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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