What is the paper trail to her 3,000 photos?
About 75 of the photos found in the Lowell basement were of Annie and family. There were cute children images, including one that clearly reflects her style and is now in the public domain and available for purchase as wall art for prices as high as $214.
There were no letters or notes were found in her effects, but there were samples of her handwriting. This discovery expanded led to matches with handwriting found in U.S. census records and church documents. These writing samples match several thousand prints and negatives taken for the City Engineers between 1905 and 1932.
Other evidence comes from her accidental self-portraits. Annie regularly took images for City Engineers, and many of those picture feature her reflection in windows and doors.
A descendent who grew up in the same house in the early 1980s remembers glass plate negatives. These were sold to an antiques dealer before they were mysteriously delivered to the UMass Lowell library. In these negatives were artistically and historically important portraits of Portuguese-Americans working at Appleton Mills. In addition, facial recognition software links one of Powell’s final photos to a subject in the UMass Lowell collection.
