I began a project in 2011 that would take me four years to complete. The idea was to collect every film photograph that had ever been taken in Catahoula. I didn’t start out with that ambitious goal in mind, and I didn’t know that it would take me as long as it eventually did. I was just fascinated by the photographs I dug up and kept wondering what else was out there. One photograph in particular made me realize that the project was turning into something bigger than I first suspected—the royal court for the 1957 Mardi Gras carnival gathered on the stage in the old school gymnasium, fifteen of the finest fishermen and farmers in Catahoula dressed in bejeweled satin dresses. Growing up at the edge of the Atchafalaya, I was familiar with stories of the old swamp silting up and disappearing, but that photograph of the cross-dressing court drove home another reality. A unique culture was disappearing too—it had in many ways already disappeared—and these photographs were all that remained. And I understood that if I didn’t preserve them, maybe no one ever would. Since that first project, I have digitized other collections of photographs and other historical documents. My goal is to create online archives for long-term storage of the files, as well as online galleries so that people can easily view them.