Found Slide by Photographer Hugh Stevens Bell
For the past several years I've been collecting postcards, mostly neon signs that are long gone that I can no longer photograph myself. I view this as a sort of adjunct to my photography. American photographer Walker Evans had a very impressive postcard collection that went to the Met in New York when he died.
More recently I've begun collecting amateur slides. There is a certain snapshot aesthetic that I appreciate with home slides and they tend to cover an era in America from the 1940s to the 1980s when slides were popular. Mostly I try to buy collections from estate sales, ebay, antique stores, antique fairs, etc. I've had a few friends and family members who have also given me their old slides to scan.
Over the Christmas break while visiting with my parents down in Southern California I found an antique store that was going out of business. As such they were liquidating an old warehouse that they had to be out of as part of shutting down. In that warehouse I found three boxes of slides that I bought for $10. The woman who sold it to me told me that the slides came from a famous photographer who had died and whose home they liquidated.
One of the boxes contained several dozen boxes of slides mostly addressed to a photographer Hugh Bell. It seems like he spent a great deal of time photographing the Southwest and American Indians back in the 1940s. He seems to have a great eye.
I couldn't find much on him on the internet other than a few eBay auctions where a couple of his old negatives have been sold.
There they list him as having been born in 1899 and died in 1989 and having been a researcher, writer and photographer whose Southwest Native photographs were published in National Geographic.
Anyways, this is from the first box of his slides that I scanned. The postmark on the slide box is September 26, 1941. I plan on publishing more of them later and introducing more curated found photographs into my own Flickrstream over time.
Found Slide by Photographer Hugh Stevens Bell
For the past several years I've been collecting postcards, mostly neon signs that are long gone that I can no longer photograph myself. I view this as a sort of adjunct to my photography. American photographer Walker Evans had a very impressive postcard collection that went to the Met in New York when he died.
More recently I've begun collecting amateur slides. There is a certain snapshot aesthetic that I appreciate with home slides and they tend to cover an era in America from the 1940s to the 1980s when slides were popular. Mostly I try to buy collections from estate sales, ebay, antique stores, antique fairs, etc. I've had a few friends and family members who have also given me their old slides to scan.
Over the Christmas break while visiting with my parents down in Southern California I found an antique store that was going out of business. As such they were liquidating an old warehouse that they had to be out of as part of shutting down. In that warehouse I found three boxes of slides that I bought for $10. The woman who sold it to me told me that the slides came from a famous photographer who had died and whose home they liquidated.
One of the boxes contained several dozen boxes of slides mostly addressed to a photographer Hugh Bell. It seems like he spent a great deal of time photographing the Southwest and American Indians back in the 1940s. He seems to have a great eye.
I couldn't find much on him on the internet other than a few eBay auctions where a couple of his old negatives have been sold.
There they list him as having been born in 1899 and died in 1989 and having been a researcher, writer and photographer whose Southwest Native photographs were published in National Geographic.
Anyways, this is from the first box of his slides that I scanned. The postmark on the slide box is September 26, 1941. I plan on publishing more of them later and introducing more curated found photographs into my own Flickrstream over time.