About
Lost and Found: The Search for Harry and Edna is the story of more than a thousand unmarked photographs of an unknown man and woman, discovered in a resale shop in St. Charles, Missouri.
I began posting one image to Facebook each day, speculating about how many years might pass until someone might recognize one or more of the people in the long-lost photographs.
By the end of the second day, hundreds of strangers emerged from around the globe to create a makeshift online search party. Their combined investigative skills helped solve the mystery of Harry and Edna in about two weeks.
Harry August Grossmann and Edna Annette Lehr were married in St. Louis, Missouri in 1923. They had no children of their own. Edna lived until 1983, and Harry until 1986.
Photography is a universal language that provides an immense power to inform, motivate, communicate and inspire. Social media exponentially increases our ability to share and collaborate, and once in a while we are able to solve a mystery that might have never before been possible.
Harry and Edna's photographs are not masterpieces. They are superb snapshots that have been stripped of their original context. When we view a photograph without any identifying information, we subconsciously draw upon our individual experience, education and implicit bias to attempt to make sense of what we see. While hundreds of Facebook comments did little to solve the mystery of Harry and Edna, they revealed volumes about the commenters.
Harry and Edna's online search party realized that these images were more than vacation slides; they saw them as a collection of lost memories. Today we share our pictures as swiftly as we make them, and they are visible in our social feeds for just a few fleeting moments.