I bought a box of slides and photographs through an online auction with a Los Angeles auction house. Most boxes are birthdays and station wagons. This one was not. The first frame I held up to the light was a young woman from about 1970. Blonde. Still. The kind of face that stops a scan. A touch of the Mona Lisa, perhaps? Not Twiggy. Closer to Nico if Nico had been from Helsinki and still knew how to look happy. High northern bones. A professional light on her, even when the picture was supposed to be ordinary. I kept going. There were hundreds. Her name was Sirkka Sopanen. Later Sirkka Kyllikki Shayan-Arani. Born June 1950. Finnish. She came through the modeling world young, then she got out of it. I am not sure why. She had a husband. She wrote books. She illustrated. She designed. I found an old Twitter account she left behind. She still called Finland the beautiful country of her youth. She published a memoir in 2006 with a title that gives the whole plot away: Sirkka metropolien mallisirkuksessa. Sirkka in the model circus of the big cities. I found it online. Out of stock. Even if I could get a copy I would not be able to read it. It is in Finnish. She did not stay in that circus long. The pictures make you wish she had, and also glad she didn’t. A little boy is in a lot of the pictures. Same kid, year after year, growing up in the frames the way kids do when nobody is performing for history. I think I found him on Instagram. Grown. An actor in Los Angeles. Instagram will not let you message someone unless they follow you, and he does not follow me. Most of his photographs were locked. I found one that was not and left a comment asking him to get in touch. Maybe he will see it and reach out. Maybe not. I am an outsider who bought a box. I do not even know how he would feel about the collection turning up this way. A few people on Flickr have written that they knew her. I eventually learned she had died. December 11, 2021. There is a memorial plaque at Hollywood Forever. I went. I photographed it. I stood there for a minute with a woman I only knew from color film. That is the strange part of this work. You buy a box because the color is good. Then you end up in a cemetery paying respects to someone who never asked you to find her. I have published hundreds of the pictures in this collection now. I still have hundreds I am working on. Perhaps you knew her. If so I would love to learn more. Perhaps you know the son she left behind and can share this post with him somehow. Hopefully it would be something he would be happy to see. The collection is here: flickr.com/photos/thomashawk…

Remember when flying was an event? When men still wore hats onto the tarmac. When women put on their good dresses and heels like they were going to church or a wedding. When the word was stewardess, not flight attendant, and it was one of the most glamorous jobs a young woman in America could have. This found Ektachrome slide is dated July 1960. TWA Flight 8637. A Lockheed Constellation, everybody called them Connies, sitting on the ramp with its four big Wright engines and that long elegant fuselage Howard Hughes helped will into existence. The stairs themselves are branded TWA, orange stripes and all. There is a little sign for Sky Club Service. Luggage stacked on a cart. A man in a dark suit and fedora coming down with his coat over his arm. A woman in a bright blue dress. Somebody waving from the top like they are leaving on a grand tour instead of just another flight. And look at the stewardess. Perfect posture. Tailored uniform, white gloves, little hat, standing there like the hostess of the finest hotel in the city. She is not rushing anyone. She is receiving them. TWA was the airline of the stars then. Hughes’ airline. The one that made crossing the country feel like something. The Connies were already living on borrowed time. The 707s had been flying for a year. But on this particular afternoon the old world was still holding on. People dressed for it. They treated the airport like a stage. I keep coming back to how ordinary this scene was but also how extraordinary it is today at the same time 66 years later. Just another arrival or departure on a summer day in 1960, captured on a slide that somehow survived the attic and the dumpster and ended up in my scanner. These people had names. They had somewhere to be. Then the slide got separated from all of that and became an orphan. We used to dress up to fly. Now we dress down to survive it. Found Ektachrome Slide, July 1960.

