Amity High Students Restore 100+ Photos For Hurricane Ian Victims

WOODBRIDGE, CT — Family photographs of weddings, childhood and other family events are invaluable. Most other items that are destroyed in a natural disaster can be replaced, but photographs are often irreplaceable.

A talented group of about 30 photography students at Amity High School are restoring family photographs for Hurricane Ian victims that may otherwise have been lost to history. The storm was one of the worst to hit Florida in nearly 100 years.

About 120 photos have been restored to date.

“In a panic, we don’t think about those,” Amity Regional High School photography teacher Lisa Toto said. “When we need to go back and clean up, they are the first things people look for.”

Toto first heard of the photo restoration effort while watching a World News Tonight segment with David Muir. Fort Myers photographer Krista Kowalczyk launched “Operation Photo Rescue” to help salvage damaged photographs.

Toto immediately grabbed her laptop and got in touch with Kowalczyk, who was happy to have help in the enormous effort. Kowalczyk and her assistant physically cleaned the photos, digitized them, and sent them to Toto’s class.

Students were eager to help in any way they could.

“They wanted to do the work, they wanted to show what they could do by giving these memories back to these people,” Toto said.

Helping families even a little bit through the tough time was fulfilling, junior Abby Fitol said.

“When we first started, we all kind of just jumped at the idea, we liked the idea of helping other people,” Fitol said.

The idea of losing family photos forever was one that struck home with many students.

“I felt like we put ourselves in their situation, and we knew if that was us we’d be devastated,” Fitol said.

One picture that stuck with her was one of a man sitting in a chair.

“You could just tell that he was a nice person and seemed genuine,” she said. “Just being able to fix that, it made me feel like I was part of the moment and taking the picture.”

Toto’s class spoke with two families over video conference. One woman was extremely happy to have a photo of her father from elementary school restored.

“It was nice seeing her reaction, the second she saw what we had done she started crying, she was so happy and grateful,” Fitol said. “It was such a great moment.”

The photo restoration effort will continue with a new photography class being trained and many previous students still heavily involved in the effort. The project reminded Toto of the earlier days of photography, when developing film in a darkroom had a magical quality to it.

“When they can fix a photograph that nobody thought could be fixed, that’s the magic,” Toto said.