My father-in-law was a professional film editor. As you can imagine, his photos are excellent. He taught classes for many years, won contests, and gave travel talks at the libraries in the area.
My husband (also a semi-professional photographer) took all his film, slides and scans when he died, with the intent to sort it and find a home for things. Unfortunately, my husband passed away only a few years after his dad. I am left with an entire bedroom full of prints, slides, negatives and digitized media.
I’d like to do the right thing with it. My lovely FIL traveled the globe and shot images everywhere. However, I know that his pictures of Cambodia are probably like anyone else’s pictures.
Should I throw it all away? Are there stock photo houses that would like it? I’m not looking to make money (although I wouldn’t turn it down if offered). I’d just like to see his life’s work go somewhere. There is only one brother and he has no interest in any of it.
Advice?
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Usually you can offer the photos to whoever or whatever is in the photo. Person, establishment, city, brand, etc. You may also offer it as an archive for the city. But you gotta sit down and sort them out. You’ll eventually see themes here and there that can be compiled to a book of some sorts. Go at it, savour the time travel.
Did your father-in-law attend a university? If so they might be interested in acquiring his work for their archives/permanent collection. You could also reach out to the university gallery director and see if they’d be interested in an exhibit of the Cambodia collection.
Unless they were famous, you probably won’t get much money from the photos/negatives. That being said I personally think that a great way to create some sort of legacy for them would be to release them under a Creative Commons license. This way people who find the work useful can utilize the images and your FIL’s photography will live on that way
Scan it and show it to us!
Keep his memory alive
Upload it to Flickr or somewhere