The photography of Joan Shelton
Kodachrome, Vivian Maier, and holding on to photos
It was spring of 2017 and I had been working at the shop for almost six months. It was my first job since finishing university, and it was selling things that I had a keen knowledge and love for: cameras.
What I quickly learned was that selling cameras was actually only a small part of the job. A lot of the time I was taking in people’s photo orders. This would range from helping people print off their granddaughter’s birthday party photos from their (far too old) digital point and shoot camera at the shop’s instant photo kiosk, to delicately packing up one hundred year old photos (likely the customer’s long forgotten relatives), and sending them to the photo shop’s lab for digitizing.
While so much of the retail world can feel commodified, this part of the job felt different. It wasn’t that I was selling clothes, coffee, or even the cameras (though I was selling cameras). I was holding people’s photos and memories.
As I started my shift, my co-worker Damian stopped me before I even got behind the counter:
“Hey man, there was this lady that came in and she didn’t want any of her photo slides. I looked through them and kept some for you but I put the rest of them in the garbage ” (a paraphrase).
Before I go on, a quick word on the basics of analog photography:
For film photography there are three main types of film, black and white, colour, and slide. Black and white and colour are both negative films. Negative films, just as the name implies, contains the negative of the image. Slide film is where the photo is already the positive image. While you can store slide film in film strips just like negative film, slide film is usually cut up frame by frame and put into a slide holder. These slides are then able to be put into a slide projector and viewed on a wall.
I scurried to the back of the store to take a look at the slides that Damian had kept and shone a light underneath them. All of the sudden, the dark image centre burst into colour. I quickly looked through about the dozen slides, my excitement growing.
Coming to the last one, I looked around, wondering if the ones that Damian had thrown out were still around. I spotted a fresh garbage bag sitting on top of the larger garbage pile that was suppose to go out later that day. Opening it, I saw more slides with the words “Kodachrome” on them.
Kodachrome is a legendary type of slide film. Developed and released by Kodak in 1935, Kodachrome was adored by photographers for its true-to-life tones. Most importantly, (and this would come in handy in my case) it retains those colours after many, many decades. Paul Simon wrote a whole song about it:
Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s
A sunny day, oh yeah
That’s why it was many photographer’s top choice, including Steve McMurray, who was a longtime photojournalist who worked for National Geographic. He took that famous photo. Yes, you know the one. THAT one.
When Kodak discontinued Kodachrome in 2009, McMurray was also the person who shot the last roll. This event was so seismic that the closing of the last Kodachrome developing lab in the US was the premise for the aptly titled film “Kodachrome,” featuring Jason Sudeikis.
During my short time working, I had seen my fair share of old slides that customers brought in. In most of these cases, the chemicals had expired, leaving a “red shift” of sorts on the slides.
The garbage bag slides exhibited none of this. The pictures were true to life, a testament to Kodachrome. Putting each slide up to the light revealed a small colourful world. Some of the slides had small markings, dates and places, etched onto the sides of the cardboard frames.
Through the images and descriptions, I started to see a trip take form, likely in Europe, sometime in the 1960s. Alongside indiscernible scenic snap shots, there were photos of London’s Big Ben and Venice’s Mark Square.
What caught my eye weren’t picturesque vistas but the intimate shots of strangers, both individuals and groups. It’s like I could almost imagine the photographer striking up a conversations with the subject(s) while still letting them carry on with whatever they were doing. Eventually, my eye landed on one of the small slide boxes labelled “Joan Shelton.” The excitement of discovering these photos and now attaching a name to them, I thought “I wonder if this was what it felt like to have discovered Vivian Maier’s photography?”
Vivian Maier, a nanny in the 1950’s, took over 100,000 photos. She was reclusive, never married, and her photos were never shown or displayed anywhere. She hadn’t even developed many of her film rolls. Only after her death was her extensive photo archive discovered and shared with the world. Maier is now considered one of the great street photographers of the 20th century.
Within photographer’s circles, it is almost cliche to hope that any collection of negatives or slides you come across will be the next “Vivian Maier.”
Joan Shelton was no Vivian Maier.
In total, there were about 300 slides not thousands and thousands of photos and negatives.
However, I had the feeling that similarly to Maier, Joan Shelton’s photography needed to be recognized somehow, or shared. Like Maier, whose photos ushered viewers back to a unique time of the 1950s in America (New York and Chicago mostly), Shelton’s photos took me back to a postwar Europe, and the transitory period of not having quite shed its old world looks, habits, and traditions.
These slides couldn’t be thrown out. However, not knowing exactly what to do, I packed them all up into the fresh garbage bag, and left them on a shelf in the back of the store.
.
.
.
