They say every picture is worth 1,000 words. In the best case, a good picture tells a story. Sometimes the picture itself is the story. This is one of the cool things about photography.
Take the photo below, for instance. Not a very good picture – out of focus, not well-framed, and the subject kind of blends with the background. It’s a kid who lives in a Dhobi Khana – a washers’ community and the second largest in India – where people live and work washing sheets and blankets and everything else you can think of for local clients, by hand, literally beating the clothes against rocks. The place was built in 1902, and they are still in business, though with an uncertain future. The picture was snapped with a Kodak No. 2A folding autographic brownie, manufactured around 1920. You can’t get film for it anymore – the camera takes exposures 2.5 by 4.25 inches – and the widest film you can get (new) is only just over 2.25 inches wide. I found a couple of 116 film spools and backing paper that are the right size, and, in a dark bathroom, taped a piece of narrower 120 film to it, and rolled it all back up to put in the camera. That film had expired in 1973. Then I went and snapped this picture with it.
The photo below looks like something you’d find in an old scrapbox in the attic. It was taken on a camera that belonged to a guy named Ron Stone, who was stationed on the USS New Jersey, the U.S. Navy’s most decorated battleship, as part of the “King Division”, which served aboard the ship during the Korean War, from 1952 to 1956. Mr. Stone served aboard the New Jersey from September 6, 1952, to August 3, 1954, and later on the USS Missouri, followed by the USS Eldorado. He left the Navy on December 20, 1955.
But he didn’t take this picture. The USS New Jersey currently sits off the New Jersey coast near Camden, where it functions as a museum ship. Mr. Stone likely is no more, as his camera was picked up at an estate sale and wound up in my hands while I lived in Namibia, and is currently continuing to snap photos in India, 60 years after it was on board the USS New Jersey, and roughly 75 years after it was manufactured. The photo below was taken in July, 2013.
This is a picture of my dog on a beach in India. It was taken on a 1950’s Ansco Anscoflex, designed by Raymond Loewy. Who? Here’s a quote from another blog about Loewy:
This robust example of 1950’s Industrial Design is the brain child of Raymond Loewy. Don’t know who Raymond Loewy is? I’m sure you’ve seen his work, Pennsylvania Railroad Locomotives, Boeing 307 Interior, Components on Harley Davidson’s 1941 Knucklehead, Lucky Strike Logo, Coca-Cola Bottle, US Coast Guard Logo, US Postal Service Logo, International Harvester Logo, Shell Logo, BP Logo, Exxon Logo, TWA Logo, NABISCO Logo, The Zippo Lighter, NASA’s Skylab Space Station Interior, Frigidaire Products, Studebaker Commander, Avanti and Starliner Coupe, Sears products. Basically by 1951 his company Raymond Loewy Associates had a slogan “the average person, leading a normal life, whether in the country, a village, a city, or a metropolis, is bound to be in daily contact with some of the things, services, or structures in which R.L.A [Raymond Loewy Associates] was a party during the design or planning stage.” He is the father of industrial design and has been and will continue to be an influential designer.
The camera is pretty simple, and it has a major flaw – it always produces a line on the photo, near the right edge. You can see it clearly on the photo below. It has had this flaw pretty much since it came out of the box, way back in the 1950s. How do I know this?
Because between 1953 and 1960, the same camera was used by its original owner to photograph this girl on her 6th birthday in Toledo, Ohio. The birthday girl is the one smiling on the left. I know this because the very same roll was also used to photograph the same girl on her second birthday. That roll, with two usable snapshots, was never developed – neither the photographer nor this girl, who would be in her late 60s today, ever saw this picture. But the manufacturer’s defect is present on all three photos. It’s a line that stretches from the 1950s to 2013, from Toledo, Ohio, to Chennai, India, on a beach with an old dog chewing on a stick.
