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Prima Persona
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The family archive

Your family’s photographs, letters and papers, scanned at archival resolution in your home, named in your own words, and kept for good in a private archive.

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Gathering the mementos

Photographs carry more of these films than anything else we bring

Gather what you can find

  • As many photographs and home videos as possible
  • Prints, albums, slides and negatives, clippings, certificates and medals
  • Letters, diaries and recipes in their own hand
  • Paintings and drawings, objects that carry a story

We take care of the rest

  • We send you a simple guide to help you sort them
  • And a questionnaire to better understand the people we’ll interview
  • We copy every print and album page at your table, at archival resolution
  • Afterward, the planning, the questions, the filming, and the edit are ours

Beside every film

Every film begins with what your family has kept.

A film draws on a few hundred photographs, yet most families hold thousands, with slides, cine film, letters and papers. Alongside the film we copy all of it in your home, repair what time has damaged, and record who is in each picture while there is still someone to ask.

The film tells the story. The archive keeps what it was made from.

Folded into the visits we already make

How the archive is made

  1. A first lookFirst visit

    We see everything the family has kept, from albums and shoeboxes to the reels nobody has watched in years, and note what matters most and what is fragile.

  2. The captureSecond visit

    An afternoon at your table with our own lights and copy stand. Albums are photographed page by page, with any writing on the backs. No one needs to sit for it.

  3. Naming the photographsFirst day of filming

    Over prints made for the occasion, the person at the heart of the film tells us who, when and where. It is the gentlest hour of the day, and often gives the film its best stories.

Care

Handled as the originals they are

  • 600ppiPrints
  • 2,400ppiSlides and negatives
  • 16bitUntouched masters

Originals stay at home

Everything is copied at your table and logged back into its box before we leave. Only cine film and videotape travel, under the same signed log, to a named laboratory.

Repaired, never altered

We mend tears, fading and stains by hand and keep the grain. We never open closed eyes, remove a person or change an expression, and every change can be undone.

Copied to FADGI

The guidelines America’s cultural institutions use, with a color target in the first frame of every session.

Named in your words

Who, when and where are written into each file, so they travel with it. We never run facial recognition.

Yours to keep

What your family keeps

Our promise

Everything we scan is kept for good

Every master, copy and restored file, with the names written in, is kept on our servers, safe and ready for you to retrieve at any time, whether that is next month or many years from now. Ask, and we send it to you or to anyone in the family you choose.