One man's trash is another man's treasure. This statement is proven true in the recent New York Times video. Reporter Deborah Acosta was walking around New York City when she found an odd trail of old Kodak slides. The trail lead to a big bag full of slides, notes, and letters addressed to a woman named Mariana Gosnell. Who threw away these photos? Who was Mariana?
Acosta got the go ahead to film on Facebook Live this exciting hunt to find out who Mariana was. She suddenly passed away in 2012 at the age of 79 but it turns out she was a journalist and photographer for Newsweek. The photos were of her travels, portraits of herself, and lots of planes, which she flew. In the end, her partner was the one who threw away the photos because he was trying to downsize a storage unit.
I absolutely love to look through old photographs and post cards at thrift stores and have my own little collection of interesting images I've purchased over the years. If I would have stumbled upon this trash bag full of slides, I would have 100 percent grabbed it and taken it home with me. I might be a bit of a hoarder, but I digress. It's so amazing to me that people can part with physical photographs. Everything is digital now and there is something so special about holding an actual print or slide. I can't be the only one fascinated with this kind of nostalgia. Do you keep photographs as photographers?
Put some up I say! This site lacks that stuff! This story is hard to believe by the way.. Lovely, hope it is accurate.
I want to scan my film photos to digital for convenience and cataloging. But going all digital has its drawbacks: transferring photographs from one storage media to another, file formats may become obsolete. JPEG has been around for a long while, but the JPEG format may become obsolete in the future.
I've worked in the computer industry for 40 years and I have seen storage media come and go. Floppy disks: gone. Zip drives: gone. Compact Disc: almost gone, being replaced by DVD and BluRay. Tape is still in use for enterprise backups, but gone from personal use.
At least with film, it is its own archival media.
Maybe the younger viewers won't understand as much, but this story really touched me. As I get older I wonder what will happen to my photos. Will people still look at them? Will everything just be forgotten? I make prints, I have many backups, it just makes you wonder sometimes.
My first job in publishing was at Newsweek, when I was still in college, in the 1970s. I was acquainted with Mariana Gosnell in those days. I can say with some certainty that she rarely worked as a photographer for Newsweek; she was a reporter and writer. She was a licensed pilot and a great deal of her photography was aerial, and it was largely personal work. Having just inherited an archive from my late photojournalist father, I find it sad that her partner would have simply thrown these pictures in the garbage, accumulated flotsam and jetsam of a life notwithstanding. PS: Ms. Gosnell was a bright and lovely person.