Since I have become obsessed with obtaining cheap old film cameras, fixing and/or modifying them, and using them to document junkyards, drag racing, and the Bonneville Salt Flats, I spend a lot of time searching for interesting cameras from the 1895-1960 period, preferably priced under 15 bucks. I've bought several dozen so far, and many of them came with exposed film inside. Nearly always, when I develop that old film there are no decipherable images to be found, with two exceptions: a 1930s Balda Juwella I found at a Tokyo flea market, and a 1950s Argus Argoflex Seventy-Five that I found on eBay. The Argus not only had acceptable-quality images of a family gathering, the first shot on the roll of 620-format Kodak Verichrome Safety Film showed a group of 1950s Detroit cars parked in front of an early-20th-century urban house.
I bought an Argus Seventy-Five at a thrift store for 50 cents when I was a kid, circa 1974, shot a few rolls with it and then took it apart (because I wanted to know how the viewfinder lens system worked) and lost most of the pieces. Last year, I picked up another on eBay for ten bucks shipped (paying 20 times as much as I did for my first one!) re-rolled 120 film onto 620 spools, and took it to the Houston 24 Hours of Lemons race.
I refined the vintage-camera mugshot technique at later racers, naturally, but the Seventy-Five can be used with a flashbulb attachment and I wanted to experiment with photography using big ol' single-use flashbulbs (which are readily available at good prices on eBay). My friend and fellow Denver car writer Andrew Ganz had a wedding coming up, so I decided I'd document the event with flashbulb-equipped vintage cameras (spoiler: this worked great, the wedding participants loved it, and I recommend that you do the same at the next wedding you attend). Unfortunately, my Seventy-Five had bad electrical components inside and wouldn't trigger the flash attachment. What to do? Why, go to the camera junkyard (eBay) and get a parts camera!
When my parts camera showed up, I was able to extract all the pieces I needed to fix my Seventy-Five’s flash-trigger mechanism. The camera contained an exposed roll of Kodak Verichrome Safety black-and-white print film, which was available from 1931 through 1956 (when it was replaced by the more modern Verichrome Pan). I took a wild guess about developing times for ancient film and processed the roll with Kodak D-76, and it had a dozen faded-but-usable images. I contacted the eBay seller, who said that the camera had been his grandparents’, at which point I sent him high-resolution scans of the photos. He was overjoyed, since the shots were of his mother, grandparents, and various relatives in Columbus, Ohio, and his family members had the opportunity to look at 63-year-old photos they didn’t even know had been taken. Since the newest car in the photograph appears to be from 1955 and the film was discontinued in 1956, we can get a pretty good guess of the photographs’ era.
The eBay seller told me the address of his grandparents’ 1955-1956 house, and I found that it looks much the same today as it did in the old photo.
The washed-out image (thanks, background radiation and deteriorating film chemistry!) makes the cars a bit hard to identify, but I feel confident that the sedan in the foreground is a 1952 Buick. The two in the background are less clear, but they might be a 1953 Ford on the left and a 1955 Chevrolet on the right.
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