A Rainy, Slushy Evening in Portland: Photos from the Past

My dad took a lot of pictures--something like 25,000 color slides and half as many prints. He organized them carefully, packing upwards of 450 slides in each plastic case, each case with some yellow legal pad pages that gave cryptic descriptions of what was actually on the slides.




After he died, I had my brother ship me about 20 cases, so somewhere around 8 to 10 thousand slides. This winter, I decided to go through them, slide by slide, projecting them and snapping a digital image from the screen. It's not as good as a scanned image, but good enough.

The chronosequence starts about 4 years before I was born, and I don't know how old I will be in the last slide of me. I've seen some when I'm thirty-couple years old.

I'm glad I have these slides, although I have to admit some guilt when I empty a tray in the trash, uninterested in countless slides of trips to England, and hundreds of pictures of the Metropolitan Park. He always said, "I know what you boys will do with these slides--you'll just dump them." But not all of them...