Seeing the Light

(entry for 9/11/24)

The first photographer in our family was my mother. (She was also the first, and only, electrician in the family, but that’s another story.) In 1939, a year before I was born, she was given an old Kodak-brand folding camera that used a strange 116-size paper-backed black and white negative film. (It was the only film ever invented that resulted in 2.5 inch by 4.25 inch photos, a weird longer-tha-normal rectangular format.) She fell in love with the unwieldy thing and took pictures of us and our surroundings everywhere we went. (The black and white photos of me in various posts of this blog were all taken with this camera, and she was always the photographer, except for a few photos where she is in the picture herself.) 

Kodak advertised it as a “pocket camera,” but this must have been a joke, for I’ve never met the pocket it would fit in! Purse, maybe. Pocket, no. It measured four by eight inches, and an inch and a half deep when folded flat (six inches deep when extended.) I did some research recently and found that it’s official name was the Kodak 2A Keystone Model B. That’s a picture of one (though not hers) at the head of this post.

Among other unique features, it had no visible lens! No piece of glass or plastic for the light to pass through to focus on the film. (There actually was a lens, called a glass miniscus, invisible behind the shutter, focusing the light onto the film flat against the back plate of the camera.) The opening where the shutter lurked was incredibly small, about the size of a pencil eraser on the back end of a number 2 pencil. In other words, not much light came through. There had to be very good illumination of the subject for any usable image at all to reach the film. Nor was there any flash attachment to take care of darker situations. There were two shutter speeds, 1/25 and 1/50 of a second. There were four sizes of exposure openings. Not the f-stop numbers of later cameras, just 1, 2, 3, and 4, from largest to smallest. If you used the slower shutter speed (1/25), the largest opening (1), and opened all the drapes and curtains in the brightest room in the house, you could almost take indoor photographs.

You had two choices for focus: eight feet or a hundred feet. That was it!

A roll of film yielded eight pictures. You heard me right. Eight! It normally took a week to get the pictures back after the roll of film was taken to the developing service (usually in a local drugstore).

Mother took hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pictures, and the best of them always ended up mounted in black-paged photo albums. She didn’t just give pictures away. She gave complete albums away!

Either Rita or I were in most of them. And/or my dad.

My dad could pose patiently for hours, it seemed, and was in many of the pictures, but otherwise seemed to have no interest in the process or the results.

This was true until 1949, when he was introduced to 35mm color slide photography, using Eastman Kodak’s new Kodachrome 10-speed ‘color transparency’ film. (‘Ten,’ by the way, is an extremely ‘slow’ film speed. As with my mom’s camera, there had to be a lot of light there to achieve any sort of recognizable image.) We had suddenly become very poor in 1949, so his new interest had to be considerably restrained. A single roll of Kodachrome cost about two dollars including developing (a price that could at that time buy you an elaborate dinner), so at first he didn’t do a lot of ‘shooting.’ When you bought a ‘roll’ (actually a canister) of Kodachrome 35mm file, the processing was included in the price. When the twenty or thirty-six exposure roll was completed, you mailed it off to Hollywood, California, (of course!) in a cute little yellow pouch that was in the box the film came in. After developing, the continuous strip of film was cut into individual photos and then made into card-board mounted ‘slides,’ which were then mailed back to you in a box. Kodak had a monopoly on film development. No one else was allowed to touch a roll of their slide film, which was just as well, since the process was extremely complex. (The film was actually a multi-layer black and white film into which color dyes were injected, one color and layer at a time, during the multi-step developing process. Other brands of slide film came later, in which the color dyes were already present in the film, and parts of each color removed successively during development. But nothing ever quite equaled that original Kodachrome for quality of color and management of light. The dyes used were very stable, and did not lead to discoloration with age as color print film tended to do.)

Overnight, my dad decided that he was now the photographer. At first, he used a really cheap Agfa camera, almost a toy, with no control over shutter speed or lens opening. But the high quality of the film versus the low quality of the camera soon began to frustrate him, so in 1951 he bought a Praktica single lens reflex camera (with screw-mount interchangeable lenses) from Germany to replace the Agfa, and gave the latter to me.

So now there were three photographers in the family, instead of only one. (Although I must admit, my contribution to the art was primitive, to put it mildly. I took the Agfa with me to Junior Camp the first summer after he gave it to me. I shot twenty pictures. In one of them, you could almost see what the picture was supposed to be about. The other nineteen, forget it.)

My dad became something of a Montrose celebrity. He joined the local Camera Club and won contest after contest. (No money involved. Just bragging rights.) One particularly gorgeous photo he took up on the Uncompahgre Plateau, of autumn-colored aspen trees against a deep blue sky, won first prize in a state-wide competition. As I recall, his prize money was $20, enough to pay for ten rolls of film!

This photo was quite controversial, by the way. Some ‘experts’ claimed that he had manipulated the colors through the use of filters. Someone said it was impossible to get the sky that dark a blue in the daytime without a polarizing filter (which he did own, but did not use on that photo). Well, they were wrong. All they had to do was go outside and look! At nine thousand feet elevation, the plateau average, the sky was often that dark, especially when you looked straight up! Not that there would have been anything wrong with using such a filter. The rules did not prohibit it. But any such accessory was supposed to be listed on the competition entry form, and he had not listed any. (Mostly because there weren’t any used!)

He bought a projector, and we (and countless friends) were subjected to hours of night-time ‘slide shows,’ in which we had to sit through all the slides, bad as well as good, even the ones where there was nothing there at all. TV had not come to western Colorado yet, so there was nothing to stop or interfere with the living room slide shows.

My mom’s response to all this was to stop. Just stop. No more pictures. Nothing was said about it. She didn’t even seem to miss it. Her camera sat unused on a shelf. (I eventually inherited it, but by then it had developed a couple holes in the expansion bellows, so it leaked light and ruined the film.) I don’t know if she was simply jealous, or whether my dad had said something hurtful to her, or whether there was some other, more private reason for her reaction. All I know is that she took no more pictures. She lived another 48 years, but did not ever take another photo. Ever.

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