Sean Connery. Cannes. 1999. Found slide. Unpublished. Ira Richolson shot this. A friend introduced me to Ira when he and his wife Paulette were about to move into assisted living. He did not have room for the slides. He cared too much about them to send them to a landfill. He wanted them with someone who would actually keep them. We talked for a long time. He was relieved. He said they were a gift. Mine to do with what I wanted. Fine to publish. I offered to pay the postage. He refused. About a week later I came home from work and there were 30 U-Haul boxes on the doorstep. Another 20 or so showed up later at the office. I figure 80,000 slides. Maybe more. His life’s work, left with a stranger because the stranger had a scanner and a promise. I had no idea what was in them. For all I knew, out-of-focus flowers. It was not flowers. Ira was a credentialed media photographer at Cannes through the ’80s and ’90s. Amateur, in the best sense of that word. He shot Tarantino. Scorsese. Sandra Bullock. Clint Eastwood. Robert De Niro. Kodachrome and Ektachrome, mostly. None of it published. This frame is one of them. He stayed in the cheapest room he could find. He did not stop for meals. Cans of tuna between shoots. The whole trip was the camera. You can see it in the work. He was not there for the party. He was there for the frame. Tight when it needed to be tight. Air when the face needed air. A lot of credentialed photographers came home with the same two-shot. Ira came home with the second the official pictures missed. When he got home he did two slide shows for the neighbors. One for everybody, the stars. Then a second one, for his male friends, that he called the Cans of Cannes. The adult industry used to run its own awards next to the festival in those years and invite the press down to the beach. This was before the tube sites. A porn star was still a porn star. I called him after I opened the first box. I had never seen an archive like it. He had not seen a lot of these pictures in 20 years. He had mostly given up photography in the early 2000s. I scanned them and sent him links. He looked at them on his iPad. We did regular calls, then Zoom once Covid shut the country down. The pictures, the memories, the stories. I got to know Paulette. A few of his friends found the work on Flickr and told him. He liked that. We talked about a small show at the place he had moved into. Nothing fancy. I still want that show. A book too, eventually. Not a catalog of everything. A book of the frames where his eye is undeniable. That is later. Right now the job is scanning and publishing, so the work exists somewhere other than a box in my office. This one is Sean Connery, May 1999. He was at the 52nd Festival International du Film for Entrapment. Jon Amiel’s heist picture. Connery produced it and played the thief. Catherine Zeta-Jones played the investigator sent to catch him. They screened it out of competition on May 14, then sat for the press. He was also there to take a career award. The Croisette that week belonged to him. Ira was in the room. Not the carpet. The talk. Cannes is the part people will know. It is not the whole archive. Ira also shot Washington. Presidents. Inaugurations. Parades. The Dalai Lama when he came through. The city on an ordinary day, which is harder. And Vietnam. He served there. I am working through those photographs now. War, then decades of the capital, then a summer every year on the Croisette with a can of tuna and a press pass. Same eye. Different room. He also sent undeveloped rolls. Old Tri-X and other black-and-white from the ’80s, still in the cans. I developed one. Nothing on it. I have not touched the rest. I do not want to be the person who kills whatever is left on that film. If you have actually saved 40-year-old exposed black-and-white and know the lab, the chemistry, or the reason not to bother, I'd love to get your opinion on how best to handle the undeveloped rolls at this point. Elliott Erwitt said, “It’s about time we started to take photography seriously and treat it as a hobby.” That was Ira. As serious as anyone I have ever known, and a hobbyist on paper. By day he had been a DEA man, then an analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Army before that, Vietnam and Washington. Photography was the thing he would not put down. The calls slowed. His health went. He had to be moved into full-time care. His mind gave out. The nurses said he thought he was still at the Pentagon, and that he seemed happy. Our photography conversations got harder to have. What started as a box of slides turned into a friendship with one of the great unpublished photographers in America. Ira Leonard Richolson died on January 21, 2023, at Renaissance of Annandale. He was 80. Five days past his birthday. Born January 16, 1943, in Albany, raised in Astoria. Survived by Paulette, his wife of 22 years. I am still scanning. A few thousand frames are up. The rest will take decades. This Connery was never published. None of the photos in his archive were. A show and a book when the archive can bear them. Until then, one slide at a time. The public archive is here: flickr.com/photos/thomashawk… There is a second album, the complete archive, including the Cans of Cannes. You have to be signed in to Flickr with adult content turned on to see it. His obituary: legacy.com/us/obituaries/was…