Vegas Vickie, Circa, Las Vegas, Nevada… It doesn’t get much more Vegas than this. This is one of the most impressive neon signs ever built. Not just in Las Vegas. Anywhere. She is 25 feet tall, about 20 feet wide, and she now lives in the Circa atrium over the lounge that carries her name. Cowgirl hat. Blonde hair. Red mouth. Fringe. Holster. One boot kicked high. The character is older than the sign. Vegas Vickie showed up in print ads in the 1950s as Vic’s counterpart. In the 1960s the Pioneer Club even hired women to play her in person. Hostess. Greeter. Cowgirl on the payroll. The sign itself went up in 1980. Bob Stupak commissioned it for Glitter Gulch on Fremont Street. Chuck Barnard at Ad-Art drew her. Jack Dubois worked on it too. YESCO later brought her back to life. Vic had been across the street since 1951. Forty feet of cowboy. Howdy Partner. Cigarette. Waving arm. Vickie was the answer. She kicked. Motor in the knee. Fringe. The whole cartoon cowgirl thing done in glass and steel and paint. People called her Sassy Sally. That was the joint next door. Wrong name. She was always Vickie. In 1991 Herb Pastor turned the block into the Girls of Glitter Gulch. The sign stayed. In 1994 they married her to Vic for the Fremont Street Experience. They did it again years later. Two neon figures and a scissor lift. Then the block came down. Derek Stevens bought the sign in 2016 when he assembled the land for Circa. They pulled her off the building in 2017. Crated her. Sent her to YESCO. New paint. New tubing. New motor. Barnard’s signature on the boot. They lowered her into the unfinished lobby with a crane and built the hotel around her. She has been there since Circa opened in 2020. I have been photographing neon in this country for a long time. Most of the great ones are gone, dim, or sitting in a dirt lot. This one is still working. Circa has the giant sportsbook. Stadium Swim. The new downtown toys. People say all the action in Vegas is on the Strip. Some things are still worth going downtown for. Vickie is one of them. Go look at her from the balcony. Then walk outside and look at Vic. They built a whole city out of signs like these. Almost none of them made it. She did.

Charli Blake... Oakland, California

Ace of Spades, Los Angeles, California... A 1974 Ford Econoline E200. Cream over maroon. Motörhead painted down the side in that heavy blackletter type that still looks like a warning. Wowie Rips bought it in 2016 and made it this. Sold it five years later. Now it belongs to Jim Stah, a tattoo artist who spent 2024 putting a proper interior in it. Carved wood, red shag, aces of spades everywhere. The Econoline script is still on the fender. Cooper Cobra radials. The stripe wraps around the back like it never got the memo that the 1970s ended. These vans were never meant to last. Most of them got used up, wrecked, or turned into something practical. This one just kept going. If the van’s a rockin’…

Good Morning San Francisco...

On the streets of San Francisco...

An American Sunset...

Bailey’s Dairy Treat. Park Avenue. Hot Springs, Arkansas. That giant soft-serve cone on the roof is doing more work than most monuments. The building went up around 1952 as Butchie’s Drive-In. Art Moderne. Rounded corners. Walk-up windows. Neon. It is on the National Register now, one of the last little roadside stands left from the years when Park Avenue was the last stretch of highway into America’s original sin city. Before Butchie’s it was the Polar Bar. Bill Clinton used to walk here. He lived up the street at 1011 Park Avenue from 1954 to 1961. A friend’s father owned the place. Clinton and the other kids would come down the hill for dairy and grill food. His order, according to the old hometown walking tour, was a chili cheeseburger and a Grapette. A future president, standing at this window, eating a burger and drinking a local soda. Hot Springs had Capone at the Arlington. Babe Ruth taking the waters. Tony Bennett rehearsing down the road. This stand got the kid from Park Avenue. Lien and Kieu Morphew have run it since 1994. Burgers. Soft serve. Shakes. Malts. Banana splits. Egg rolls and fried rice if you know to ask. Picnic tables. A striped awning that looks like it has survived every summer since Eisenhower. Places like this are not supposed to last. The highway changed. The casinos closed. The bathhouses emptied out. Most of the other drive-ins on this road are gone. This one is still here, still swirling ice cream under a plywood cone, still feeding whoever walks up. I photograph neon signs as a record of how America actually lived. Not the speech. Not the campaign stop. The window. The awning. The cone on the roof. Clinton went to Georgetown, Oxford, the White House. The stand stayed on Park Avenue. That feels about right.

