Corinne’s Slides

My wife and I spend a lot of our weekends antiquing. Even when we come home empty-handed, it’s worth it — there’s something about walking through other people’s abandoned lives that feels both voyeuristic and respectful at the same time. You’re seeing what mattered enough to keep, what didn’t matter enough to hold onto when someone downsized or died or just got tired of dusting.

Last Sunday, March 15th, 2026, we were at Le’ Stuff Antiques Inc. in Hillsboro, Oregon, which is one of those sprawling stores with plenty of secrets worth discovering. Amongst a shelf of old camera gear, cases, and photos, I found a box for an old Kodak flash but inside were boxes and boxes of 35mm slides. I’d just finished (re)scanning all the slides from my family collection so I thought what the hell, I really wanted to see what were on them, so that was my purchase for the day.

I don’t know anything about Corinne except her name shows up on many of the boxes, sometimes with one surname, sometimes with another. Don’t know if she’s still alive. Don’t know if she took these pictures but I suspect she did since most of them are of a young boy or boys, so I’m guessing those are her sons.

I’ve been scanning them for about a week, being teased with hints into this person’s life but never knowing much more than they lived in Salmon, Idaho, likely in the 1940’s and 1950’s, that they likely had two sons, might have been married then divorced or widowed, and seemed to know how to use a camera better than the average Joenette.

I’m posting the scans from each of the boxes here, unedited, not because I think they’re historically important or because I have some grand artistic vision about found photography, but because I think every life is important and like my own family photographs, I don’t think these should fall into the dust bin of history.

Cheers,
Aslynn