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Exposing history: A physician's photos of Natchez, Miss.

A retired Mississippi doctor uses photographs to open windows to the past of the Deep South.

By Damon Adams, amednews staff. June 11, 2001.

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On a back patio in Natchez, Miss., Thomas Gandy, MD, uncovered a black-and-white world of a century gone by.

Inside stacks of wooden boxes, he found aging negatives of steamboats that once plodded along the Mississippi River, images of children dressed in their Sunday best at a time when slavery had just ended, and glimpses of townspeople in a community built on plantations, a river economy and Southern charm.

Dr. Gandy, an internist in Natchez and a longtime history buff, purchased the 75,000 negatives -- snapshots of life in Natchez from the mid-1850s to 1951 -- from the widow of a photographer in 1960. It was the start of a fascination with history that led the doctor to spend nights and weekends sorting and cleaning the cellulose-based negatives, wiping away the dirt of neglect to reveal portraits of the past.

More than 40 years of devotion to the photos has paid off. Dr. Gandy's prints of the negatives have been displayed from Natchez to London to Australia. He and his wife, Joan, have featured the photos -- most of them snapped by photographer Henry C. Norman and, later, his son Earl -- in six books on Natchez, including one on the steamboat era. Through the pictures, Natchez residents learned more about the 19th-century community that shaped their town. And Dr. Gandy found a pastime on which to focus once he retired from medicine in 1990.

"I've exhibited these photos all over the world," says a proud Dr. Gandy, 79, who still lives in the antebellum home he bought in Natchez in 1957. "I make them look clean and crisp and big. They look almost as good as new." [...]