I think I learned it from my Mom — I have a hard time passing up a good deal. For me that’s especially true when it comes to cheap vintage film cameras. Sometimes I fix them up and take photos, other times I just test them out and sell them on eBay to fund my film photography habit. Every once and a while one of the old cameras I buy will have a roll of undeveloped film still sitting inside, forgotten from a time long ago.
Over the past couple years I’ve taken these abandoned rolls of film and done pretty much what the original owners did. I tossed them in a drawer and forgot about them.
Until now.
A few weeks ago I came across @anthonys_lost_film on Instagram, a place where this random internet stranger develops and shares found rolls of film just like the ones I had sitting in a drawer collecting dust. And I thought it was a pretty cool idea. Anthony’s work inspired me to develop my own rolls of found film, and these are the results.
The often grainy, gnarled, and funky photos Anthony has shared offered a peculiar glimpse into an unknown past. Looking at them feels voyeuristic, like you’re looking into someone’s life without permission, but also triggers and bit of nostalgia and even mourning. They seem like important memories that were tossed in the trash (or sold to some random person on eBay, or sent to the local thrift store) without ever seeing the light of day.
This wasn’t my first foray into developing lost or expired film. Last year I scanned a batch of slide film I found at the thrift store that turned out to be historic pictures of the Kilcher family, and before that I took a stab at developing 20-year-old expired cameras I found at my parents house (click the link to see pictures of Baby Clay with a mohawk!).
So earlier this month when I got ready to develop a few rolls of color film of my own, I pulled my collection of misfit, forgotten film rolls out of the drawer and put them in line for development. I had a total of 5 found rolls; 3 from cameras I bought on eBay, 1 from a camera picked up recently at a local thrift store, and 1 my mom found in a drawer at her house last year.
Of course I had no idea what — if anything — would develop from these rolls. But surprisingly they all produced usable images. Some have wild color shifts and stains, some have a lot of base fog and grain, but they all still managed to tell a story of a place and time otherwise forgotten. So here are some of the highlights, and some of the things I’ve learned about them with the help of other internet strangers.
Since developing I have shared these photos with @anthonys_lost_film on Instagram and also posted them to Reddit on r/foundphotos and other subreddits. Anthony has begun sharing the photos on Instagram if you want to give him a follow. And the Redditors on r/foundphotos, r/Connecticut, and r/whereisthis have come out enforce to help lend a hand in deciphering the people, places, and things on these reels.
Within 24 hours of posting, these photos have been seen by more than 67,000 people on Reddit and Instagram, garnering 128 comments and tips.
I shared a selection of photos from 4 separate rolls of film to the internet. The 5th roll had a handful of usable images, but they were mostly just of trees and one of a girl sitting in a bush, pictured above, which gives little or anything to go off of. Plus the quality was exceptionally bad. So I ended up not including them in social media posts.
With that said, there is a lot to unpack in the other 4 rolls. Below I break things down roll-by-roll and share some of the most interesting photos and also what we know about them, which in many cases is not much. If you have any context to add, please leave a comment or shoot me an email.
1 – CVS Color Film 400 found in an Olympus Stylus Zoom:
These photos are some of the most striking and probably the ones I know the least about. Actually, I know nothing about them except that judging by the flip phone cameras in some of the frames they were probably taken in the early 2000s.
More than half of the roll appears to be from a wedding reception, with a few indoors shots of a woman sitting with a cat and the same cat playing in the bath tub. They’re genuine and intimate and exactly the type of photos a point-and-shoot pocket camera was meant to capture.
2 – Kodak Max 400 found in an Olympus XA:
Here’s where things start getting a little more interesting. This roll of film had about 15 frames of zoo animals, but the other half of the photos had several identifiable landmarks and other interesting captures that helped make some sense of the where, kind of the when, but still not quite the who of these photos.
Anthony (of @anthonys_lost_film fame on Instagram) was the first to point out that the photos of Lego creations were from Downtown Disney (now called Disney Springs) in Orlando, Florida. Commenters on Reddit also helped place other photos in San Francisco and Nebraska, and a few even piped up to say that one of the guys pictured may have worked in his same medical field and published scientific papers related to his work.
Read more in the photo captions below.
UPDATE: The above photo was taken from the rooftop of the Inn San Francisco, located by u/SuperFaulty on Reddit in the r/whereisthis forum.
3 – Walgreens Studio 35 200 film from an unknown camera (sorry, I forgot):
When I posted some photos from this roll to the r/foundphotos subreddit, the first thing identified was the above picture by user u/FinnbarMcBride. It was snapped at a restaurant in Simsbury, Connecticut that at the time was likely called The Chart Room. It has since been renamed (a few times) and is currently called Abigail’s Grille and Wine Bar, named after the lady in the painting above who’s ghost is said to still haunt the place.
u/FinnbarMcBride also recommended cross-posting the photos to r/Connecticut to possibly track down the people in the picture, which I did. What ensued was a sort of colloquial conversation among strangers of “how Connecticut” the photos were. The synopsis being that those pictured could have been almost anyone’s aunt or uncle or parents or grandparents two decades ago enjoying themselves with a bottle of wine on the back patio.
A few people even chimed in to offer thoughts on who those pictured might be, but I’ve yet to track down anything conclusive. In the end I’d love to get these photos back to the original owners if possible.
Other photos taken from this roll were poolside and beach side, placed by u/PixieFurious as the Sonesta Resort in Anguilla, which was torn down in or about 2004.
4 – FujiFilm 800 film from a waterproof disposable found at my Mom’s house:
There’s really no mystery to this last set. They’re family photos from a cruise we took in maybe 1999 or 2000 thru the Bahamas. The picture above is my Mom, Terri. She said she didn’t mind if I shared these photos because “I was thin back then.” LOL
But like the other lost films featured in this little blog post, these are found photos. They were lost for decades in a drawer or a box or wherever in the caverns of a home. And now for me it feels good to see this blast from the past and remember some of the fun times in life otherwise forgotten.
I hope you enjoyed this stroll through memory lane, even if not all the memories were our own.
If you have old photos or film you’ve been considering to develop, I’d encourage you too do it. Just Google search for your local photo lab and see what surprises from the past await.
