An area San Diego newspaper photographer has donated his total assortment of pictures taken throughout his profession to a neighborhood college library. Dan Rios studied pictures at a area people faculty, earlier than working on the Escondido Advocate and the North County Instances newspapers from 1968 to 2001.
Throughout that point, he amassed over one million pictures masking the native historical past of the San Diego space because it occurred. From the arrival of the San Diego Chargers NFL soccer staff to the constructing of the historic Coronado Bridge, and the restoration of Balboa Park and its buildings, in addition to documenting information tales of on a regular basis happenings, Rios lined your complete San Diego space from a photographic perspective.
Now, within the sundown of his life, Rios is donating his total assortment to the Cal State College San Marcos Library Particular Collections division. Referred to as the “Dan Rios Papers,” the gathering options pictures, slides, contact sheets, negatives, and correspondence chronicling the occasions which have echoed all through his total 33-year profession as a photojournalist.
The gathering additionally options images of president Richard Nixon, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and celebrities similar to Debbie Reynolds, Danny Kaye, and Vincent Value. However one in all his passions was taking portraits of individuals he met alongside the road.
Rios started amassing his large assortment of pictures in 1977 when the Advocate introduced it was throwing out outdated newspaper negatives to make room for a pending newspaper growth. Seeing the historic worth of the archives, Rios got down to save as a lot of the newspaper archive as he may.
Rios rescued the negatives from the newspaper dumpster and took them house for storage in his storage. “It was my pictures trainer Mr. Invoice Dendle who drilled into us the significance of conserving our negatives endlessly,” Rios instructed the San Diego Union-Tribune. “From him, I realized to treasure them and maintain them near my coronary heart.”
Over time, Rios amassed over 100 bankers’ containers of fabric which took a big Penske truck to switch to the college library. The gathering was really donated in 2018, nevertheless it has taken 4 years for the workers to arrange and cross-reference the gathering and create a searchable database for library patrons to wade via.
The price of scanning and printing the gathering could be too cost-prohibitive and would take too lengthy for the college to finish. So patrons will be capable to request a digital scan of any {photograph} within the assortment, on a case-by-case foundation, and have it emailed to them freed from cost.
The gathering might be out there to the general public beginning July 23. Meantime, a small portion of the gathering might be considered on-line as a part of the CSUSM Particular Collections catalog on Flickr.
Picture credit: All images from the Dan Rios papers/California State College San Marcos College Library Particular Collections.
