a photo slips away

In a photo finds its way home, I wrote about how I found a subject in one of my photographs, with a little help from the Internet, and gave her the full-resolution original photograph to have. This story is also about a photo and its subject, but as the title indicates, the outcome is a little different.

A few months ago, a relative of mine was working with a client from overseas over the Internet. As a routine part of the project, this client e-mailed my relative a series of digital pictures, actually scans of photographic prints. The pictures were of a German cargo ship, taken by its crew. In flipping through the pictures, my relative found a picture of two of my aunts in 1977, refugees from Vietnam, being rescued from a fishing boat from the cargo ship. Needless to say, this was an astonishing find of a picture.

My relative printed the picture out on her office printer and gave it to my uncle, who then shared it with all of my aunts. My mom eventually saw the photo too and told me the story of how our relative found the photo. Of course, I immediately started asking about who took the photo, if the photo was dated, if I could get a copy of the digital scan, and if anyone had dug any deeper to get in touch with who took the picture and who owns the negative.

All in all, probably a few dozen people got a chance to see the photo in the months before I heard about it. Unfortunately, not a single person asked even one of the questions I had on my mind. When I tried to follow up and get more information, I found that my relative has since changed jobs. The original digital file was never saved (it was deleted with the email), no one has the person's name who sent the file. Essentially, no one knows a thing. All we have now is the printout from the office printer on plain old office paper. If someone, anyone, just asked one question about who, what, or where, maybe I'd have something to go on, something to start with. For all I know, we could have had the original photo by now.

I'm not sure why no one realized that there's only one shot like this in the world. Just like any investigation, there's only a small window of opportunity to trace information down. Sadly, in this case, that opportunity just slipped away. That photograph captured history, not only a history of the Vietnam conflict's effects, but our family's history. You can't pose for pictures like this. Why are group pictures with forced smiles so important? They aren't real! The cheesy group photos are us presenting ourselves the way we want to be. Photos like the one from the ship capture the way we really are and what actually happens in the world.

Is there any chance I'll ever be able to find that picture again? I'm afraid there might not be. It just burns me up to know that there is a slide or negative out there, somewhere, and I'll never know where it is, if it's being preserved and kept well, or if anyone cares.