1940 German camera returns to junkyard for portrait lens close-ups

The camera is 50 years newer than this Honda D engine.

Denver junkyard photographed with 1940 Agfa Speedex film camera.

The reason most of your great-grandparents’ photos are indecipherable is simple: Photography in the old days was hard. For the first half of the 20th century, most non-professional-grade cameras couldn’t shoot anything closer than about six feet away, which was one of the larger of the many difficulties amateur photographers faced back then. If you wanted to shoot up close, you had to attach what was called a portrait lens to the front of the camera’s existing lens, then measure the subject-to-camera distance exactly to get your shot. After much trial-and-error and a whole bunch of eBay-obtained portrait lenses, I have been able to take my vintage-camera junkyard photography to the next level: closeups of discarded intake manifolds and Little Tree air fresheners. A couple of weeks ago, we saw the results of a portrait lens attached to a 1919 German camera and taken to a Denver car graveyard; now we’ll see how a 1940 German camera does at the same yard with a different portrait lens.

Actually made in New York, but to a German design.

The Speedex camera was the product of the German-owned Agfa-Ansco company in New York, whose president renounced his German citizenship the day Germany invaded Poland in 1939; soon after, the company was seized by the United States government as enemy property. The camera I’m using was made just after this happened, in 1940, so it’s as historically interesting as my 1941 Plymouth that came off the assembly line during a day of heavy Blitz bombing of London.

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