My First Photography Project
That started when my grandfather died.
In June of 2014 my grandfather passed away. Our family gathered for the viewing, we held the funeral, and then started the process of figuring out what to do with all his stuff in the house. My grandmother had passed over a decade before and most of the big heirloom stuff had already been designated for various family members so when i say “stuff” i’m referring to the boxes forgotten in the closet. The things packed away and put in a closet to be left untouched for 20+ years. Everyone took a section of the house. I took the room where I often stayed when visiting. It was either there or the living room couch where that darn clock ticked away every second of the night while i tried to sleep (Irony is I now own that clock). Sorry got sidetracked. I started picking through the boxed in the closet one by one and found treasure after treasure. Luckily no one else thought they were much of anything so they remain with me. Among the treasures were my grandfather’s entire military record, a collection of old pocket knives, and a little brown box with an eastman Kodak Sticker. That little brown box introduced me to my great grandfather, who I had never even heard of, and now i’d like to introduce him to you.
This is my great grandfather, Andrew Jackson Deal. This photo was one of the many Kodachrome Slides in that little brown box. Slides, prints, records of military service were all now in my possession. It didn’t take me long to start up a family tree on ancestry.com and starting adding the treasure trove of information I now owned. Not long after, I had all the photos digitized and knew two generations of family history that had been pretty much lost.
By now you’re probably wondering what this has to do with photography aside from the slides. Well three and a half years after my grandfathers death my wife, our 15 year old dachshund, ragdoll cat and I were packing up our car to move from wichita Kansas to the state my great grandfather served in the Army Air Corps for three years. Traveling up the center of the US, crossing the border into Canada, and traveling the entirety of the Alaska highway, we found our new home in Fairbanks. Shortly after our trip, I bought a camera as one does when the northern lights are literally in your backyard.
Three years later, I had the realization that I could retrace my great grandfathers’ footsteps. See the places he saw but only 74 years later. Some research revealed a rough idea of the path he took and, to my suprise, a number of the places captured still existed. I did my best to capture those locations in this mini project of mine. While there are not a lot of locations with matching photos, the real heart of this little endeavor was capture the common experience of living in Alaska and seeing a bit of the past in the present. This project lacked intention but ultimately
Disclaimer: I don’t know that my great grandfather actually took any of these photos but the original film was in his possession and he appears in a number of the shots.
Ultimately, this whole experience brought me a lot closer to my own family history. It helped generate a deeper story to the legacy I hope to leave behind through my photography. I hope one day my daughters children or grandchildren find my images and are as interested in my experience as I was in my own great grandfathers.
