Digital archivists find historic Haines photos in VHS tape case
- Chilkat Valley News
- 39 minutes ago
- 4 min read
“Taku for Two” duo focuses on the history of Juneau and Southeast Alaska
By Jacob Dye
For the Chilkat Valley News
Digital archivists Elizabeth Kell and Kevin Allen have been capturing forgotten visions of Alaska history by digitizing aging VHS tapes for nearly two years. A recent find has left them seeking the subjects of a series of images with a decades-old depiction of Haines.
On the YouTube channel “Taku for Two,” Kell and Allen publish the products of their work to preserve VHS tapes and other obsolete media. Their findings — largely concentrated in Juneau and the immediate surroundings of Southeast Alaska — include everything from the first broadcasts of KTOO-TV and historical documentaries to commercials broadcast to Alaska televisions more than 50 years ago.
“There’s so much good stuff out there that people have either forgotten about or they just assumed ‘oh, it was on a VHS tape’ or ‘oh, it was on a broadcast U-Matic (videocassette).’ We’re never going to see it again,” Kell said Monday. “We can try to get that back and get that back out there.”
The work started with an effort to reclaim a home video of Allen’s mother in a 1990s logging camp in Hobart Bay near Petersburg. They decided to try the process themselves, and have since developed an interest in uncovering recent Alaska history “trapped” on tapes, records and cassettes. Now the pair take in tapes from community members, go spelunking in thrift shops and Kell said “pretty much are glued to eBay … looking for Alaska content to digitize.”
It was from some unassuming origin like that, either a box found on the side of the road or a lot purchased from a thrift store, Kell said, where a tape about the installation of a skylight had entered their collection. It was “not very interesting,” she said, and was left to the side for a while. On second glance, Kell found a set of six photos tucked into the tape’s case — she suspects they were put in the case while things were being moved and were forgotten.
The images looked like Juneau, or at least Southeast Alaska, Kell said, but when she posted them to a Facebook group on Sept. 6, people quickly identified them as being likely of Haines. They show a series of campsites, a dog and a group of people posing before a set of mountains.
Some commenters offered suggestions as to the identities of a couple of the people in the photos, but Kell said that in following up those leads she’d heard that those people had recently died.
Too often, Kell said, when she finds an anonymous video or photo, she finds that the subject has died. There’s still value, though, in connecting with family members who might be interested in a new image of a loved one or a new opportunity to hear their voice. Kell’s background is in anthropology, and she said that work resonates with her current efforts as an archivist in that the people in her tapes and photos often are still living and can bring more stories and context if the right questions are asked.
So many of the findings, Kell said, are things people remember, but may never have thought they’d get to see again. Like a commercial broadcast decades ago or a vision of family members once thought lost.
Kell says the work is significant because it presents unique perspectives into the way local communities have changed over time. Recovering old video is also “important because at some point it was important to someone else.” Film and filming wasn’t cheap, she said, and even just a quick 30-second commercial is something that someone put their time and effort into.
It’s not possible to seek out an important recording, Kell said. The reality is sifting through hours of content in search of something remarkable. Sometimes something interesting is nestled among even the most mundane tape.
“There’s 20 million recordings of ‘General Hospital’ out there,” she said. “But this one’s special because this shows how the Mendenhall Mall used to look. It’s finding these things kind of in surprising locations.”
When a tape is brought to be digitized, Kell said, they sometimes need to be cleaned of mold or otherwise repaired even before they can slide into a VCR. She and Allen have a selection of VCRs because not every tape gets along with every piece of hardware. They use other equipment to adjust the sharpness of the image, the color of the output and the sound mixing. They can even adjust the rate at which the images on the film are relayed back in the final product. That product won’t ever be a glistening high definition — Kell and Allen are doing their best to preserve decades old tape that have degraded — but they work to preserve the video “as good as it’s going to get.”
Kell and Allen can be reached at takufortwo@gmail.com with questions or with information about the subjects of the recovered Haines photos. Their archived video can be found at “Taku for Two” on YouTube.
• This article originally appeared in the Chilkat Valley News.
