AFTER IMAGE

Lost Treasure

GERMAN CREATIVE DIRECTOR Jennifer Skupin found a box of slides at a Dutch flea market in 2008. After scanning them, she found that she had stumbled upon a collection of beautiful color photographs of Alaska taken in the 1950s and 1960s—but without any identifying information of the people and places featured in the shots. “As 2020 drew to a close,” journalist Francesca Street recounts in an article posted on CNN Travel on January 28, 2021, “Skupin rediscovered the original slides, stored in a box, while she was cleaning out a closet. In our current age of social media and hyperconnectivity, she wondered if she might finally be able to track down the photographer or subjects.”

With the hope of learning more about the photos, Skupin published the full set of images to a Google Drive and shared her story in the CNN article, "Can you solve the mystery of these 60-yearold travel photos?" In the piece, she encouraged people to view the drive and provide any information they might have. Within hours, comments started popping up. People identified family members, classmates, friends, and even themselves as children. They named locations and shared stories of beloved places and people, images of long lost memories resurfaced and crowdsourced by Skupin's post.

To read the full story and view the collection of photos, visit cnn.com/travel.

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FORUM

THE MAGAZINE OF THE ALASKA HUMANITIES FORUM SPRING 2021

Extra Tough: Women of the North

Francis Usugan of Toksook Bay holds dried seal gut in an untitled 1980 photograph by James Barker. The image is part of an exhibition at the Anchorage Museum, reviewed in this issue by Laureli Ivanoff.