The Bell Collection is both history and inheritance. C. M. Bell was my great-grandfather, but I first knew him through my father. My father's stories gave Charles a presence that no census record, studio ledger, or photographic negative could quite provide. Through those stories, the photographer became a man, and the archive became part of the family. Over time, I came to understand that these photographs belonged to a much larger story, and the archivists at The Library of Congress deserve the lion’s share of credit.

Presidents and politicians stood before Bell's camera, but so did children, families, soldiers, clergy, performers, workers, and thousands of people whose names have nearly disappeared from the record. Each negative captured a life for a fraction of a second. More than a century later, many of those faces are still waiting to be seen again. These galleries are part of that recovery. They will continue to grow as more photographs are restored, identified, researched, and returned to view from the more than 25,000 surviving Bell Studio images.

In that sense, this remains a family affair, undertaken in the name of posterity. We are preserving the work of C. M. Bell, but also the people who came through his studio and, in doing so, became part of the visual memory of America.