Found slide. Dated January 1966. Dad at the wheel of a 1949–53 Studebaker pickup. All ten kids piled in the bed. Next to them, what look like a pair of early-1960s Chevy wagons. Mom’s cars, most likely. Mom’s probably the one holding the camera. Maybe they were headed out for ice cream. Rural house in the background. Pines. Dirt road. Ordinary Colorado afternoon. The plate on the Studebaker even reads like Larimer County. Families used to look like this. I was born two years after this picture was taken. I’m the oldest of eight. My parents raised eight of us. It wasn’t considered remarkable. A lot of families did. Four. Five. Six. Eight. The house was loud. The table was crowded. My dad worked construction. My brothers and I rode in the back of his truck all the time. We don’t live that way anymore. The average family got smaller. Then smaller again. Kids became expensive, complicated, delayed, optional. The culture shifted. The numbers dropped. Something got lost in the process. Not just the headcount. The unselfconscious pile-in. The assumption that there would be enough hands, enough room, enough future. These kids would be in their sixties now. Most of them probably had smaller families than the one they came from. Now if only we could get @elonmusk to pose in a Cybertruck with all 14 of his kids in the back.

We'll always have Paris... Found Kodachrome slide, handwritten on slide "10/6/57"

Bitchin' Camaro. Oh? What's that you say? Nothing much to see here... just a brand spanking new early 1970s CHEVROLET CAMARO(!) rolling through the streets of San Francisco on a found slide dated April 1972. Jefferson Street. Fisherman's Wharf. Tokyo Sukiyaki. Sea Captain's Chest. A. Sabella's. The Hofbrau signs stacked up the block. Maroon body. White vinyl top. Rally wheels. Chrome bumper still slim, before the government made them fat. "Hey Jack, what's happenin'? I don't know. Well, uh, rumor around town says you might be thinkin' 'bout goin' down to the shore. Uh, yeah, I think I'm gonna go down to the shore."

Well, you don't know what we can find Why don't you come with me, little girl On a magic carpet ride… Tucson, Arizona

I can’t help it, I am a sucker for a pretty staircase. Architects are amazing artists. This one at the Hotel Martinez when I visited the South of France this past summer.

Found Kodachrome slide. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. This one is Miami Beach. I was pretty sure the first time I scanned it. Behind her, on the white mid-rise, the sign reads Atlantic Beach. That is the old Atlantic Beach Hotel at 3400 Collins Avenue. Roy France designed the original Roberts Beach there in 1938. Polly Lux bought it in the 1940s and gave it the name still sitting on the slide. But it is the woman who makes this slide. I first posted her in February 2020. Back then I had not started putting the found slides into albums yet. I was just scanning boxes and throwing them onto Flickr one at a time. Found Kodachrome Slide. Found Kodachrome Slide. Found Kodachrome Slide. That was the whole system. One of my contacts kept noticing her. Same face. Same short 1960s hair. Same way of looking at the camera, with so much flair and style. He would write me. Then he would write me again. Do you have more of her? Who is she? I knew nothing. I still know nothing. We decided I should gather her anyway. He gave her a name. A placeholder, really. Lady Zelig. She could walk into any room and become whoever the room needed. She does something close to that across a whole decade of other people’s vacations. She is on the beach in Miami. She is in San Francisco in the 1960s. She is in Rome. She is in Vienna. She is in Austria beyond Vienna. She is in New York, of course. She is in wedding after wedding after wedding. Never the bride. As I kept working the collection, other women started repeating around her. Same eyes. Same bone structure. Same clothes passed between frames. Were they sisters? They could be. So we dubbed the larger set Found Kodachrome Sisters. The album is here: flickr.com/photos/thomashawk… There are more than four hundred slides in it now. She went everywhere. That is not a figure of speech. The photographer, whoever it was, followed this little orbit of women across hotels and airports and church steps and city squares. Miami Beach. San Francisco. Rome. Vienna. New York. Weddings in rooms I still cannot name. Streets I am still trying to place. The clues are all in the frames. A sign. A steeple. A storefront. A stretch of beach with a scalloped cabana roof and a high-rise behind it. For more than six years she has been living on Flickr in public. Nobody has identified her. I get asked about her more than almost anyone else in the whole found collection. A friend asked me about her again today. That is what prompted this post. There is a reason for that. She is striking. Attractive in that unforced way that does not need a studio. The pixie cut. The black one-piece. The sunglasses. She looks like she could walk out of 1964 and order a coffee. She is young in these pictures. Quite possibly still alive. I collect these pictures because they were about to disappear. If I do not save them they will almost certainly die in obscurity. Lost in landfills. Never again to see the light of day. Boxes from estate sales. Cartons from eBay. Slides that sat in a closet until the closet got emptied and the closet’s owner was gone. You pull an orphaned image out of analog obscurity and you give it a digital life that might last. Most of the people in them stay anonymous. Sadly, that is the usual ending. This one bothers me more than the usual ending. I am not sure why. Somebody loved her enough to burn through roll after roll of Kodachrome. Somebody stood in the sand in Miami Beach and made this frame. Somebody stood in Rome and made another. Somebody stood at the edge of a wedding and pointed the camera at the bridesmaid instead of the bride. That person is probably gone. She might not be. If she is still alive, she would be older now. If she married later. If she had children. If there is a family that never saw these pictures because the slides left the house in a box and never came back. They are looking at a hole in their own history. They do not even know the hole has a Flickr album. I have watched the Flickr community identify locations I could not identify for months. Even families. Even names. They are good at this. X reaches further though. Especially if people like or share it. If you know this face, say so. If your mother had that haircut. If your aunt was always in the wedding pictures and never in the white dress. If your grandmother kept a box of Miami Beach slides and then the box vanished. Look at the album. It is a wonderful journey through the 1960s. But more than that, look at the woman in this frame. Look at the women around her. Tell me if you have any idea who they might be. Study the clues in the photos. The locations. The rooms. The other faces. Surely I am missing something. Lady Zelig. Always the bridesmaid. Never the bride.

