Dad's Slides

Dad's photography begins shortly before he met Rosie - while still in college at Washington University. We (I) never asked why he liked slides better than black & white prints or photofinished snapshots. Maybe he liked color - fairly new but rapidly becoming popular as a mass market product in that era. Perhaps he liked the social aspect of gathering us together as a captive audience to look at (this is our first projector)  projected slides. In our family it certainly predated sitting around watching TV. I remember this projector - it was fun to put it away back in its heavy fitted box. Later we got a TDC and all the slides were transferred to its convenient linear trays. The Kodak Carosel projector must have replaced the TDC sometime when I was already away at college. Dad got two prmitive Leicas while serving with the US Occupation Army in Munich in 1946-1948. He probably mentioned, but we don't recall what 35mm camera he used prior to that. As we all know, the early Leicas weren't exactly easy cameras to use. Once I understood just how tricky they were to load, it always saddened me when Dad came home disappointed with a roll of processed film on which about 60 exposures had all been recorded on one sad film frame. He could pull together a scalp wound by knotting a patient's hair instead of using sutures, but loading Leicas wasn't taught at UL Med School in the 1940s. I caught the photography bug at a fairly young age.

From the perspective of a photo archivist which I think is what I ultimately became, Dad's slides have several attributes:

1. There are ONLY 45 trays of them covering about 55 years.

2. He liked Kodachrome and stuck with it quite a while even though it demanded precise exposures which he never mastered.

3. He never over-shot, and was pretty ruthless about editing out the dross. This is both good and bad.

4. He and Rosie created handwritten lists for each tray identifying many places and people none of us would otherwise recognize. The handwriting conveys a lot of extra sentiment and with practice and effort is often legible.

5. To be continued. ahe - Dec 2010.

Contact me at aeskind@gmail.com.