This ongoing investigation traces the history of a box of twelve 8mm home movies that document the highlights of a family of four in mid-twentieth-century America. Using the handwritten notes on the reel boxes as clues, our team traveled to Quincy, Illinois to photograph the neighborhood in which these movies take place. The house, high school, and major landmarks still exist and, according to Google and Facebook, so do the children. This project has been temporarily postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but the second part of this project will be to make contact with the surviving members of the family to understand more about who they are and how these movies were sold on eBay and added to my vast archive of 8mm home movies.
This project is funded through a grant awarded through the College of Arts and Media at the University of Colorado Denver. The Dean's Innovation Award for Collaborative, Creative and Scholarly Work funds collaborative student projects that cross disciplines. I want to thank my team members Chelsea Minter-Brindley and Tomas Bernal and our advisor Carol Golemboski for all their hard work and dedication to this project.
