By Ron Wilson, director of the Huck Boyd National Institute for Rural Development at Kansas State University/Image Audra Agin
What if that old, cracked photo of great-grandma could become a beautiful new image? Today we’ll meet a rural Kansas woman who specializes in repairing and restoring old photographic images.
Audra Agin is the founder of Photo Repair by Audra. She grew up on a farm in Chautauqua County, went to Emporia State where she studied business and education, and met Fred. They married and had two children, now grown.
The Agins live west of Emporia near the unincorporated rural community of Plymouth with a population of perhaps 150 people. Now, that’s rural. They maintain a large garden and can the produce each year.
Fred worked for the Santa Fe Railroad until his retirement. Audra worked at various jobs in Emporia.
After she retired, she was looking for a hobby to do in the wintertime and started scrapbooking. She gathered family photos for a scrapbook but she wasn’t pleased with the quality of the old pictures. She went online and looked up ways to enhance and restore those photos.
One day Audra was scrapbooking with a group of women. They learned she was enhancing, repairing, and copying photos for her family photo albums. The ladies saw her work and suggested she go into the business of repairing photos.
That was the beginning of Photo Repair by Audra. She bought apps to do photo restoration and took online classes. She uses Photoshop and high-tech tools to accomplish her projects.
Today, Photo Repair by Audra offers digital and printed photo restoration, digitization of photo albums, scanning of slides and old negatives, newspaper restoration and more.
Some projects are quite challenging.
“I worked with a blind lady for five years,” Agin said. “She wanted to put together a family book. It was going to be 15 pages, but three years later, the book ended up at 170 pages.”
On another occasion, a man brought her a large photo that had been rolled up for more than 20 years.
“It was on hard paper. When it unrolled, it cracked everywhere,” Agin said. “The cracks were in the worst possible places and created high ridges and tears. Rolled photos should be unrolled by professionals.”
She put the photo under a stack of encyclopedias for a month (some tools are not so high-tech). Once the photo was stabilized, she scanned and successfully repaired the image for her customer.
Agin also volunteers at the Lyon County History Center. The center received a set of 2,400 glass negatives of various sizes.
To save them, Agin first cleaned the glass plates. Then she put each glass plate on a light pad, captured images with a camera above the photo, and converted the photo negatives into positives. If a photo was cracked, she merged the pieces together.
It took two years to complete the 2,400 images that now reside in the Lyon County historical archives.
Another service she offers is compiling collages. “A friend of mine’s father was ill and wanted family photos taken soon, so we did,” Agin said.
Later the wife wanted wall collages for the home.
“I brought my scanner to their home, scanned the photos and returned them to their original location,” she said. “I made three photo collages of about 25 photos each: One of his military service, one with his growing family, and one of their trips and travels together.”
What does she enjoy most about her projects? “It makes people smile when they see my work,” Agin said. “There was a guy at Hamilton who was cleaning out his barn and found two pictures of his grandparents. They were broken up in several places.”
He brought it to Agin to reassemble. “I couldn’t glue it together, but I took pictures of the broken pieces and made it whole again on the computer,” Agin said. “When he took (the finished product) out of the box, the tears streamed down his face.”
For more information, see www.aprbyaudra.com.
We commend Audra Agin for making a difference with her skills and entrepreneurship. She is helping bring old images back to life.
Audio and text files of Kansas Profiles are available at https://www.huckboydinstitute.org/kansas-profiles. For more information about the Huck Boyd Institute, interested persons can visit http://www.huckboydinstitute.org.
