Two generations of photographers. Jean Flynn was raised by the father she adored, Ted White, on his gold mine on the Chena Slough north of Fairbanks in the early 1930's.  At the age of 15 she was sent to boarding school in Washington State, and after graduation entered an Institute specializing in photography.  She began her career as a professional in 1949, primarily at that time as a wedding portrait photographer.  She evolved over the ensuing decades to fashion photography, both runway and studio; event photographer; wildlife photographer; Real Estate; and still-life. She owned several portrait studios, the first in Palmer, Alaska in 1954.  She moved permanently to Anchorage in 1957, and then opened the first of several modest studios, in the small community of Mountain View.  Her last studio was in Spenard, in her clothing and jewelry boutique called "The Frilly Filly".   She also worked as an editorial photographer for several small newspapers, and the Alaska Spectrum magazine.  Later she had a fashion column called "Living with Flair" in the local paper.  Concurrently she was doing a considerable amount of Real Estate photography for Century 21 in Anchorage.  Her professional efforts were largely concluded in her late 70's, but she remained an avid enthusiast until her passing in 2001.

Jean gave her son Jimmy his first camera, a Linhof 4x5 press camera, in 1957.   By the age of nine he was proficient in image capture with both small and large formats [on a tripod], and sheet and roll film developing, contact printing, and enlargement.    Predictably, his interests were more inclined towards playing baseball, and exploring the woods of Ship Creek near his home.  His skills with photography were largely only employed through his teens and twenties when it was discovered that he was proficient with a camera and invariably inducted into taking the pictures whenever there was an event he was associated with.    In his thirties the interest in this art form were rekindled, and there have been several hundred thousand of frames since then.

Jean Flynn, around 1975