Found Photos Friday: First Day of School?

I picked up this roll of 620 for about $6 a few weeks back. Verichrome is pretty easy to develop, but its age means fog and increased grain. The first two shots, though, turned out pretty decently.

Piecing together a story from unknown photos is always a challenge, fun, and maddeningly impossible. These shots look mid-sixties-ish to me based on dress (especially glasses.) That would make all of the kids in these first two pictures about retirement age. It's somewhat amazing and sad to think that someone took these photos for some reason and then they sat on a spool, untouched, undeveloped while these kids went through school, to college, met their husbands, had kids, suffered divorces, buried their parents, maybe buried a child, and did lived their lives, I hope, well and fully. And now, in mid-2013, some random guy develops and old roll of film and for the first time in more than a half-century releases the long-trapped 50th of a second of light that comprised each moment on the frames.




I actually like the first shot a lot better. It's clearly more impromptu and less staged. Though I really love that the kid in the lower left is blowing a kiss during the staged shot. I admit, I'd really like to know what happened to these kids and who they grew to be.


I'm not certain whether that's a wedding dress or the type of dress worn by a teacher on her first day teaching. Maybe the latter? I had been leaning wedding dress the other day but now, I suspect these photos are of a teacher on her first day teaching kindergarten or first grade.


Same person. Along the bottom, you can see little trees of fungus that had begun growing into the film's emulsion. In time, maybe some dozens of years, all of the film would have looked like that.


Typically, I'm not a huge double exposure fan. But this accident works, though it makes the scene look rather ethereal and ghostly.