Don Eesley with his camera, c. 1960s

Donald Stuart “Don” Eesley — Will Eesley’s brother and Chuck’s great-uncle — caught in the act of taking a photograph, raising a 35mm SLR to his eye with both hands. Grey-haired and in a short-sleeved shirt with a tie, he reads as a man in his fifties or sixties, which places the frame somewhere in the 1960s (Don was born in 1908 and died in 1975). Other figures stand blurred in the background, and a chair is just visible at the left — an outdoor family gathering of the kind the Eesleys kept photographing across the generations.

It is a fitting likeness of him: a candid of the photographer photographing, in a family whose visual record — from Maggie’s four-generation photo deck forward — is the reason this archive has pictures at all. His earlier likenesses here are the April 1932 studio portrait at about twenty-three, the three brothers c. 1912, and the late-1940s Bexley family group portrait; this catches him a full generation on, mid-life, doing the thing that made the record.