This week Maureen Taylor, the Photo Detective, is joined by B. Wells Douglas, a professional photographer who has quite the following on the social media platform TikTok for vintage photo finds.
B. Wells looks at slides that he’s found and digs deeper into their meaning, looking at who is in the photographs, and trying to examine why they may have been taken, who is in the photos, and what story they tell.
He also dives into what it means to be able to afford camera equipment, and how our ancestor’s socioeconomic status often influences just how many photos we have of them, and approaches the slides with an artistic lens, looking at their composition and the world of light and dark.
Related Episodes:
Episode 165: Reading Clues in World War I Snapshots with Curator Lora Vogt
Episode 144: A Ten Year Photo Identification Journey
Links:
- Vintage Film Finds
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About My Guest:
B. Wells Douglas is a photographer who lives in Bloomington, IN. His work uses historical vernacular photography to construct digital spaces that explore social and political issues facing the United States.
He grew up in Montana within a family of artists and was taught from a young age the importance of approaching life creatively. In 2019, he joined the Indiana University BFA photography program. During his time there, he began exploring historical, vernacular photography. His early work with vernacular photography explored his relationship with his grandfather and his life. He began building an archive of 35mm slides and was interested in the patterns he noticed in the ways gender was represented in family photographs. For his BFA thesis project, “AMERICHROME”, Wells dove into vernacular photography and looked at the ways historical and contemporary issues are found within personal documentations of everyday life.
An additional outcome of this work has been the development of a large social media platform with over 20,000 followers. Several followers have shared/donated images and his pages have become an intersection of a wide variety of people.
About Maureen Taylor:
Maureen is a frequent keynote speaker on photo identification, photograph preservation, and family history at historical and genealogical societies, museums, conferences, libraries, and other organizations across the U.S., London, and Canada. She’s the author of several books and hundreds of articles and her television appearances include The View and The Today Show (where she researched and presented a complete family tree for host Meredith Vieira). She’s been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Better Homes and Gardens, The Boston Globe, Martha Stewart Living, Germany’s top newspaper Der Spiegel, American Spirit, and The New York Times. Maureen was recently a spokesperson and photograph expert for MyHeritage.com, an internationally known family history website, and also writes guidebooks, scholarly articles, and online columns for such media as Smithsonian.com. Learn more at Maureentaylor.com