Photo Doctor Helps Restore Memories, History

Seeing it for the first time is heartbreaking.

Wedding photos. Graduation pictures. Family portraits. Thousands of photographs, documenting more than 100 years of the history of a single family from Massachusetts. And all of them are burned, singed, melted and fused, damaged in a massive fire.

These thousands of photos now sit in the Montgomery garage of Ken and Barbara Mindar. And over the next six months, Ken Mindar will use every tool at his disposal to restore them. Mindar runs a business called Photo ER, and saving fire- and flood-damaged photos is his specialty.

This is the biggest job Mindar’s ever undertaken. His clients built a 12,000-square-foot home in Massachusetts last year, and had just moved in, when a fire wiped out nearly everything. After sifting through the wreckage, they put together the thousands of family photographs – many of them melted together in thick bricks – and sent them to Mindar in several plastic tubs.

“He found me through the website,” Mindar said. “We were in the Caribbean, and he contacted me. And I said, ‘You’re crazy. I can’t do that.’ And I didn’t hear from him again until February, when he said, ‘I’m sending you 11 tubs, 250 pounds of photos.’”

They arrived in March, and it took Mindar about seven weeks to go through them all and figure out what he could save. More than 3,000 of them were fused together, and Mindar has been separating them by hand, one by one. That process, which involves soaking them in hot liquid until they are malleable enough to split apart, will take between six and eight weeks, Mindar said.

Then he will scan each one in, and get down to the work of restoring them. It’s a lengthy, meticulous process, using digital tools to bring damaged areas back to life, and fill in color where it’s been torn or melted. Mindar, now 63, relies on his more than 40 years of photo retouching experience for this – he was using airbrushes long before digital tools became available – and the skills he’s picked up as a lifelong artist.

In all, for this one job, he will attempt to restore 7,736 prints, 899 slides, 46 documents and 66 pictures in frames. And he’ll get about $76,600 to do it.

Mindar does all of this in his Montgomery home, in a simple digital studio. He shares this home with Barbara, his wife of 22 years. (And yes, they've heard the Ken and Barbie jokes, and they love them.) Barbara is an entrepreneur as well, running a series of other websites, including stcroix-beaches.com and leatheralls.com.

They're the most tech-savvy senior citizens you're likely to meet, and they have a clear rapport and an easygoing way with each other. It's obvious that these online businesses are fun for the Mindars, and even the painstaking photo restoration work is rewarding.

Mindar knows he’s not just restoring photographs. He’s restoring memories, and pieces of history that would otherwise be lost. He remembers one job that found him repairing a photo of Bobby Valentine, an outfielder in the ‘60s and ‘70s who now manages the Boston Red Sox.

The photo was from Valentine’s playing days, and when he finished retouching it, the owner took the new print to Fenway Park and had Valentine sign it, as a gift for his son.

The real joy in his work, Mindar said, comes when his clients see the finished product, and their memories flood back. People have cried, he said, and many have said they had given up hope of ever having a cherished photo brought back to life.

Mindar has already restored a couple of photos for his Massachusetts client, as a demonstration, and told him that he can fix about 99 percent of the images damaged in the fire.

“He was amazed,” Mindar said. “He thought they were gone. He’s very anxious to see this done.”

For more information on Photo ER, check out the website.