Found slide. Handwritten on the slide, “Chinatown.” Date stamped June 1970. Pell Street, New York. Esther Eng Cocktail Lounge. Red Han Palace characters stacked over the English. Temple Garden Restaurant Cocktail Lounge next to it. Wah Yan Mue Chinese Temple on the same facade. Across the street the luncheonette with the gold 新景 sign and King’s Coffee Shop throwing green light on the sidewalk. Esther Eng died in January 1970. This frame was made four months later. The restaurant was still open. The sign was still lit. Fire escapes on both sides of the street. A couple of cars sitting in the middle of the block. People walking. One guy in a white shirt carrying bags. Most of those signs are gone. The cocktail lounges are gone. The tubes went dark a long time ago. Pell Street is still there. The buildings are still there. Chinatown kept going. This is New York City.

Found Photograph. I think she’s a teacher. Her eyes are striking. I don’t know her name. I don't know the school. The chalkboard is a Renaissance lecture. It begins in Italy around the 14th century. Then it spreads over Europe over the next two centuries. The main factors, as she has them written, are a passion for extending the limits of human knowledge and for employing man’s capabilities to new and better advantage than gold. Then the examples. Michelangelo and Raphael in art. Luther under religion. Galileo and Copernicus under science. On the left side of the board are names and page numbers. Marion. Thomas. Lucille. Helen S. Helen T. Somebody on Surrey. Somebody on Bacon. She is looking straight into the camera. Pearls. That hair. That expression. This one came out of a larger Maryland box. At least that is how I have it grouped. A Maryland Archive. Like a lot of these collections it is mostly the expected American vernacular. Family snapshots. Living rooms. Kids. Cars. Holidays. The occasional vacation. The occasional uniform. Then the collection takes a left turn, as they sometimes do. There is a photograph in there of a grown woman being spanked. Not a child. An adult. It's an odd collection. Maybe someone can figure out who these people were. The album is here: flickr.com/photos/thomashawk… The spanking photograph is here: flickr.com/photos/thomashawk…

