Old Photos In My Collection

You may already know that I have quite a large collection of photographs. The overwhelming number of them are photos that I have taken over the many years that I’ve been a fan of photography. My personal photos start about 1960 making them about 60 years old.

Additionally I have a few hundred photos that I’ve been archiving for relatives. A large proportion are older – many dating back to the early 1900’s. A few are one hundred years old.

Below are some of these photographs that I’d like to share. Not all of them are ancient but they represent items or events that should harken you back to an earlier era.
 
 

 
Take a few minutes and go through your collection of photographs. You may unlock some of those nostalgic memories.
 
 

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed photography since I was a youngster. This in turn is the reason that my picture taking has spanned more than five decades.

I categorize the photos that I take into one of two “camps” – the snapshots and the memorable photos.

This article is the another in a series of articles that I’ve called “About this photo” to draw attention to a few of those memorable photos that may be hiding in a shoebox or on your hard drive.

Unlike some people who have photographic memories, I instead have memories about certain photographs.

Most of these special photographs were taken long, long ago. They are indelible and remain riveted in my mind. And so, in this “About this photo” series, I’d like to key in on one of these unforgettable photographs to bring you back to the time and circumstances under which it was taken.

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Taken late summer 1970, this is a photo of my girlfriend along Lake Michigan. We spent many weekends at this beach that summer. Usually the beach was very crowded, but on this cloudy and windy day, we had the run of the sand and shore to ourselves. The red lighthouse was a familiar site to anyone who knows this area and remains a key attraction to the beach today. It’s a lucky coincidence that my girlfriend’s jacket was about the same shade of red as the lighthouse. The reason that this photo is etched in my mind is that I’ve been married to this lovely lady for 50 years now.

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Now let’s skip forward some 40+ years. This photo was taken a few summers ago. Here we have two young girls having fun at the same location on Lake Michigan. You can see the same red lighthouse along the water albeit at a slightly different angle. These are two of our young grandchildren. As we were walking along the beach I was reminded of the 1970 photograph when we approached the red lighthouse. I asked the two girls to pose on the bench in the foreground. This photo captures the familiar feelings of warmth and affection that has somehow remained with me for more than 50 years.

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Along the way, I’ve taken a huge number of snapshots. However, the number of memorable photos that I’ve taken is far smaller. Yet it’s the memorable ones that have a magical ability to steer emotions, feelings and pleasure into our minds, even years later. Simply amazing.

 

Written by Arnie Lee

NOTE: This is a reprint and was originally written in 2005. I remember very clearly when Dad would pull out his large twin lens reflex camera, usually around a holiday, birthday or family event. He would lower his head and look into the lens hood while his hand would reach down to grasp the knurled knob on the camera’s side. I would see the bellows move back and forth as he zeroed in on his focus. Then he’d snap and the shot would be done. We’d wait weeks, sometimes months, to see the results. After all, a full roll of film had room for 12 negatives!

When the film was finally developed, we were thrilled to see the results. Here are two photos, one from the 40’s and another from the 50s, but they both share the same “feel” – the subjects are dressed up for a special occasion, some of them are posed comfortably and others more stiffly, but always in full black and white.

Aunt Emma, Aunt Millie and Mom circa 1940 I took this family picture as a youth circa 1957

In the 50’s, color photos were reserved only for special occasions – owing to the higher expense. While Dad sometimes shot color, the cost of the film and print processing was too extravagant for normal use. But for those special times when he did use color, he would send the exposed film to one of the discount processing services to save money. The downside: developing by mail took an additional week to complete.

I cut my teeth on Dad’s older twin lens reflex (TLR) and a Polaroid Swinger. Using the twin lens reflex was an exercise in patience. With only twelve exposures to a roll of 120 film, you made sure that you had a good shot before you released the shutter. With the Swinger, it was a blast to see instant photography. With today’s digital we’ve come full circle; we have another form of instant photography again.

As a youngster with sparse earnings, I made do with Dad’s second TLR and the Swinger that served as my equipment. I came into luck when Uncle Tom, who was in the Air Force at the time, agreed to buy a camera for me at a huge discount on the Air Force Base PX. This became a lesson in patience: I’d wait a whole year until he returned from service overseas to get my hands on a state of the art Canonflex RM SLR camera.

In the mean time, I learned to develop film and make my own prints. A small corner in the basement became my darkroom. I covered the windows to keep out the light, fashioned a processing area from discarded planks of wood and used Mom’s washroom sink to provide water for the chemicals. I spent many nights mixing developer, stop bath and fixer; processing film and making black and white prints. I started with a basic Testrite enlarger and later graduated to a fancy Durst 606 enlarger with a built-in color filter drawer. I was so immersed into this hobby that soon I learned to make my own color prints. It would take take three hours of preparation to make the first color “test” print and perhaps six hours to get an acceptable “final” color print. I can hardly believe that I had so much patience back then.

To further my interest, something wonderful happened. Mom arranged for me to get a part time job with John Margotta, her past schoolmate who was now a professional photographer. For three years, after school I would head to John’s studio to learn the photography business. In the studio I was his assistant. I would hold lights and set up equipment for weddings, bar mitzvahs, anniversaries, birthdays, modeling shoots, funerals (yes, funerals) and more. I learned about lighting techniques, portrait techniques, posing techniques, action techniques, view camera technqiues and wedding cake cutting techniques too. And of course John taught me many darkroom techniques. I used most of my earnings to purchase more equipment.

My photographic education continued. During high school I proudly served on the yearbook staff as one of the three student photographers with access to sporting and entertainment events. In the following examples, you’ll see that we continued taking black and white photos since the cost of color was prohibitive at the time.

The friendly cheerleading squad of New Rochelle High School circa 1967 Motown’s Four Tops performing at New Rochelle High School circa 1966

During my college years, I completed my formal photo training by working at two different high end processing labs servicing the Madison Ave advertising agencies. In the 60’s, a process called “dye transfer” was used to make photographic reproductions for the high quality magazines like Vogue and Harper. Here is where I learned processing from the ground up: making color separations from original transparencies for printing using cyan, magenta and yellow dyes. Despite commuting between my home in New Rochelle and the photo labs in New York City and the long working hours, I thoroughly enjoyed the job as I continued to learn different aspects of photography.

At college I taught at the photography club and introduced my girlfriend to darkroom techniques. By the way, Kris is now my wife and hates the darkroom. I was a staff photographer for several university organizations and earned extra cash by photographing fraternity and sorority events.

Following college, Kris and I were married and shortly thereafter, photography took a backseat to raising a family, putting bread on the table and becoming involved in the software industry. Although I took and accumulated thousands of photos during this period, the bulk of these were of family faces and of the scenic vacation variety.

Skip forward 30 years to the mid-1990s. My company Abacus, was involved with flight simulation software and I’m taking more and more aviation related photos. I now find myself dabbling in the new world of digital photography. The stars are finally aligned and I’m ready to marry two of my long time interests: photography and aviation. With digital, the equipment and processing techniques are radically different from conventional film photography.

Several years ago, I received a surprise email from John Margotta, my photography mentor from the 1960s. I was happy to hear that at an age of 80+, he’s still immersed in photography. He’s produced some artistic renditions of still life using his “Photoshop-equipped darkroom”. His approach to photography is a lesson that hi-tech isn’t reserved only for the young.

Lucikly, I’m finding that most of the basics that I started learning 50+ years ago are still relevant. After all of these years, I remain very excited and passionate about my love of photography.

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