Ocean Springs photographer reflects on lives of images

Photographer Beth Riley brought to the interview a hand-tinted black-and-white portrait of two children sitting on steps.

In the picture, the girl couldn’t care less and is looking away. The little boy is laughing so hard he’s covering his mouth.

“This is the one that started me off as a professional,” Riley said as she made her way to an office in the back of a building she owns downtown, where Riley&Riley Photography used to be.

In 1993, the picture won first place in the Camera South Photo Invitational children’s category.

“That’s when I thought, ‘Ok, maybe I can do this,’ ” Riley said. “I loved this picture, and I was glad someone else loved it, too.”

Riley remained fascinated with children and their expressions throughout her 20-year career as a photographer on the Coast.

She photographed newborns and followed them through adulthood as parents brought them to her studio year after year.

She covered weddings — something she stopped later in her career because of the stress — and followed those same couples through the birth of their children and later the children as adults.

She remembers the story behind one portrait after another in her office. The little boy in a cowboy hat, red bandana and diaper grew up and joined the Marines. The exquisite bride is now divorced, “but I think her mother wants the wedding pictures.”

The young woman with a flower in her hair. That picture changed the way the young woman perceived herself.

“She never thought she was pretty until she saw this picture. Her father said it gave her so much more self-confidence,” Riley said.

“I loved everything about photography,” Riley said with a wistful look, “even being in the darkroom. It was a way to get away from everything.”

But it’s over. Riley is in the process of closing her doors and giving her work back to the people she photographed.

For a nominal fee of $25, anyone who hired Riley through the years can have their images back — all of them — in the form of negatives or CDs, depending on when they were taken. There are well-known families, stunning weddings, Gene Taylor and the Christmas cards through his political career, Brett Favre in a wedding.

A reputation for quality

Riley was known for her live beach portraits, and for the 1990s portraits of mothers and young children in white lace gowns. Both were styles she picked up from other photographers.

She took her time with portraits on location.

“I wanted to create a memory to go with the picture,” she said. “In a studio, with a green screen, it’s about the photographer and his technology. I wanted it to be about the family and their day.”

That’s probably why she still remembers the faces and the tales that go with the pictures.

What flashed to mind was a photo shoot with the children of Billy Hewes, who is the now mayor of Gulfport.

They were fairly young, and flies descended on them on the beach.

They were swatting like mad, she said. And so to get the picture, she let them fight the flies until she was ready, then said, “OK, stop.”

They froze for the second she needed.

“I told them, OK, now you can swat,” she said. “And I got a picture of that, too.”

The Hewes family wanted it all as part of the package.

In the days after Katrina

The Sun Herald photographed Riley at her home on Ocean Springs Harbor in the days after Katrina in 2005.

The irony to the ending of Riley’s career is that her studio on Government Street and all of the thousands of images it contains was safe from the surge. Her home and all of her personal photographs and portraits were not.

In the news picture, she is standing in front of the home that would be bulldozed, holding photographs that couldn’t be salvaged.

Some were stuck together. Some were never found. The ones that meant the most were in a drawer in a chest that held water for a week. She’ll never forget the smell.

“That’s why I value this so much,” she said, about returning photographs to others. “For a couple of years after Katrina, that’s all we did was replace photographs.”

Earlier this month, she was able to return pictures to two families of people who have died and two others who had lost their pictures to Katrina.

Her work is mentioned in the novel “Watermark,” which is about Katrina and written by Coast attorney Michael Hewes.

She brought the book to the interview and read what Hewes wrote about salvaging the family portrait. She has taken the portraits for years for the Hewes family on the Ocean Springs beach.

The book is fiction, but it recounts a real-life experience of Michael Hewes returning to his Gulfport home, blown through by the surge.

She read: “He came to the remains of a door hanging onto its upper hinge and immediately recognized the corner of a frame, wedged between a couch and the old cast iron tub. He picked it up and turned it over and for the second time that day, his throat tightened up. This was it.”

In the book, he describes the portrait Riley had taken of the Hewes family – the children sitting in the sand wearing khaki pants and white shirts, “strategically posed.”

It was mud-smeared, discolored and some of the emulsion worn off, but otherwise in fine shape. Riley said Hewes wrote that of all the things he had discovered so far in his search, the portrait meant the most by far.

“That makes me feel so good,” she said. “That’s why I’m doing this.”

For the ones who pick up negatives, she’s helping them find labs that still print from them.

She’s charging the filing fee to weed out people who are serious about wanting their pictures before she goes into the stacks of boxes and rows of portals in the office and through the computer files to locate the work.

The studio is gone, rented out by Paddles Up sporting goods. Her office is now arranged for the purpose of disseminating.

Changes can be painful

Photography has evolved to the digital world. She laments that maybe negatives will come back like vinyl records. There’s a better sense of permanence and concrete way to archive them.

But in the meantime, graduating high school girls don’t even want prints any more.

They want something they can post on Facebook, she says. She tells them that downgrades the allure of the work.

Toward the end of her career, they quit printing wallet-size photos. People have thousands of digital photos on their phones and don’t carry photos in their wallets anymore, she said.

But these same people fail to archive their photographs, and when they lose them, they are gone, she said.

“Where will their pictures be preserved, on a CD, on a jump drive, in the cloud?” she asked. “What if the cloud fails?

“They’re doing a Katrina on themselves and don’t even know it.”

Switching gears, she looked around the office to a portrait of a young Brett Favre, groomsman at a wedding. He is smiling with the bride’s brother, a young man who had a job at McDonald’s in Long Beach. That was 1997, and the young man came back to Riley for wallet-size images of that portrait.

He said he got tired of explaining to customers that he had his picture made with the popular Brett Favre, so he just started handing out the wallet-size images.

Amid the faces frozen in time, she whispered to herself: “I don’t know what I’ll do with them all. I think half of my negatives of weddings will not be picked up because of divorce.”

If the negatives aren’t claimed by the end of July, they will be in a dumpster.

It was her husband who wanted to retire.

First she gave up the studio and continued to do portraits outside. Then she quit altogether, and they began to travel and spend more time with the grandchildren.

“I really never planned on being a professional photographer,” she said. “I never dreamed I would have a studio, and I accomplished that. I am so happy that I did, because I loved it. It was just fabulous. And I feel like I have given people something of importance and of value in their life. I really do.

“When I was in the studio and selling all the equipment, an ah-ha moment came when I thought, ‘I can let this go, because I have accomplished this,’ ” she said. “I’ve been much more like that since Katrina.”

This story was originally published June 21, 2016 at 8:19 PM with the headline "Ocean Springs photographer reflects on lives of images."