“For me, the pandemic sort of transferred my own passion for being out and about making photographs myself to collecting vernacular photographs, writes Thomas Hawk, a selection of fabulous found photos – all Ektachrome slides – you can see here. “At first, it was sort of something to work on during lockdown, but then as I dove deeper I found myself being as consumed by these images as I am my own.
“I feel like collecting, scanning and sharing these images with the world sort of gives them a second life beyond what would be almost certain obscurity and loss from our shared culture.”
Ektachrome slide – Paris, August 1975
“I suspect by the time all is said and done, I’ll have been able to archive hundreds of thousands of these photographs and hopefully provide a deeper look into our shared past for those who wish to explore. I think scanning the images in high quality, high resolution allows the viewer to go deeper and study them even more than they might holding a smaller version of the image in their own hands – although I do appreciate the experience of holding and examining a snapshot or viewing an old slide through a slide loupe.”
Italy, October 1968
Ektachrome Slide – Chicago, January 1972
Ektachrome has a distinctive look that became familiar to many readers of National Geographic, which used it extensively for color photographs for decades in settings where Kodachrome was too slow. In terms of reciprocity characteristics Ektachrome is stable at shutter speeds between ten seconds and 1/10,000 of a second.
Found Ektachrome Slide – date stamped on slide: August 1973
Ektachrome – 1960s Las Vegas
Cable Car, San Francisco – August 1965
January 1961
July 1966
Lunch en route, Sequoia to Yosemite – August 1965
Found Ektachrome Slide – Las Vegas, 1960s
October 1965
Found Ektachrome Slide – date stamped on slide: April 1966
May 1974
Found Ektachrome Slide – October 1978
San Francisco, October 1965
Bill watching TV, January 10, 1958
Grandpa and the gypsies’ – December 1959
December 1965
December 1971
1963 – from a box labeled Models, Amherst
Via: Thomas Hawk, who is “trying to publish a library of 1,000,000 hand crafted, lovingly created, individually finished and processed photographs before I die. Mostly I’m focusing on America.”