Found at a swap meet in Huntington Beach, purchased for $5, and gently taken from an old trunk before being lovingly scanned and posted, the Compton Collection documents the momentum of a Californian dynasty. Brownlee wanted me to specifically mention the Geordi LaForgette visible in a recent batch posted from the collection.
The photos---which are at turns funny, confusing, and even beautiful---are works of intense mystery to me. Foremost among my musings are the circumstances in which an entire photographic family legacy (near 400 photos in the Flickr pool alone) ends up being flogged at some flea market. These photos survived half a century, presumably treasured and transported by their keepers for over half a century, only to be nearly thrown away.
Is everyone dead? Were the lives documented so intensely sad as to be gratefully shoved off on some stranger, and forgotten? The family in the photos seems to be huge; surely there is someone to whom these would represent a vast familial wealth.
The City of Compton Collection [Flickr]
