Images from the past become

a father’s legacy to his son

Frame By Frame

By Suzette Cook-Mankins

A reader from Willits sent me this e-mail a few months ago regarding photo restoration and digitizing images:

Hi-
I read your interesting article concerning digitizing old photos to preserve them. I have several hundred old black and white negatives (2x3) that were taken by my father and grandfather. Some of these are over 100 years old, but most date from the early 1930's. Many appear to be quite striking shots, some are historical, though mostly of SoCal. There are written notations of the place and subject matter of each. Your article doesn't address how to deal with negatives. Other folks I've spoken with haven't been able to suggest a feasible method of being able to turn these into positive images for viewing; the right scanning equipment seems expensive and I guess the bright light alone is damaging. So far, these negatives don't appear to have degraded much, even though they are not "properly" stored in always cool conditions nor in acid-free envelopes. They are neatly stored in file cabinets. Any suggestions?

-Thanks, Gary Owen

I decided to meet with Mr. Owen and check out the negatives he inherited. In the Photo Lab at Ukiah High School we sat one morning, me rifling through his wooden box of filed negatives holding each one up to the light to assess their quality, and him thanking me for taking the time to help in the effort to see these images in positive form.

My theory was that we could scan the negatives on a flatbed scanner with white paper in the background. Next, we open the file in Adobe Photoshop, drop out the color and then invert the image from a negative which should create a positive form of the image. So that's what we did.
I scanned an image of what looked like a young man in a field, then applied the inverse and, sure enough, the image of a gentleman in his early twenties sitting in patch of cacti appeared. I asked Owen if he recognized the person in the photo and he said he did. "That's my father," he said as he leaned in closer to the screen to scrutinize the image.

This was Owen's first glimpse of particular frame of his dad. I felt like I also was meeting this young version of Winthrop Owen. He was dressed in a suit wearing wire rimmed glasses and a bow tie. He appeared to be too wise to be sitting in a patch of cacti. With a little more research I began to understand why he chose the setting.

Gary Owen, introduced me to his father, Winthrop Owen:

"Winthrop Owen was born in 1905 in Santa Barbara, passed away in 1999 in Willits. He spent all but the last 17 years of his life in SoCal, mostly in Pasadena and the San Gabriel Valley. He met my mom while working as a conductor on the old Pasadena street cars and also on the old Mt. Lowe Railway which was a excursion tramway that ran up in the mountains above Pasadena. Though he had degrees from USC and Caltech in chemistry and geology, he'd graduated at the height of the Depression and so ended up parlaying that rail conductor job into eventually being a locomotive engineer for a SoCal freight railway (Pacific Electric) which got swallowed by Southern Pacific, from which he retired.

The old street car lines (The Big Red Cars), which were LA's very practical and popular mass transit system in the 30's and 40's, had, by then, been deliberately destroyed in order to sell more automobiles, in a well-known story. My dad always had a darkroom in the house, but it was little-used by the time I was growing up in the 50's. After my dad died in 1999, I hazmatted a five gallon bottle of bluish developing fluid, which he'd moved up to Willits, thinking that someday he'd get back into photography...I don't know what camera he was using.

I've only had a handful of these negatives turned into positives and printed: the one of Uncle Ben from 1902 and the ones from my grandparent's honeymoon at Avalon on Catalina in 1904 (the family story is that my grandmother caught all the albacore), and a few of the other family and friend group shots from the 30's. I'd never seen a positive image of the one of dad that you scanned and cleaned up before."After learning these facets of the man in the newly turned positive negative, I started to think of the story behind my own dad. This weekend, when Father's Day shows up on the calendar, I will spend some time reminiscing about who my dad was. I will take out my photo collection of him and remember that I have his blue eyes, his silly grin, his hard work ethic, and a collection of stories that define who he was - and why I am who I am.

Suzette Cook-Mankins is a 20 year veteran of photojournalism. Send comments, questions, requests to mizdigital.com