Good Finds: Mystery Farm

     I love looking through bins of negatives, slides, and photos at vintage markets.  Most of the time the seller has no idea where they came from and that means I get to make up my own stories or try to piece the actual story together by finding a handful of photos that were clearly from the same family or even roll of film.  I not only find myself interested in the subjects of the photos, but also find myself wondering about the camera used, the film used, the development techniques used, etc.  Generally I imagine the photos, depending on the time period, were taken by some dad-type person using Kodak's latest consumer camera.  He bought the camera specifically for a vacation or summer activity and picked up several rolls of film (120, 620, or 127 format) and snapped away on his family before taking them to the chemist's shop to be developed.  Those are times I wish I could see myself.  Times when the films I love were still being made, and when I wouldn't have had to ration flash bulbs the way I do now.

     Here is one such photo I dug out of a bin at the Fremont Market on Sunday this past summer.  This market is my favorite for looking for photos as there are usually 2 or 3 people who have big bins to look through.  The photo doesn't say anything on the back, and I know nothing about it.  The crop in this farm looks to be corn, so I am assuming this is somewhere in the US.  The shapes of the hills lead me to believe this is significantly further East than where I found it, and the sparseness of the trees on the hill add to this suspicion of mine.  The photo is pretty beat up - there are tons of small white scratches and chips, and the paper has yellowed quite a bit.  There is evidence of bubbles in the emulsion on the paper, or maybe some of the emulsion was peeled away by accident, though this can only be seen up close.  Still, the photo itself is a very pleasant one.  This photographer seems to have had an appreciation for taking photos with no humans in them, just like me!  In my head I call these "quiet photos", though I have never said or written that before right now.

     I have no clues about what kind of camera or film were used, but the format is 6x9.  I love using 6x9 cameras because the negatives are so huge and look so nice without having to get out the magnifier.

Mystery Farm