Nearly all of my old American-made film cameras came from New York, where Kodak, Ansco/Agfa, Goodwin and other photographic pioneers had their factories. Chicago had camera manufacturers, too, though they tended to build extremely affordable hardware (such as the UniveX) and the companies tended to be more of the fly-by-night/change-the-name-every-few-years sort. I picked up a Chicago-made Pho-Tak Foldex 30, made by the somewhat dodgy United States Camera Company around 1952, and used it to document the experience of a Series II Land Rover during Denver’s Bomb Cyclone II snowstorm a couple of weeks back. Shockingly, the Pho-Tak turned out to be a pretty decent camera (despite, I assume, being hammered together in a burned-out warehouse basement by a bunch of Malört-guzzling gentlemen hired out of the local blood bank), and so I decided to bring it with me on a junkyard expedition to the San Francisco Bay Area.
I brought three rolls of 120 film for this trip: one of Fujifilm Fujichrome Velvia 100 color transparency, one of Ilford Pan F Plus 50 black-and-white and one of Rollei Retro 80S black-and-white. For my subject, I chose engines that had been pulled out of vehicles by customers and then left behind on the ground. It takes a long time to remove a junkyard engine, and it seems that it’s always either 115°F out or pouring rain when you do the job; engines get left behind when the junkyard shopper discovers a previously-unnoticed showstopper flaw, or when it turns out to be the wrong engine, or some other depressing development. Once in a while, an engine will get yanked out because the junkyard shopper wants to grab a flexplate or crankshaft or other part that’s easier to reach with the engine removed. Whatever the reason, each of these engines represents a great deal of sweating, cursing, and suffering, and I wanted to capture the aftermath with the Pho-Tak. And because I have shot plenty of junkyard engines sitting in junkyard dirt in the past, I’m including a special bonus gallery of those photos (below), taken with film cameras dating from 1899 through 1974.
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