My 100 year old photo project.
That's how old these negatives are but I have been a care taker for them only for the last 37 years. I first found them in my very first apartment in Pensacola, the top floor of a house at 1314 Cypress St. They were in a shoe box stuffed a crawl space. My hobby being photography I was immediately interested in them. They were old and the film format was huge. I could hold them up to the light and make out the vague shadows of the people. This really put a hook in me. I wanted to know who the people were, when they had been taken and I had the weird idea that it was important to develop and publish them. They had survived along time before I found them, they deserved a better fate then distagrating in a humid attic. My Land lady was Modest Caro Britton who lived on the 1st floor of the house. She was 79 years old at the time and her health was failing both physically and mentally but she was often a joy to talk to about history. She had lived thru two world wars and seen a lot in her time. She would tell me of the blimp hanger in Pensacola Bay, Civil War Veteran that lived next door at one time and how hers was one of the first houses in the neighborhood that was built with electricity already built in. I asked her about the negatives and she said that some of them were probably taken by her uncle Bryan. She couldn't see the images on the negatives well enough to comment much on the photos but she did rummage around in her closet and showed me an Kodak Folding Autographic Camera. It was in ruins. The lens had been poked out, the bellows was torn and the red glass on the observation spot was missing but It was a camera that could have taken some of the earlier pictures. 130 format film makes distinctive negatives. I asked her if I could have the negatives and she agreed and so my 37 year history with them began. In 1983 I had no dark room. I wouldn't have one until the late 1990's and that's when I made my first contact prints of the negatives. I could now at least see more details of who and what was in them. Unfortunately, Modest had passed away by then and I was left with just the memories of what she had said about the negatives. I tried to enlarge them using my cheap, used 35mm enlarger but it didn't work very well. They were all to large to fit in the negative tray and when I tried to jury rigged my own larger tray I ended up burning one of the negatives so they had to wait until I could get a hold of an enlarger capable of processing larger negatives. If you know me then you know that my life has had ups and downs and many many problems and many moves that have caused me to loose or mistreat things that I shouldn't have but thru all of that I always went to great care to make sure my negatives were safe. When the digital age came along and my darkroom became obsolete overnight I knew I needed to scan my negatives but it wasn't until recently I was able to get a photo scanner capable of scanning large black and white negatives. Even now I had to do a little jury higgly jiggily to get three of the largest negatives to scan properly. Now this is it. A hundred year old, not my family, story and 37 years of stewardship of the following sixteen black and white negatives.
