos and identifying, cleaning, archiving, and scanning them is a long process.  I still only have a fraction of the photos scanned.  Unfortunately for this process, my oldest sister now has custody of most of the photos.

I will write on what to do with all of the pictures–of storage materials, formats, and ways to date and identify the subjects.

I will give tips on using family photos  as a way to write a family history and as a tool to draw information for an oral history.

My parents met in 1946 at an organization for single Jews that my uncle Robbie nicknamed The Last Chance Club.  The photo to the left is of my parents Don and Bev on a Last Chance Club picnic taken sometime in early 1947.