When I went to work a 24 Hours of Lemons race near Olympia, Washington, last summer, I brought along my Ansco Buster Brown Folding No. 2 camera to immortalize some of the racing action with the finest in cheap 1910 photographic technology. There’s a big wrecking yard just down the road from the track, and I went over there to document racers feverishly yanking parts for their broken race cars. As I watched a Mustang II team Sawzall a transmission out of a Ranger, I noticed a familiar grille poking through the weeds nearby: a genuine Dodge Magnum, last of the Chrysler B-Bodies. Yes, this Disco Era personal luxury coupe was the descendant of the ’69 Charger, and I think this shot made on a camera 69 years its senior captures the sadness of its demise.
The Magnum has a mashed-down roof and the kind of interior you’d expect in a car exposed to the damp Pacific Northwest elements for years, so its chances of rescue and restoration are effectively nil. Still, it’s an interesting car and I hope some of its parts live on in other Magnums.
Ansco was a fearsome Kodak competitor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, headquartered in Binghamton while Kodak operated out of Rochester. The cheap Buster Brown line of cameras (named after a popular comic-strip character of the era) competed directly with the equally cheap Kodak Brownies, much as cheap cars like the Oakland Model 42 competed with the Ford Model T. My Buster Brown No. 2 Folding is a masterpiece of penny-pinching, with crummy materials and hammered-together-by-drunks assembly quality, but it still works perfectly at age 109 and the image quality is very good. In fact, the image quality from 100-year-old affordable cameras tends to be better than that from 60-year-old affordable cameras, because glass lenses work better than plastic ones.
I’ve had great success with the Buster Brown No. 2 Folding at the Bonneville Salt Flats, at the dragstrip, and at the junkyard.
Source: Read Full Article