Shahed Dowlatsahi, University of Chicago, South Side Home Movie Project, Summer 2017, NEH
In the Summer of 2017, at the University of Chicago's South Side Home Movie Project, I worked primarily on preserving a collection of about 70 small-gauge home movies shot by the Patton family from the 1940s through the 1970s. The Patton collection shows a middle-class African American family from the Chicago's South Side celebrating many Christmases, taking trips to National Parks out west, indulging their obsession with helicopters, and boarding cruise ships for international travel to exotic locales. By the end of the summer I had inspected, rehoused, digitized, and completed the first round of cataloging for approximately seventy of 8mm and Super-8 films in the collection. The digital access files of these incredible home movies will soon be accessible through a public-facing portal of the project's Collective Access database.
University of Chicago, South Side Home Movie Project
