Why She Took Three Years To Return His Photo: A blog based on the story of a lost and then found photo.
A few years ago, an elderly woman in a nursing home asked her nurse if she could return a photo to its owner. The nurse figured the man in the picture must be dead by now, so she just put the photo aside. But when no one ever came looking for it, she found out who the man was and called his son.
The son had never heard of his father owning any photos of his mother and thought it must be someone else’s photo, but he took it home to look through old family albums. Sure enough, there was his mother in the old photo. He called her up and they compared notes on the woman with whom they shared a name.
The woman in the photo was named Barbara Pritchard, not Barbara Bixler as she is now known. Pritchard lived out her final years in San Diego while Bixler lived out hers in Sacramento. They didn’t know each other until this week when Bixler came down to San Diego to return the photo personally.
According to KGTV 10 , a local ABC affiliate station that covered this mystery story, “Bixler said she
This is the story of a lost and then found photo.
It begins with a painting.
That painting was painted by my father, an artist, some time in the early 1950s. I don’t know exactly when it was painted or why, but I do know that it was given to a girl he knew, and that she kept it until the late 1960s before she sent it back to him. I also know that she took three years to send it back, which is something I’ve always found strange. It’s not like he put a return address on the back of the thing. Why did she take so long?
Long after my father died in 1975, when I was well into adulthood, this painting resurfaced one day at my mother’s house (where I lived at the time). My mother had no idea where it had come from or who it might belong to. In those days we lived in a smallish town about an hour northwest of Toronto and there were no real estate agents or even much in the way of public transportation. In fact there were no telephones in our house: if you wanted to make a call you had to drive into town and use one of the pay phones at the post office or gas station. But such was life
In September of 2012, I lost a photograph of my father from the 1940s in Tokyo. I posted about it on Facebook, and his friends helped me look for it, but no one could find it. It was too big a city to search block by block, so I was forced to give up and accept the loss. Then in January of 2014 another friend of his found it in a box with other photos that he had received from someone who had cleaned out my father’s house after he died in 1986.
I did not take this well.
In fact, I took it so badly that I wrote a blog post about it: “The Story of My Lost Photo”
In that blog post, I described what happened when I found out where the photo was: “Of course, I called right away to tell him that we had found it. He told me that he would send a letter to the owner (who lives in Kyoto) with a request that she return the photo to us.”
I did not receive such a letter until almost three years later this week, on January 10th of 2017. That is why I am here today asking you for help. And before we get into the details of that request, let me tell you the rest of the
Posted by: Deanna
April 24, 2009
I just discovered that I have a blog. Bloggers are writers of web logs. This is my story about a photograph I received from my husband when he was on tour in Iraq in 2004, and what happened to it after he gave it to me.
I was walking down the street, enjoying the morning sunshine. I saw a woman out walking with her dog and I smiled and said hello as I passed by. She smiled back and we both carried on with our separate business. About five minutes later, she passed me again as she walked her dog in the opposite direction. Again we smiled at each other, but this time she stopped to talk to me.
She had something to tell me and it was important. She told me that she recognized me from somewhere, but couldn’t quite remember where. She thought it might be important, so could she come around to my place later that afternoon?
We arranged a time and I went on my way. Not really thinking too much about why this lady wanted to see me or what about.
When she arrived at my place later that afternoon, she introduced herself as my student from three years earlier at college. Three years earlier was also when I took a picture of her for one of my classes.
I had never given that photograph back to her; nor had I even thought about it since then.
So here was the photo in question:
It’s a simple black-and-white portrait of this young woman dressed in her graduation gown… an innocent snapshot taken three
A few years ago I lost my wallet. It had been a long time since I last lost something so important to me and I was in a bit of a panic.
It had been just over three years since I took the picture of my friend, which was now going to be, to all intents and purposes, gone forever. How could something like that just disappear?
Two days later I received an email from Lisa. She had found my wallet, she told me. In a bin on the street where I had dropped it when it was raining. And inside it was the photo of my friend.
Tears welled up in my eyes as she told me how she had taken the time to find out who the woman in the photo was, how she had tracked me down online and how she had sent me an email on Flickr asking if it was indeed my wallet that she found.
She said that if this were her, she would have kept the photo and not cared about finding its owner again. The story surprised me, but then again it didn’t. Because Lisa is one of those people that you like instantly. She might be kind at heart but you can’t help but think that there’s a streak of mischief in her as well; someone who
Recently I was contacted by a woman who had found my photo on her husband’s facebook page. She asked me if I had taken the photo and was wondering if she could buy a copy.
I had taken this photo in December 2008 at the Soho Apple store in New York City. I used a discontinued version of the iPhone (the 2G) and it was my first time using it, so the image quality is not that good. I used to be a professional event photographer, and I was photographing an event at the nearby Apple store. This lady saw me taking pictures with my new phone and asked me to take her picture as well. She wanted to have a picture of herself to show off that she now owned an iPhone.
I didn’t know about facebook then and uploaded the photos directly to flickr, where they sat for three years until I uploaded them to my own blog. From there, they found their way onto the internet when someone decided to post them on reddit .
The photo has been up on Facebook for over two years, but only now did it get discovered by someone searching for photos of themselves on Facebook. And only now did she get in touch with me.