Okay, the Minnesota Science Fiction Society Fan Photo Archive; but that’s really too big for a title!

Our goal is to preserve, organize, and make available photos from our local fannish history, regional fannish history, and national and world-wide fannish history. If interplanetary fannish history becomes a thing, we will be interested in that, too.

The impetus for formalizing this was the unexpected death of David E Romm / Baron Dave Romm, in 2017. He left no specific instructions about his photos, but he was involved in documenting fandom photographically since I first knew him, when he moved to Minneapolis in the late 1970s.

I had been collecting old photos since 1983, when I prepared and presented the first edition of the “Minn-StF Family Album” slide show at Minicon 19 (Chuck Holst also gave a historical slide show at that convention).

With the cooperation of Dave’s brothers, in giving us Dave’s photo collection, we have quite a bit of historical depth (and we’re always looking for more). I have access to my own old photos, too, of course.

–David Dyer-Bennet, Director, 27-Aug-2021