Blog

Let’s look back to the Big Easy for some Southern stories. This is my beautiful Grandmother as a young girl with her Dad in the late 1950s at the Roosevelt hotel in New Orleans. Just look at those outfits and the awesome hairstyles! The Roosevelt has a long history and is a beacon of luxury […]

My Grandma C. passed when I was just five years old, but my aunt has a lot of these glamour shots taken of her by her friends around Salt Lake before she was married. She was ill for the last 10 years of her life, and I only remember a shadow of the person I’m […]

What will we have to show from our digital existence? Who will hold our memories in their hands? I recently discovered this portrait of my grandfather, Anthony Victor Flint, circa 1940. I was mesmerized. To me, it’s a clear indication of the significance of the photographic medium and the need to preserve our memories so […]

I found myself deeply overwhelmed by the need to keep even the most mundane of my mom’s belongings when she died this past February, photographer Jennifer Loeber says in her artist statement. Instead of providing comfort and good memories, they became a source of deep sadness and anxiety and I knew the only way I […]

A ‘selfie’ of my Granddad in the mid-1920s in St. Louis, before selfies even existed. Here, my Granddad, Charles Edward “Eddie” Niesen, sits for photo booth portraits. This boy with a bright smile was the baby in his family; he was born the same year that his oldest sister eloped with her husband. I think […]

“I believe in the resonance and staying power of quiet photographs.” –William Albert Allard My Aunt Beth and her friend in rural Mississippi in the 1960s. These Kodachrome colors and memories never faded for me and my family. But this photo is about more than Kodachrome and kids on summer vacation. It evokes endless summer […]

Once, there was a young cowherd who lived in China. Times were hard and food was scarce. When he was 9 years old, he saw a ship setting sail to far-off lands. “Tell my mother I’m going to Nanyang (Singapore)!,” he shouted to the townspeople. He went onwards to Malaya (Malaysia), during its golden age […]

“But there is a deeper need yet…to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember; the […]

Summer evening in the 1940’s in Sweden. My grandfather Nils and my grandmother Karin are in the front seat. Nils loved cars and often invited friends for a ride. Back then not many people owned a car. Here they are with friends, all excited as if they were going to fly an airplane. I love […]

Meet my great-grandparents, Vukosav and Agnes. This is their life story…which eventually led to me. After immigrating from Montenegro, Vukosav met and befriended two Polish immigrants in Ohio: Agnes and her husband. Agnes had two children, an older daughter Mary, and a son, Joseph, pictured immediately next to his mother. Agnes eloped with my great-grandfather, […]