At a Tennessee antique store, chasing a new interest in film photography, Chase Bennett noticed a camera on the shelf. He picked it up, turned it over, and found undeveloped film still loaded inside. He shut it carefully, paid for it, and knew he had to get the roll developed.
When the roll came back, Bennett saw, unsurprisingly, a family he didn’t recognize. What struck him was how ordinary it all was—a family in the 1960s, gathered around the table, standing in a yard, looking at the camera the way people do when someone they love is holding it. These weren’t the moments that make the history books, certainly.
“I am the first-ever person to see these photographs,” he remembered thinking, and, “Who are these people?”
And, as is so often the case, that question became a calling. Bennett, a sound professional and documentary storyteller based in Boise, has spent the past year and a half building the Lost Memory Repository, an effort to rescue, restore, and return found photographs, film, and audio artifacts to some version of public memory. He finds them at flea markets and antique stores, online marketplaces and estate sales, in bins and boxes passed along by people who didn’t know what else to do with them. He develops undeveloped film, threads old reels through projectors, scans glass negatives with a macro lens, and manually adjusts the exposure on individual shots until the faces of strangers look like real people again.
“If you take film and run it through a projector and project it on a screen—it looks like real life,” said Bennett. “Many people have not had that experience. And even my expensive modern camera, known for insane dynamic range, cannot capture it.”
Often, he purchases photographs at the Antique World Mall in Boise. One face stopped him—a woman with a look he described as interesting and a very distinct face. He posted the photo to the Lost Memory Repository Instagram page, and an account with similar goals (Unknown Faces Collection) ran her image through an Ancestry-based facial recognition tool, which matched her photo to a Nampa High School yearbook. Now, she had a name—Frances Togstad, which became Frances DeCoursey when she married.
Bennett learned that she’d passed away in 2016 at the age of 93 and had no local and living relatives. He made a short video, put her name on it, and, to his surprise, received a message from a relative of Togstad. Now, when you Google search her name, her face comes up.
Bennett says that, in a sense, he felt like Frances had been revived—someone who may have otherwise been lost, at least locally. But thanks to his work, she lives on.
“Sometimes you’ll find something and before you know it, you’ve developed a deeper sense of who that person was—this stranger, these random photos—and there’s just something very fulfilling about that.”
What Bennett is really collecting, underneath the film and the glass plates and the expired rolls of 35mm, is evidence that regular people lived. Not the Beatles, not Marilyn Monroe, not the well-documented figures that fill out the historical record—just people, doing the things people have always done.
“You go through these photos and there are all these recurring things,” he said. “Two people in a rowboat on a lake. Apple bobbing. Playing limbo on the beach. Skipping rocks. We romanticize those things now, like they’re something we’ve lost. But those were just ordinary people’s lives,” he said. “But they matter. They mattered to the people in their life.”
Bennett thinks about this a lot—what today’s ordinary moments will look like in 60 years, who will find them, and what they’ll mean. He thinks about how photographs used to be un-curated—you printed everything, even the bad ones, because film was precious and waste felt wrong—and how that lack of curation produced something truer than anything we’re capturing now.
“We’re leaving such a trail. Our text messages, our emails. Somebody in the future is going to look at all of it. But we spend so much of our lives trying to keep our personal lives private. And why? I would be happy to just have a signature, or one sentence written by my great-great-grandmother,” he said.
Among his recent finds: a set of glass negatives—eight of them, eight by ten inches each, the resolution extraordinary. With the right scanning setup, you can zoom into a 1914 newspaper headline held by a man in the background of a family portrait, cross-reference it on newspapers.com, and establish the month the photo was taken. You can read the spines of the books on the shelf. You can identify the fireplace.
Several of the negatives appear to be from Boise—a photo from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 291 Union in front of a building he suspects is or was somewhere downtown. And, for all the technological barriers that stand between the present and the past (projectors no one knows how to thread, negatives people throw away because they already have the prints, audio tapes that require machines most people have never seen), there are plenty of ways it helps.
“I post something on the ‘History of Boise, Idaho – 1863 To Present’ page and ask if anyone knows when this was taken,” he said, “and people just figure it out. They narrow it down to the month from the height of a building under construction. Collective memory is an incredible thing.”
It fits, he thinks, with something particular about this city and its relationship to its own past. Boise was once a significant stop on the rail line—an artistic town, a place with nightlife and a sense of its own consequence. When the trains stopped and the cars came, something shifted. A feeling of isolation set in that never fully left.
“Boise has always felt a little like it doesn’t quite matter,” he said. “But it did. It does. When you go back through history, it’s all there.”
And, while Bennett is deeply interested in the community aspect of the project, there are personal connections too. He described a great-great-grandfather named John who played rugby in England and, according to a newspaper clipping he found on newspapers.com, helped his team win a championship sometime in the late 1800s. Bennett later identified the team as the 1910-11 Ely Football Club and, with a copy of group photograph he’d found, he set out to learn more.
The photo, which he posted to an English historical society’s page, was degraded through what appeared to be a microfilm scan of a newspaper reproduction of the original print.
He reached out to ask if there was a higher-resolution version. There wasn’t, or at least no one could help him find it. He zoomed in as far as he could. One of those faces is probably his ancestor. He can’t tell which one.
“Most of us are going to be erased from history,” he said. “I think that’s just true. I think a lot of people hold guilt that they don’t know their relatives as well as they should, and maybe that’s how these things get lost to begin with. Someone dies, there’s a box in the attic that no one’s looked at for 40 years. It’s just too hard.”
But, if Bennett has anything to do with it, more of us will be remembered than not.
That, for now, is what the Lost Memory Repository is: one person deciding that ordinary lives deserve to be found. Eventually, Bennett hopes to build a searchable archive—cross-referenced by name, location, school, and year. There’s always a bin of film reels from a neighbor without relatives and a box of glass negatives to be scanned. Audio to restore. People to find.
Look for the next installment of the Lost Memory Repository series in future issues of ID Guide!
