Ever since my dad was ten, living in South Florida and tinkering with a Minolta twin lens reflex camera, he’s been a photographer. Now, we all have cameras in our back pockets. Taking photographs in this digital world is easy, but that doesn’t make us all photographers. Developing them in trays in the linen closet of your family’s home? That qualifies.
Dennis Shaw, a TV repairman for most of his career, has a keen eye for color and shadows. When I was a kid, we lived 1/2 a block from Dad’s TV shop and I used to skip down there to visit. I’d play out back by the pool or watch the Brady Bunch on one of the sets for sale in the display room. Whenever Dad was working on a set and needed to use the degausser, he’d call me over. He moved the wheel in a circular motion in front of the picture tube and all the colors in the spectrum swirled at his touch. I was mesmerized. Dad can take one look at a picture tube and in seconds say, “The color is off.” He’d fiddle with the knobs and have it fixed within minutes. I can’t see what he sees. I would have sucked at that job. Maybe that’s why he had me sorting picture tubes in the back hallway.
Being drafted in 1960 didn’t stop Dennis Shaw from continuing to perfect his hobby. He continued studying photography via correspondence school and had Mom send as many supplies to Germany as she could.
The house I grew up in, built in the early 1920s, didn’t come with a garage, so Dad built one. I don’t remember much about the building of it, but I do remember when they poured the cement for the driveway. The big hulking garage and new white double driveway changed the entire look of our 1920s house and yard. We used to sit on the roof and watch the fireworks from Edison Stadium at the high school. Dad’s favorite part most likely was the darkroom he added between the garage and the house. He may have dragged me and my brother all over town as his subjects, but inside the darkroom was where the magic happened.
Today, the darkroom has been traded for computer programs with the exception of a few developers still out there.
I started digitizing the Shaw Collection a year ago when Dad let me bring trays of old photographs back to North Carolina with me to scan, organize, preserve and archive.
You wouldn’t see it, but I was giddy to dig through them, to remember my siblings and me as kids, to witness pieces of my father’s childhood. Those trays of prints weren’t enough. Next, I was filling the car with tubs of slides and negatives stored in black boxes. I found batches of negatives my grandfather had taken during Dad’s childhood, and Dad didn’t know they were there!
My life, my family’s lives, and tons of travels are captured in these prints, films, and magazines full of slides. Stories stored only on film are at risk. I’m trying to fix that.
Next week, I’m making another trip to Florida, this time to capture the narratives around these photographs and to set up a process so our family can continue adding to our heritage with an online archive of media and stories at WeAre.xyz.
It’s not just photographs. Letters, historical documents, ephemera, artifacts, news clippings, oral histories, US and Civil War era memorabilia, and anything else hinting at a story, these are what make up a family collection. Preserving and archiving family collections, so their stories can be remembered, that is my passion; especially when they’re created by a photographer.
Two weeks immersed in family history. I can’t wait. 💜
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