When Jerri Zbiral and Alan Teller first saw the shoebox half-hidden beneath a couch, they had no idea that it would, 25 years later, develop into an obsession that would take over not only their lives, but the lives of dozens of artists, scholars, students, and soldiers, and send them on an epic quest halfway around the world. At the time, it looked like just another estate-sale curiosity: an ordinary shoebox filled with 130 brown envelopes, each containing a four-by-five-inch negative, with a black-and-white print stapled to the front. The photos appeared to have been taken in India. The only clue to their provenance was the notations someone had made on the bottom of each negative that read “10th PTU” with a date, most either 27 April or 3 May, 1945. The box’s previous owner, Zbiral and Teller’s friend Irving Leiden, had recently passed away. He’d picked it up somewhere, but his widow didn’t remember any details.
They replaced the old shoebox and envelopes with archival-quality storage materials. They stuck it in a closet for safekeeping, intending to get back to it soon. “That’s what we do,” Zbiral says. “We have so much shit.” And then, as they put it, “life took over”: their photography and film projects, their jobs to pay the mortgage on their house in Evanston—she as an art dealer and appraiser, he as a designer of museum exhibits—and the raising of their two children.
“Following the Box”
For a quarter century, Jerri Zbiral and Alan Teller have been trying to figure out the identity of the photographer responsible for a treasure trove of images from 1940s India. Here are a few of those photos.
Teller and Zbiral showed their photos to Jim Nye, the bibliographer of the U. of C.’s south Asia collection, and his colleagues. “They went nuts,” Teller says. “They were the first to encourage us to pursue the project.”
By then, their connection to him, whoever he was, had begun to feel much deeper.
Not only that, the question might also make a grant application more attractive, particularly to groups such as the AIIS or the Fulbright Program, which encourage their visiting scholars to work closely with citizens of their host countries.
“They’re very lively, effervescent people,” says Philip Lutgendorf, a professor at the University of Iowa and the current president of the AIIS. “I knew they would do really well in India. People would take them into their hearts and homes in the way that Indians so often do. They would make friends and spread goodwill.”
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