If you follow photoxo on Facebook or Instagram, you may see me occasionally posting what I’m working on that day. If I did it every day, it would mostly say “Today I’m scanning printed photos.” That is the bulk of my business (and what I love the most). But I’ve done a lot more than scanning, some of it is just harder to communicate in a snippet for social media!
Here are some of the projects I’ve been working on over the last six months!
I digitized a memory book that was given as a 60th anniversary gift to a special couple by their daughter. The book was made up of original documents, photos, clippings, and honors they received throughout their lives together. One of the best parts of this project is that as I’m creating digital files, I can also add videos and audio into the folder structure, creating something that couldn’t exist solely in print form.
I also recently purchased the equipment and software that enables me to digitize VHS tapes. So far I’ve taken over 240 hours of video from long-unwatched magnetic tape to sharable digital files.
I helped a client choose from among her thousands of digital photos from a huge vacation with friends and create a book. Kinda the reverse of #scanyrpics, what I always advocate, but printing your pics is just as important when you want a lasting heirloom.
Another client wanted to learn to make a digital slideshow to celebrate her granddaughter’s second birthday! She’s savvy with her digital photos and really wanted to be able to do the workflow on her own, so we sat together for an hour a week and worked through the steps. Now she’s a pro!
I’ve been working with one family for months on the type of project I dreamed of when starting photoxo—integrating all (and I mean all) of their photo and video memories into one comprehensive digital archive accessible to the entire extended family. This includes not only digitizing prints, VHS tapes, 8mm film strips, cassette tapes, and reel-to-reel audio tapes, but also moving gigabytes and gigabytes of born-digital photos and videos from various drives and DVDs and integrating them into a cohesive whole. When we finish, all the digital files will be organized, labeled, and searchable by keyword. Imagine how awesome that will be!
I was also contracted by the Centro Espanol to do some digitizing work on their substantial and important archive so they could share it with the community on their website. It is an incredible record of the history of Spanish immigrants in Tampa, and now it is available to a new audience because it exists in digital form.
You may know about my background as a curator, and I continue that independently with my project Picurious which gives new life to interesting orphaned images. The picture above is a Picurious image–the pictures in my project are scanned at high resolution and available as limited edition fine art prints. I post images several times a week to the Picurious Instagram feed. This is my favorite creative outlet!
As you can see, the work I do always focuses on storytelling and preserving our personal history but it takes many forms! And I’m still expanding into teaching my methods via remote classes like Disaster to Done and other courses coming soon.
I recently heard a scholar who digitized all of the recordings from Woodstock into a 36-hour opus say, “If I didn’t do it, who would?” and that’s exactly how I feel about my work. It applies to you too—if you don’t tell your story, who will?