A very rare neon Denny's sign, still out in the wild. I was coming up on the Interstate Bridge, the old I-5 span that carries you out of Oregon and over the Columbia into Washington, when this thing rose up against the sky. Real glass tubes. The old hexagonal cabinet. ALWAYS OPEN on top. I had to pull over, park, and get out of the car. Most of these are gone. Not because the yellow shape went away. The chain kept the shape and killed the neon. Plastic faces. LEDs behind a diffuser. Cheaper to buy, cheaper to run, and you do not need a glassbender when a tube blows at 2 a.m. Neon is fragile. It is handmade. The people who can still bend it are few, and a repair can cost more than a whole new plastic sign. Cities tightened the codes. Corporations wanted one look in every parking lot. San Clemente still has one that lights. El Cajon has another with the boomerang roof still attached. Newbury Park converted theirs to backlit plastic in 2023. There is one sitting in the Neon Museum boneyard in Las Vegas, which is usually where this story ends. Those are the ones I know. If you know another original neon Denny's script sign still standing on a pole somewhere, drop the location in the comments. I can't imagine more than a dozen still exist. This one is on Hayden Island in Portland, 11950 N Center Ave, just before the bridge. Harold Butler and Richard Jezak opened Danny's Donuts in Lakewood, California in 1953. Then they added food, changed the name, and spent the 1960s planting Googie roofs and giant signs at freeway off-ramps. The Grand Slam arrived in 1977. I've eaten more than my fair share of those over the years. For a long time the deal was simple. Twenty-four hours. Eggs. Coffee. A booth if you had nowhere else to be. They had more than 1,600 restaurants. Then came the closures. In January the company was taken private for $620 million. New owners. A turnaround they are calling Project Grand Slam. Remodel hundreds of stores. Open a few dozen new ones. Change the menu. Keep the name. The diner is still open. The neon is the part that feels like it is on borrowed time. I did not expect to see one of these still up on the way to that bridge. That is why I stopped. Sometimes the best signs you find out there are the ones you didn't research or map, the ones that just show up out of nowhere.

Found Slide. July 1983. Fremont Street. No canopy. No phones. No one filming themselves walking. Just a desert town that decided to wage war on the dark with incandescent bulbs and won. The Golden Nugget still looked like a gold-rush hallucination someone wrapped in a million light bulbs. Vegas Vic is waving at actual pedestrians. A Cadillac the length of a studio apartment idles at the curb. The sign promises the most frequent slot payoffs on Earth, which in 1983 was still a sentence you could almost take at face value. Steve Wynn already owned the place. The rococo neon came down the following year. Twelve years after this frame they roofed the whole street and called it an Experience. This is what the place looked like when the lights were still analog and you had to stand there to see them. The simulation was about to get a graphics update. Some of us liked the old build.

Found Kodachrome. Date stamped October 1964. Handwritten on the slide, “Colten Bay.” Jackson Lake. Wyoming. The wagon pointed west and they just kept going. This is the American family on the road when the road still was the highlight of your year. Back when the family was still nuclear. Mom. Three kids. Dad just outside the glass. White station wagon shining in the October sun. Green bag lashed to the rack. Wood slats across the top. Chrome bright. Windows down. The west laid out in front of them and nothing behind them that couldn’t wait. Mom has her arm on the door and the red lipstick on and she is looking straight at the man she married. She knows this picture is the one they will keep. Three kids piled in the glass. The boy in the cowboy hat already belonging to the mountains. The girl in the snowflake sweater and the white sunglasses giving the camera that perfect unimpressed stare. The third one tucked in behind her, chin in her hand, watching it all happen. Dad is not in the frame. Dad is standing in the dirt with the camera to his eye, stopping the trip just long enough to make it last. They drove until the light got this gold. Packed everything that mattered on the roof. Pointed the wagon at the Tetons and let the road do the rest. The great American road trip. Sixty-two years later the car is still loaded and the family is still leaning into the glass. Nostalgia is one hell of a drug.

Found Ektachrome. Date stamped on the slide: January 1961. I’m pretty sure the car ahead is a 1959 Plymouth Fury. If I’m wrong, a car person will correct me in the first ten replies. I am not a car guy. I just look at a lot of old pictures. Three people in that Plymouth. A man, his wife, their son? Red taillights burning in the blue. License plate SG 4699. I can’t make out the state. This could be almost any street in middle America. Telephone poles. Wet pavement. A red light hanging over the intersection. Wires cutting the sky into pieces. On the right it looks like Richard’s. Maybe a drive-in. A car dealership. Something that might say John Hardware, half eaten by a pole. Ektachrome is what gives it that cold early morning blue. Not Kodachrome. Kodachrome would have been warmer. This one feels like the sun hasn’t decided yet. You can tell it’s cold. Shot from a moving car. Soft focus. Windshield. A wiper. A streetlight leaking into the frame. The kind of mistakes that make a snapshot feel like a memory instead of a photograph. People figure these locations out. @ma261065 nailed a recent one as Panama City. This one will be harder. Until then it is just America in January 1961, waiting at the light. I do love the mood.