Man returns forsaken portraits to families

After he was sent to a bankrupt portrait studio in Kansas City, Missouri, in January to measure the space for a new leasing agent, architect Brian Bononi saw something he couldn’t get off his mind.

Piles of portraits were stacked near the entrance, ready to be thrown out with the trash when the store’s furnishings were liquidated.

“My heart sank every time I looked at the pile,” said Bononi. “I knew that those photos meant a lot to the people who were in them and that they’d be gone forever if I didn’t do something.”

I kept thinking, ‘What if those were my photos? Wouldn’t I want somebody to rescue them for me?”

So, Bononi, with help from his wife and four children, took the portraits to their house to be stored.

The next day, Bononi said, “We alphabetized all of the portraits and made a list of those that had full names and phone numbers and those that didn’t,” he said. “Then we started making phone calls.”

So far, the Bononis have reached 63 customers and reunited many of them with photographs they assumed they’d never see. And now, with help from a few posts on Facebook, the family is hoping to locate nearly 100 more people whose phone numbers and first names weren’t written on their packages.

“It takes a lot of work to get everyone in a family together for a picture, and I imagine that some of these people might have had to make a special trip into town to do it,” Bononi said. “It’s sickening to think that if I hadn’t gone into the shop that day, their memories could have ended up in a landfill somewhere.”

“It’s definitely been an educational experience for all of us,” said Dawn Bononi, “and it’s been a wonderful feeling to hand people their photos when they come by our house.”