Morden photographer’s decades-old negatives developed and displayed at Manitoba Museum

Sometime in the mid 1970s, Celia Rabinovitch’s father, Milton, presented her with a wooden box.

“These were Nick’s,” he said at the time. “Maybe you can do something with them.”

The box, which had sat on a shelf in the Rabinovitch home for decades, contained more than 300 film negatives dating back to the 1920s and spanning through Manitoba’s Dirty Thirties. It was the life’s work of Milton’s cousin, Isador (Nick) Yudell.

At the time, Rabinovitch didn’t think much of her father’s remark — it was a comment made in passing, not an explicit request. But in 2007, she began to scan and digitize the photos. What she discovered was a historical trove, detailing people and places otherwise lost to the passage of time.

Now, after 15 years of careful restoration, Rabinovitch has retraced the history of Yudell’s life’s work, curating the photographs into a new exhibit at the Manitoba Museum titled The Lost Expressionist – Nick Yudell, a Photographer Discovered.

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