Photographer tracks down negatives for couple who lost their wedding pictures in wildfire

A photo from Mary and Marc Taylor's wedding
(Image credit: Screenshot/YouTube/KCRA News)

This is an early 20th anniversary gift they'll never forget.

When the Camp Fire swept through Grass Valley, California, last fall, it completely destroyed Marc and Mary Taylor's home. All of their possessions were lost in the wildfire, including decades worth of photos. Hoping she could recover some of them, Mary Taylor got in touch with the photographer, Richard Briggs, who shot their wedding on August 14, 1999.

Briggs was thrilled when he started digging around and found the negatives, telling KCRA that usually, photographers don't keep them for so long. "Luckily, they were intact," he said. "They were a little faded. I bought a scanner and scanned them all. And my wife, she's excellent in editing, and she brought back the color and the life into the photos, and from those images, I was able to make an album." He can still recall the wedding, he added, and remembers thinking, "These people are so much in love."

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The Taylors cried when Briggs gave them not only their wedding album, but also the negatives, as these are the only photos they've been able to replace. "It gave us a piece of something back after losing everything," Marc Taylor said. "I don't know how to explain it. There's no words." Catherine Garcia

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.