From loss to recovery. Nearly 80,000 negatives, rescued and restored. And ready for viewing.
In 1990, Veryl Oakland's home in Sacramento flooded. His collection of negatives – stored in cardboard boxes on the first level – were submerged. As he recalls:
"I had stored all of my negatives and photographs in our downstairs, so the better part of three decades of work was severely damaged. After that happened, I stopped shooting. I withdrew, and for the longest time, purposely avoided the boxes of damaged negatives. I couldn't even bring myself to open them."
But around 2010, his perspective shifted. On the encouragement of his daughter, Alexis, he began examining what remained. With technology having caught up, there were digital tools that made it easier to retouch images and fix damage. Looking through the collection, to his surprise, many negatives had survived intact – others, though water-damaged, were salvageable. And while some were destroyed, it certainly wasn’t the majority.
The realization sparked a decision:
"I knew I had plenty of valuable material: critical work that needed to be made available to the public. And I knew these vitally important artists deserved to be recognized in a manner that hadn't been seen before."
That led Veryl to eventually publish Jazz in Available Light, his first book. Its success – paired with his daughter's encouragement to pursue systematic archival preservation for the larger body of work – set the stage for what would become a five-year professional archival project.
Throughout the process of archiving and digitizing, images long forgotten have begun to resurface. Veryl encountered photographs he hadn't seen in decades – shots that publishers had rejected in favor of others, some from shoots that were stored away and never printed.
And the discoveries have been profound.
Read about just some of what Veryl has uncovered in the archiving process.
“One standout find I discovered in color was a series with Johnny Hartman. Back in 1978 I'd set up a casual shoot with the premier vocalist at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. In those days of limited technology and prohibitive costs, most magazine editors who needed artwork to accompany stories requested black-and-white photos – so I shot more with that film. However, I knew the black-and-white images from that day were destroyed in the flood, so I kind of gave up on the memory entirely because it was the only time I got to photograph the great vocal stylist.
So when I recently came across these color shots I’d also taken that day, resurfaced after nearly a half century, it was literally transformative. It’s both motivating to search for what else exists across other musicians, and just such a positive feeling of recovering entire moments I thought were gone.”
“While sorting through the digital scans, I was pleasantly surprised to stumble across images of Duke Pearson – a pianist I'd completely forgotten I'd photographed, and in my mind, one of jazz's most under-appreciated ‘complete’ musicians. My only encounter with him was in the late 1960s, when he was playing in Donald Byrd's quintet. At the time, I didn't think much of it.
But this is one of those instances where I only began to take notice of the musician long after shooting him. Pearson was much-admired by his fellow sidemen, but what especially won me over was his superb writing and arranging skills. Over the years, I discovered his work through the excellent album Little Johnny C by Johnny Coles – Pearson appeared on and composed five of the six tracks, which is what makes the album so appealing.
Among the many dozens of songs composed over his short career, Duke Pearson is best remembered today for his jazz standards – ‘Idle Moments’ and ‘Jeannine’ – songs that have been recorded by hundreds of legendary artists.
So to resurface these photos now, knowing how much I admire him – that’s such a cool treat. It's a reminder of how much I had to learn starting out, and how lucky I was to be in rooms with musicians whose significance I only understood later.”
“Taking in the damage from the flood, I was sitting in the basement of our home amidst much of my photo collection, and one box of negatives stood out in particular. It contained a fat, wet folder with a bright red program sticking out, my handwriting across the top: Pacific Jazz Festival 1967.
Looking back, I remember the futility of that moment – just a feeling of total helplessness. Fleetingly, memories of that vibrant '67 weekend flashed by, as I'd photographed every event from day to night, and it was jam-packed with jazz's finest. It was so early in my career, and so many established stars were there: Duke Ellington with his full orchestra, Miles Davis and his Quintet, the Modern Jazz Quartet, the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis big band featuring premier soloists Joe Farrell and Jimmy Owens, plus the dramatic jazz/rock launch of the Gary Burton & Larry Coryell Quartet.…so many exciting names. It was a massive weekend. In all, I'd taken over 1,000 photos across the two days.
One by one, each act appeared in my head – and I was convinced I'd lost every single shot.
When we started archiving, I was already prepared to lose a large percentage of my work. As Jessie and her team cataloged everything, she set aside the pieces that were too damaged for any kind of recovery into a separate box. But by the end, that “damage box” wasn't very full – which meant most of the 1967 lot might actually be salvageable.
The digitization process has been such a cool thing to experience. It's like dropping back in time when I open up my photos for the ‘first time’ on my computer. When this 1967 lot came through, I actually chuckled in disbelief: The contents of that water-logged fat folder I stared at back in 1993 was largely intact. There's certainly damage, and many negatives aren't salvageable. But everyone I remembered was there.
A true silver lining in all of this is that technology caught up to where we needed it to be: Our team's able to retouch the water damage out; and it's also easier to find the cleanest photo in a series of hundreds. Especially early in my career, I took more shots consecutively – which ended up helping in recovery, as often the damage was too much for some, but others in sequence largely spared.
Duke we can fix; Miles we can fix; Thad & Mel, we can fix. It's like watching my own memories fill a screen.”
These rediscoveries represent more than found photographs.
They're proof that what seemed lost was preserved – and that its value compounds over time.
Want to learn more about the family’s archiving journey?
