‘The scope of the collection, the time range and the volume is so good that there are very few cities that have all of this in one location.’

Larry and Jane Booth, as a team, have become names that are synonymous with the San Diego Historical Society’s collection of old San Diego photographs. Larry, 65, and Jane, 64, have spent half their lives with these images, now amounting to more than 1.25 million negatives and original material, and have helped established nationally recognized standards and procedures for the care and preservation of photographic images and prints. They were interviewed and photographed at the historical society office in Balboa Park by Dave Gatley, a Times staff photographer.

Larry: I built my first copy camera while I was working at the Title Insurance and Trust Co. in San Diego, realizing that I’d never get enough money from them to buy one. I used that camera to make duplicate negatives as a way of helping save the deteriorating nitrate-base film in their collection.

In high school, I got interested in astronomy and ground a six-inch telescope mirror in my garage. At Texas A&M;, I was studying to be a chemical engineer, and also had worked for an arsenal in the optical shop adjusting battery commander scopes and things just like that just prior to World War II. And I went to England during the war as a civilian in a technical detachment.

Jane: Everything he’s done in his lifetime has led toward the man he is. He didn’t know the man he was making, but this is it. I met him in physics class; we sat next to each other. We were married 44 years ago, 2 1/2 months before he left (for the war).

Larry: When I was in England, one of my English friends had a darkroom in his basement at the time. He made a print, and I watched the print being developed for the first time. That was an exciting thing. From that time on, I was really interested in photography. I bought and started reading books, and it’s been a long educational process from that particular moment.

I came to San Diego when I returned to the States and enlisted in the Navy immediately. We built a darkroom in our garage, and we both worked for the local newspaper. I worked the swing shift, so I had almost eight hours of daylight that I could do other things with. At the same time, I did work as a photographer for an advertising company whose client was the title company, while also taking care of their historical collection.

The title company had bought up a commercial photographer’s work, the Herbert Fitch collection. They used the collection in their advertising for 15 years, as sort of a before-and-after to show what happens to the land that somebody would buy and develop into a shopping center.

Jane: Larry’s photographs were the “afters.”

Larry: I went to work full time for the title company in 1951 as a photographer, and the historical photographs were in my charge at that time.

Jane: I was a mother, a homemaker and a wife . . . a volunteer and all that good stuff for a lot of years, and then went back to school and got my master’s in art. I was also interested in photography. When I was in high school, I was editor of the annual, and business manager of the paper, and took photographs with a Speed Graphic that I lugged around.

Larry: In 1977, I resigned from the title company (and Jane took over the collection). We were able to get the Title Insurance Collection donated to the San Diego Historical Society. Corporate management realized that they couldn’t support the collection the way it ought to be.

Jane: The negatives alone were something like 146,000 images. It also consisted of books, maps, documents, artifacts, prints, lantern slides and furniture.

We just kept going, taking care of photographs, and the collection just kept growing and growing. Before very many years had gone by, Larry wasn’t buying up the collections of negatives of early photographs, people were giving . They were coming in and saying, “Larry Booth wants this,” and to this day it happens. We even get things in the mail just addressed to Larry Booth, and people know there is this one crazy person who has been collecting photographs, everything he could get his hands on, all these years. There are bigger collections, richer collections, but Larry long ago confined it to San Diego city and county. This is a document of this area.

Photographers are the recorders of images, and in our documentary collection they are historians in the truest sense of the word. Recording what things were like. It’s really very strange that people don’t think about caring who the photographers were. They just go take the photographs, make the prints. They don’t record themselves enough. They’re always in the back of the camera, not in the front of it.

Larry: We are working because we love the collection rather than other reasons. The scope of the collection, the time range and the volume is so good that there are very few cities that have all of this in one location.

Jane: Working with historical photographs “bites you.” It’s an incurable disease.