I occasionally acquire rolls of film on eBay or inside old cameras that haven’t been developed, and were never seen by the photographers. You never know – sometimes they’re old, sometimes they’re not. This roll is not.
At first, I thought this was shot in Boston. But boats move around, and this could be any East Coast port city. As it turns out, this “found film” collection is from Portland, Maine. Basically, it’s a roll of pictures someone shot walking around town taking photos of buildings. So yeah, I know this hasn’t exactly piqued your curiosity…but it’s found film, and one never knows what to expect!
Most of them are pretty generic and unidentifiable to someone who has never been to Portland. But there are a few I was able to nail down. Below, for example, is the First Parish Church.
Also, a seemingly nondescript ice cream parlor, which is the Mt. Desert Island shop, on 51 Exchange Street. There are three shops, only one of them in Portland. This appears to be the shop in Portland, which opened in June 2010. So the film is less than five years old.
Then there are a few more nondescript street corners and scenes, that make me wonder what the photographer was after… I only include a few, to give a sense.
I was able to identify the Our Lady of Victories Monument, from 1891…rarely shot from the back….and a picture of people taking a picture, near the downtown shopping area at 24 City Center.
The complete roll of oddly blue-tinged photos I got off this roll can be found here.
I just have a few more rolls of found film to process and scan before the packers come and pack all of our things and we depart India. As I finish the last few, I’ll probably wrap up this project, because it’s getting pretty expensive on eBay these days, and I get way too many rolls that are just empty. I am also excited to develop a roll of my OWN found film, which I discovered inside an old 1990s era point-and-shoot camera. I just need to find the time!
