Old photos of the Mississippi Coast are as good, maybe better, than history books
A young man holds a rattlesnake in a Long Beach pit. A dark-skinned woman in a uniform makes up a hotel bed. The dirt-caked face of a driver smiles at a Pass Road dirt racetrack. Biloxi shrimp boat turned charter is used to catch cobia.
A photograph is worth 1,000 words. That’s no cliché.
The Mississippi Coast images described above revive forgotten 20th Century scenes.
But will future generations be able to have similar 21st Century throwbacks? The sheer volume of digital images created every day by people with smartphones that combine cameras and communication is mind-boggling. This, however, is a ponderable for another time.
Today is about those wonderful old images on real photographic paper that many of us have squirreled away in boxes, drawers and attics. Sometimes these were passed down by earlier generations and feature people whose identities are lost because no one thought to write a name.
But look at the background. What is that building? That street? Where is that downtown? What festival is going on? Does the length of that dress or the lapel of that suit document fashion changes?
The old photographs show us nuances, changes and stark realities that are difficult to capture in minimal words. In today’s lingo, old photographs emit virtual words. So how many virtual words do you have tucked away?
This thought about the importance of preserving old photographs and donating them to a history library or other local archive re-occurred to me this week when I studied an ongoing exhibit at the Biloxi Public Library’s Local History & Genealogy Department.
This is where many of the historic records of the Harrison County Library System are preserved, and where the public and researchers show up to dig through newspaper microfilm, subject files, public records, old books and, yes, old photographs.
Libraries, whether they be public or connected to a college archive or some state department, are the repositories of much of our past in images. That is thanks to everyday people who generously donate images that help tell a community’s story.
Such is the case of the Chauncey T. Hinman Collection at the Biloxi library. Hinman was a professional photographer and writer whose Coast images document one of the most interesting growth-and-change periods from the post-World War II prosperity of the 1950s to recovery after 1969’s Hurricane Camille, to the slumps and burgeoning tourism industry that followed into the ‘80s.
The Hinman family realized his 40,000 negatives, slides, publications and photos were worth preserving. That’s a large collection for a public library to catalog and preserve, but the staff realized such a collection augments their local history mission
E.W. Suarez, history library research assistant and now lead conservator of the Hinman Collection, applied to Mississippi Humanities Council for a grant to properly house the items and to digitize the images so they’d be available to the public. Library patrons pitched in for a scanner.
The collection made its debut in December with 20 prints hung on the library’s walls. With that many images, it’ll be awhile before everything is digitized, but some already are useful as the Coastal Land Trust restore the Bayou Auguste tidal marsh.
My opening paragraph scenes are Hinman images. During World War II, he worked as a civilian at the Naval Seabee Base in Gulfport and met his wife, Betty McGehee. By 1950, he’s back on the Coast as a promoter of Coast tourism, documenting with photographs for newspapers, magazines and his own advertising agency.
“The importance of this collection is that it’s not just one subject — it’s everything,” says Suarez. “He did aerials, industrial photography, festivals, interiors of stores and businesses, exhibits for lawsuits. He captured the changing Coast of the mid-20th century.”
Suarez is intrigued by one photograph of a black woman, a domestic at Alamo Plaza, making a bed. He hopes someone will identify her because she represents a part of the Coast’s black contribution story rarely preserved.
Hinman, of course, is not the only photographer who documented the 20th century Coast, and they all deserve credit for their great work.
Preservation is the key. Every collection, be it professional caches or something small like a few family photos that show what Main Street once looked like, should be conserved. The 21st century brings us great digitizing tools that preserved images, even after the photo paper crumbles with age. Such modern techniques make the images more readily available to the public and researchers.
For decades, I’ve illustrated this Sunday missive because of the lending generosity of individual photograph/postcard collectors, families going through their stashes and those who oversee libraries and archives.
Photographs are vital to telling our Coast story. If you have such image treasurers, consider preserving and sharing them with future generations.
Kat Bergeron, a veteran reporter specializing in Gulf Coast history and sense of place, is retired from the Sun Herald. She writes the Mississippi Coast Chronicles as a freelance correspondent. She can be reached at bergeronkat@gmail.com or at Southern Possum Tales, PO Box 33, Barboursville VA 22923.