A couple of weeks later, someone appeared in the shop to print out photos prints that she had ordered, and I was called to ring her through. After asking for her name, I paused and looked up. “Joan Shelton?” It was my Vivian Maier moment, except here was Joan, alive, standing in front of me.
After disappearing to the back room and emerging back I showed her the garbage bag of slides. Laying out the slides on the counter’s built in light table, I told her how much I appreciated the different perspectives and angles in all of them. She seemed pleased and appreciated my excitement. She gestured to one of the slides displaying a red Mini Cooper, mentioning that her and her friend drove all over Europe in that car.
Joan had short white hair and her face was wrinkled, but jovial. Signs of experience, not wear. I would guess that she was probably in her late 70’s or early 80’s. Her round cheeks gave her a youthful look. She had a resting face that smiled and her voice was kind, yet inquisitive. The kind of person who talked to everyone as if they were her own family member.
After our conversation and seeing the slides again, I discussed the possibility of scanning, to view them better and she thought it was a good idea. It seemed like my enthusiasm made her interested in looking through the slides again, though she initially disregarded them. I helped place the order for the slides to be sent to the photo lab to be scanned and after about a week they arrived back. I was happy to have reminded her of the value of her photos and memories, and suggested the importance of being able to enjoy them again.
It would be about another year and a half until until I saw Joan again.
This time, she brought the slides, but told me that she had no use for them anymore. Perhaps after viewing the digital scans, she thought that she had no use for the physical slides, or perhaps she was downsizing and sorting through her home. After making sure Joan was certain, I put them on the shelf in the back of the store, again.
Later, as I was leaving my shift, I passed where they sat. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with them. I just knew that I had to keep them: because they were objectively beautiful photos, because of Vivian Maier, and because of Kodachrome.
One slow work shift at the shop, I decided to take a camera and close-up lens and “scan” some of the slides myself.
Within the photography world, this is known as DSLR scanning or camera scanning. It involves setting the negative strip or slide holder on some light source (light table) and taking a close up picture of the individual frame on the light table.
Months later, I was on the phone with Joan about another photo order and asked her permission to show people her scanned slides, which she eagerly gave to me. I didn't have grand plans in mind, but felt I should ask regardless. Sometime later in my manager’s annual tradition of organizing the back of the shop, I found myself taking the slides home. They moved homes from the garbage bag to a rubber maid bin, and joined some other forgotten camera equipment on the shelves of my apartment.
During Covid when everyone was developing new hobbies and creating new Instagram pages for said hobbies, I put some of the slide scans onto a new page that I created and called it @walkonthewildslide. It was a small project; it didn’t really go anywhere.
I left the photo shop in 2022. While I was grateful for the transition to new opportunities, I realized that I wouldn’t be seeing some of the familiar faces I had seen over the past five and a half years of working there, including Joan. All I had was a name, and the slides of a Europe trip in the 1960s.
Every so often, when I was organizing my photography equipment, I would find the slides and I wondered what to do with them. As the years past, I contemplated the reason for keeping them. I had no connection to Joan; why did I still have them?
Because the scenery was stunning.
And because of Vivian Maier.
And because of Kodachrome.
I hadn’t seen Joan in years, however the idea of her being out there in the world, where I might happen to bump into her and be able to ask her more questions about the slides, had this phantasmic permanence to it.
In late 2023, I googled “Joan Shelton Winnipeg.” An obituary was the first result.
She was killed in a hit and run in 2021. A CBC article, explained that she was crossing a street downtown on foot to get to the library. She was hit by a truck and while the people around her stopped to help, the person in the vehicle did not. She died of her injuries later that day.
Joan never married or had any children of her own; she was survived by other relatives, all of whom were devastated, including a great-niece who contributed to the above article.
Maybe this was why I was storing these slides. I was suddenly determined to connect with some of these family members and return Joan’s slides to them.
In a pre-internet age, this would be a much longer task, but after a simple Facebook search I was able to find her great niece, Kirstin, and reached out to her.
It’s 2024 and we finally agreed to meet up. I had already begun this post, so I shared it with her shortly after returning the slides to her. She responded with this note:
I love the way you described my Aunty Joan. She was hoping to do some more travelling once Covid was over, as that and art had always been passions of hers. She was the kind of person who loved to hear other people’s stories, and who would never be in pictures because she wanted to be the one taking them. She was such a kind soul. I wish she knew how much of an impact she made on everyone, from her family to complete strangers.
Wow! What a story! Thanks for share this!
Michael, I enjoyed your heartwarming story and Joan’s images! My favorite is the one with the red car. Kodachrome was indeed a one of a kind film. The colors come alive and they glow when viewed in a light table. Alex Webb even cherished his last roll and was intentional on how he wanted to capture the last 36 frames. Although Steve McCurry has been controversial the past several years, there is no doubt he has a good command in capturing color. Thank you for sharing!