The Man Who Develops the World's Found Film

Atlas Obscura ^ | March 21, 2016 | Andy Wright

[NYer]

Of possible interest, ping!

[VanDeKoik]

This man is a hero!

Every image he saves are memories that wont die.

[sparklite2]

I wonder who still processes Kodachrome. Good luck with that.

[GrandJediMasterYoda]

Amazing. Photographs always fascinated me like crazy. They make me wonder if the past has a constant existence related to the present. I mean what is the difference between something that happened in the past and something that never happened? If they both have a value of zero as it pertains to the present, then how can photographs exist?

[TexasGator]

“Every image he saves are memories that wont die.”

My wife has over four thousand photos on her iPad ...

[GrandJediMasterYoda]

This is me 1967 at my brothers 2nd birthday in New York city. I'm in the striped shirt 4 years old when I still had hair and didn't weigh 265 lbs LOL. Dad just became a New York city cop. He's still around and kicking today at 76 yelling at Fox news every night ha ha

[TheCornerOffice]

Saving for future reference...

[wally_bert]

I’m glad that he does this.

Old photos are very interesting to me. I kind of miss what darkroom experience I had.

My family has mountains of snapshots and it would be a few years worth of labor to go through them.

[VanDeKoik]

LOL!

I have 14 years worth of burned CDs, obsolete photo cards, and thumb drives of photos I need to secure before I actually do lose them. Almost lost my honeymoon photos.

70 year old film definitely holds better than these formats.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks NYer. In another 150 years, someone will be specializing in recovering lost images from digital media. :')

[21twelve]

We went through mom’s old albums the couple of weeks before she died at 94. Her mind was still sharp as a tack as she went through the photos all the way back to when she was three years old. Names of friends and all of the stories. We were very lucky. And most of the old black and white photos were probably as sharp as the day they were taken. The color ones from the seventies weren’t the greatest iirc.

[Hot Tabasco]

Every image he saves are memories that wont die.

I sold a Colt .25 semi-auto that belonged to my grandfather that was issued to him by the Detroit Police Dept. to a Colt firearm collector.

He has a website of all his Colts and along with the handgun I also provided some old photos of my grandfather in his DPD uniform as well as my dad and he posted everything on his website.

It's kind of cool that they will be forever archived on the internet............

[Little Bill]

I was stationed in NYC in 1967, AFP.

[sparklite2]

Color dyes, with the exception of dye transfer, will fade far, far sooner than metallic silver.

[stylecouncilor]

Ping

[Bigg Red]

Very cute.

I recently completed a self-imposed task of scanning and cataloging a bazillion family photographs. Some of them came from a great aunt who was born in 1890. Fascinating stuff.

[GrandJediMasterYoda]

Wow that is incredible! 1890? I have like this encyclopedic knowledge of dates, I can tell you exactly what was going on in that year. Oscar Wilde published "the picture of Dorian gray" "The adventures of Huckleberry Finn" was a best seller. Charlie Chaplin and Adolf Hitler were one year old, Wyoming and Idaho are admitted as the 43rd and 44th states, the US Army tried to take out the Lakota Indians resulting in 300 deaths in the Wounded knee massacre, it was so cold bodies froze in almost upright positions and they actually took photos of it...........

[roadcat]

I have 14 years worth of burned CDs, obsolete photo cards, and thumb drives of photos I need to secure before I actually do lose them.

Many people don't realize that the lifespan of CDs is limited. Some brands are better than others. But many cheap brands have a thin layer that will degrade and flake off after a couple decades, rendering the digital data unreadable. Best option is to get a photo processing place to print your most cherished photos to both paper and a new CD/DVD. At least on paper, a photo will last for many decades (professional silver paper, not inkjet printed paper!).

[Paisan]

Every photograph is a historical document.