I was recently surprised (in a melancholy sort of way) to find these forty-year-old color negatives stored with a collection of more recent photos. The elderly gentleman frozen in the frame with me in the second is my namesake Lewis Edward Wadsworth, Jr., who would die four years later. These photos were taken by my mother with a Konica C35AF, the first consumer autofocus 35mm camera (a gift from Lewis Jr. that eventually passed to me). Unfortunately, the technology was not very strong: in both photos the camera locked on the trilithons in the background, and the foreground subjects are rather unfocused. I re-photographed the originals as RAW-format digital negatives. As is often the case with old color negatives like this, I think the compositions work better when processed as black-and-white.

Incidentally, I should hope that the second photograph with Lewis Jr. puts to rest any of those pesky recurrent rumors to the effect that there is only one Lewis Edward Wadsworth — who increments the Roman numeric suffix in his name every forty or so years in order to disguise his abnormally long lifespan. See? It’s not true. People are so credulous!