Preserving a community's history — and the people in it

The mission of The Dalton DeHart Photographic Foundation is to digitize, catalog and preserve an expanding collection of approximately one million photographs chronicling the Houston community, primarily nonprofit and community events, and to make these images publicly accessible for their educational, historic, and cultural value.

These photographs are an irreplaceable record of Houston's community life over more than three decades — its celebrations, its fund-raisers, its leaders, and its everyday moments. Among them are the faces of countless members of the LGBT+ community, including many who were lost to the AIDS epidemic. For some families, these images are the only photographs that remain.

Film does not last forever. Every year, negatives fade, discolor, and degrade. Digitizing and cataloging this archive is a race against time — and once an image is preserved and made searchable, it belongs to everyone, free of charge, for its educational, historic, and cultural value.

Your support funds the real, ongoing work of the foundation: digitizing decades of film before it is lost, preserving and safely storing high-resolution scans, applying facial-recognition technology so people can find themselves and their loved ones, and keeping the entire collection free and publicly accessible. Want to see how that work happens? Read behind the operation.