RJ Troy

I bought a box of slides in a Los Angeles warehouse for twenty dollars. Thanksgiving, 2019. An antique store was emptying an old warehouse. Inside was a pile of Kodachrome that almost went nowhere. The woman selling it said the slides had belonged to a photographer whose house had been liquidated after he died. The boxes were addressed to Hugh Stevens Bell. Bell was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, on January 10, 1899. He served in the Navy in 1918, finished Western Reserve University with honors, edited the campus paper, and worked at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. He wrote for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Nature Magazine, and the Journal of Geology. In the 1930s he joined the U.S. Indian Service and then soil conservation work. A son was born in Flagstaff in 1936. He did hydraulic research at Caltech and in 1942 published a USDA study on stratified flow in reservoirs. National Geographic published his photographs along the way. He lived out his last years in Sierra Madre and died there in 1989 at ninety. What I found was not a few snapshots. It was a working life in color. Desert roads. Cars stuck in the mud. Families standing in the sun. Monument Valley. Native communities of the Southwest in the 1940s and 1950s. Mixed in were the personal frames. His people. His trips. The ordinary days that never make a magazine. Kodachrome is why these still look alive. The dyes hold. Reds stay red. Skies stay blue. Seventy and eighty years later the film has not faded the way so many other color processes have. You can still feel the heat coming off the dirt. I scanned them. I put them online. That box is what started my own personal collecting of what I've since learned is called vernacular photography. Since then I have collected tens of thousands of snapshots, slides and photo albums and organized them into many different digital albums on Flickr. Everything after that, the estate sales, the lockers, the orphaned pictures, began with the Hugh Stevens Bell Collection, sitting in a warehouse waiting to be thrown away. Here is one of them. The full collection is here if you are a fan of the American Southwest you will enjoy this trip back in a time machine: flickr.com/photos/thomashawk…