Strange History's photostream

After a long battle with a particularly vicious sort of cancer, my father died on February 25th. After the funeral, I've had to clean out and sort through just about everything he had.

It's been a strange experience.

The broad strokes of my father's life are obvious to everyone who knew him or heard about him. He was a mechanical genius. He loved cars and engines and hard work. He had a race car, wanted to keep a WWII fighter plane on the roof of his shop and even entertained the notion of building a gigantic Tesla coil with me (we abandoned that because the copper would have cost a small fortune). He was constantly thinking and did so on his own off-kilter terms.

But in sorting through the filing cabinets and desks and books, I've found things that perplex me. Why did he save that? Why is this tangle of metal hidden in the back of this drawer? There are family photographs mixed with war photographs from a stranger. There are odd doodles, incomprehensible notes, diagrams, markings.

This might be a shared experience, something that happens to anyone who is unfortunate enough to have to deal with the possessions of someone who has died; God knows I don't envy the person who will have to deal with all my crap. Shared or unique, I decided to curate these little mysteries into one place, a combination of old photos, scanned objects and my own documentary photos.

They are unsolvable riddles, but sometimes that's the best kind.