The San Diego History Center owns an estimated 2.5 million photos and film negatives of local people, places and events dating to 1869.
But that’s not enough for the first of a series of books, covering the period through 1939, planned in partnership with The San Diego Union-Tribune and to be published by the Washington state-based Pediment Group.
History center Executive Director Bill Lawrence said a relatively few number of images depict Native American, African-American, Latino and Asian San Diegans and other ethnic groups.
Many more photos of women, political protests and the border area are needed to give a fuller view of early San Diego, added Chris Travers, who heads the center’s photographic archives.
And so the history center is reaching out to the general public to bring in their photos at three scanning sessions starting Saturday.
Some will be used in the first book, due for publication in December, and the remainder may be added to the history center’s and U-T’s photo archives for future use.
“One of the things we get out of this is historic views that are more inclusive and representative of the various communities that make up the cultural fabric of San Diego,” Lawrence said.
Participants are asked to select 10 photos and fill out forms that identify who is pictured, and where and when they were taken. A consent form also must be signed to authorize publication and future use. The photos will then be scanned and returned on the spot.
Photos also may be ed at a scanning resolution of 4,200 pixels or 14 inches at 300 dpi.
Details are available at sandiego.pictorialbook.com. There is no charge.
Pediment President Chris Fenison, whose father started the company in 1997, said he will be scanning photos from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday and Tuesday. The history center is located in the Casa de Balboa, 1649 El Prado, just west of the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center. More information is available at sandiegohistory.org and (619) 232-6203.
“We’re looking for a slice of life,” Fenison said, “clubs, organizations, people going to parades down Broadway, store owners and their shops, hair dressers, as far back as we can find them and all the way through the 1930s.”
Of course, few 19th century San Diegans owned cameras — the popular Kodak Brownie didn’t appear until February 1900 — and professional photographers dominated the early decades of phtoography. The U-T previously donated its negative collection of some 1 million staff-shot images through about 1980 to the history center and retains a photo bank of several hundred thousand prints.
Those earliest images required people to stand very still because the time exposure was so much longer than modern cameras’ shutter speeds. Interiors were difficult to photograph as well. Many early photos were captured on glass plates rather than film and the history center retains hundreds of such plates in its collection.
Family scrapbooks and photo collections naturally focus on big events — a wedding, a birth, a vacation. But Fenison said he hopes the scanning project will uncover the unexpected.
“Part of the fun of coming into a community is we don’t know what we’re going to find,” he said.
Travers said the best pictures will show people in the context of their neighborhoods, not just a portrait that could have been shot anywhere.
And even if people don’t bring their photos in for scanning, they should still take time to note the who, what, when and where for later reference.
“Everybody has a box of photos that they have no idea of what they were doing there, other than the time period it might be in,” she said.
The book, “San Diego Memories: A Photographic History of the 1800s Through the 1930s,” is available at the pre-publication price of $29.95 and can be ordered at the San Diego pictorial book website.
It is expected to be organized around about 10 topical areas, from transportation to the military, but those could change once Pediment selects about 1,000 photos from the public and history center and narrows them down to about 200-300 for the book.
Since this year marks the 150th anniversary of the Union-Tribune, Fenison said he also plans to include a sampling from the newspaper’s current daily feature of historic front pages that appears on page B-2 and is available online at sandiegouniontribune.com/news/150-years/.
This is not Pediment’s first venture with a San Diego connection. In 2000 it published “Breen Damage,” a selection of political cartoons by Steve Breen, who was then working at the Asbury Park Press in New Jersey. He ed the U-T the next year and won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 to add to the one he received in 1998.
Plans call for a second book on San Diego covering the 1940s through the 1960s or ’70s and a third that will take history up to the present. Other local titles may be added as well.
Pediment has published more than 1,000 in the last 20 years and has branched out beyond historical memory books to include subjects as varied as Super Bowls, “Star Wars” and Hurricane Sandy.
Roger Showley is a San Diego freelance writer. He can be reached at (619) 787-5714; and [email protected]; Twitter: @rogershowley
