You may not know the name John G. Zimmerman, but if you’ve ever picked up a Sports Illustrated, Ebony or Life Magazine, you likely know his work. Zimmerman made his home on the Monterey Peninsula until he passed away in 2002. His daughter still lives here and she’s working on his archive. It’s a time consuming process that recently led her on a fascinating journey back in time.
The archive itself takes up an entire house. There are light tables and scanners, wall-to-wall shelves with film and prints, and a magazine library dating back to 1950. Linda’s father, John G. Zimmerman, photographed people 300 days a year for 40 years.
John G. Zimmerman died in 2002. A year later Linda Zimmerman began building the archive, and organizing hundreds of thousands of negatives.
“He spent 4 days shooting the Beatles. We only have one roll of film, that I found on the bottom of a box and it said Beetles spelled b-e-e-t-l-e-s!,” says Zimmerman. “We’re lucky to have those.”
Her father’s portfolio includes lots of famous people; there’s an unpublished Bruce Springsteen set, Bette Davis, Ray Charles.
But the group of photos that’s really captured Zimmerman’s attention are of people she knew little about, including their names.
They show a community center filled with people, standing-room only. The all-black audience is watching men and boys compete in a shoeshine competition.
Zimmerman’s dad was on assignment for Life Magazine, documenting the Jim Crow south, when he took the photos, but they were never published. The images caught Zimmerman’s imagination. She was sure that if the event caught the attention of Life Magazine, there would be a mention of it somewhere online, but there wasn’t.
So Zimmerman put the images on a bulletin board at the archive as a reminder to herself to find out more. They stayed there for six years.
“And every so often between projects I would come back and do a search and it was last year, I was searching and all of a sudden I got a hit!” she says.
A librarian in Wilson, North Carolina had posted a photo of a shoeshine contest online. Zimmerman saw that photo, and she knew her photos must have been taken in the same place.
Soon Zimmerman had a number for someone featured in the photos, Curtis Phillips. Phillips had won the competition three years in a row. The newspaper account called him a “shoeshine virtuoso.”
Phillips still lives in North Carolina and he was surprised to receive a call from California, asking about something that happened so long ago.
“Lady called me [to] say they had some pictures of me in a shoe-shining contest. I said really? Surprised me,” says Phillips.
Phillips says he began shining shoes when he was a young man—he’d go on to do it for 30 years.
“Well, I came up, 12 years old shining shoes,” Phillips remembers. He’d shine shoes on the street with a little wooden shoeshine box that he made himself. The box included shoe paste, shoeshine rag and a brush.
Phillips’ memory is not what it used to be, so he was incredibly pleased to have a set of John G. Zimmerman’s photos. His friends recalled the competition, but seeing Phillips in the photos all these years later was a revelation. One friend called the images “breathtaking.”
Linda Zimmerman provided Phillips a complete set of the photos. A set was also donated to the Wilson County Public Library, where they have been on display.
Linda Zimmerman feels a responsibility to preserve all of the images in her dad’s for the digital age, even though so many of them are mysteries, and she might not ever know the stories behind them, or where they fit in history.
“You know the thing about these photographs, now a lot of them were made 50 years ago … you just never know,” says Zimmerman. “For instance, [my dad] shot Silicon Valley back in the 70’s and there were these huge mainframe computers. And now we get calls wanting those photographs because they are archaic, they are dinosaurs, they are vintage. And that’s the exciting part moving forward, we don’t know what the new context is going to be.”
Linda Zimmerman’s efforts have paid off. Much of her dad’s archive is now available online here and here.
Carol Jackson is the Digital News Editor at NPR member station WUNC in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.