Quirky 1927 film camera documents discarded dashes in Denver

The finest in Iacoccan dash technology, photographed with the fascinatingly weird 1927 Ansco Memo film camera.

















































Most of my work documenting junkyard cars with old film cameras involves medium-format film or weirdly tiny spy cameras. 35 mm film, which we know best from the long-lived 135 format, gets a bit of my attention, but it takes something oddball to get me worked up about the far-too-mainstream perforated 35 mm film type … say, a camera marketed to businessmen who needed to shoot lots of photos in the middle 1920s, made to use 35 mm movie film in a proprietary cartridge. That’s the ticket!

Most cameras of this era shot 8 to 16 photos per loading, but this one manages 50.

The Ansco Memo, from the New York company that was Kodak’s biggest competitor for decades, was a very compact camera designed to fit in a pocket and keep shooting forever (by 1920s camera standards). It used a claw-style film-advance mechanism lifted from movie-projector designs and a dial-type film counter, both of which were very unusual for the era.

Fortunately, modern 35mm film has the same sprocket holes as old-time movie film.

The standardized 135 cartridge that dominated film photography from the 1940s through the 2000s didn’t exist when the Memo made its debut, so the film goes into a pair of proprietary Ansco/Agfa cartridges. I had to feed some black-and-white film into the supply cartridge (in total darkness) and then start the leading edge of the film into the take-up cartridge. Once that was done, I was ready to shoot 50 photographs in the junkyard.

These half-frame images are pretty decent for their small size.

Since I’ve already made a photo-essay about engines yanked and abandoned at a California junkyard, I decided to use the Memo to document the dashboard regions of thrown-away cars in a Colorado yard.

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