Old Photographs fascinate people, whether they are buried in their Grandmother’s shoebox, clumped in a heap at a cluttered antique store, or framed on the wall of a museum. There is something universally appealing about seeing and touching proof of a time before your own existence.

 

Therefore, it’s not difficult to relate to my infatuation with the negatives, prints and albums that I discovered several years ago. These boxes were not filled with mere snapshots of an amateur toying with Kodak’s newest invention. The negatives belonged to a photo-enthusiast who had enough talent and money to explore his interests.

And I am picking up where he left off.

 

The negatives of John Laux, inherited by my father (his nephew), have always been around the house but never touched. No one in the family had the time or energy to salvage the work, but luckily they had the heart to hang on to them. The numerous boxes had been stashed into a myriad of storage spaces with a few being destroyed by water damage.

 

Here is where the college student with too much time on his hands comes in. The “Uncle John Project” began four years ago when I first shuffled through some old boxes to find a camera with film trapped inside. The developed images from that roll sparked an interest and the project began to take form.

 

This project bridges the generations not only through his images that were photographed in the past and on display today, but also through the process of developing them into art.

The process, including cleaning, editing and printing, has been done in the same space that John Laux called home.  While Great Uncle John spent hours in his basement darkroom using the up-to-date printing technology, I now sit in a lit room above that same basement using modern computer printing technology. Regardless of the technology used, the procedure is done with great respect for the preservation of the past.

 

The selected images are only a piece of the project that continues with over 7,200 negatives to be edited. The exhibition concentrates solely on Uncle John’s medium-format images and does not include his thousands of 35mm negatives and transparencies or his hundreds of fiber prints.

The mural-size prints create a stronger relationship between the viewer and the time when the image was photographed. The canvas print lends the aged film to transform to art and enhance the inimitable moment. The opportunity for the images to be exposed to not only my family, but also other viewers, is remarkable when thinking these negatives may have never been pulled out of their boxes.

 

The signature found on the bottom of each print is another link of times. The signature is a digital replication of his actual signature found on the numerous hand-written letters discovered in the mix of negatives and prints. One outlook is that I become the artist by choosing the prints, size, and materials. The production may be my role, but I am bound to give the credit where it is due.

 

 

 

I dedicate “The Uncle John Project” to Uncle John