Thrfit Store Score
May 20, 2011 3:05 AM   Subscribe

A thrift store purchase of a 1950s slide projector came with a treasure trove of slides showing a slice of life in NY in the 1950s. Now the new owner is obsessively looking for anything connected to the original photographer.
posted by mad_little_monkey (15 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: self-linker -- cortex



 
Just to add a little meat to the post, the finder's blog (linked in the news story) has a nice, thoughtful entry about his find, complete with imagined scenarios & personalities for the mystery family.

Impressive color & detail, considering the age of the photos. Whoever took them seemed to know their way around a camera, and were careful about how they stored them (err...to a point)
posted by ShutterBun at 3:38 AM on May 20, 2011 [1 favorite]


Note that he has found out where the house was (explained at the blog link), but doesn't want to publish the address because of privacy concerns for the current owners. However it should be trivial to find out who lived there in a given year in the 1950s.
posted by gubo at 3:57 AM on May 20, 2011


Impressive color & detail, considering the age of the photos. Whoever took them seemed to know their way around a camera, and were careful about how they stored them (err...to a point)

Looks like Kodachrome to me. How lucky we were to have that amazing film stock around at one point. Scenes from the '40s and '50s are still so lifelike in their brilliant colors.

As for the storage, maybe they did know how to actually store it properly, but it's been my experience that old films were socked away in some box and left in a randomly located area in the house that turned out to be the best place to keep it. Sometimes, though, the storage facility was a garage or attic in the South. Hello mold!
posted by NoMich at 4:29 AM on May 20, 2011


I love this photo.
posted by NoMich at 4:38 AM on May 20, 2011 [1 favorite]


Classic photos. The in-laws made me laugh.

Ultimately these made me cry. The toys, the great Kodachrome reds, the clothes. Not a perfect time, but at least the middle class was doing okay back then. Long time ago.
posted by kinnakeet at 4:56 AM on May 20, 2011 [3 favorites]


Two posts in a row from monkey handles. Coincidence?!
posted by telstar at 5:09 AM on May 20, 2011


"It's a gift that I can give to these families to connect them with the images," he said, "their children and their grandchildren probably have never seen the images."
You know why? Mainly because slides are such a dead-end nowadays. My dad had an old Nikon that he almost exclusively used for slides back in the 60's and 70's. The result of that is a big slide storage box that probably has thousands of slides, packed away in little slide projector cartridges. Now he's moved to Florida to retire and left them behind. I would love to have them all in digital format, and that might happen if I can get inspired or get the money together to have some service do it. But I could easily see how someone would just dump them on a thrift shop... or more likely, the thrift shop wouldn't take them (because who buys old slides) and they would end up in the the trash. It's kind of tragic.
posted by smackfu at 5:42 AM on May 20, 2011 [2 favorites]


Ah the 1950s, where people rarely smiled.
posted by stormpooper at 6:13 AM on May 20, 2011 [1 favorite]


I have a bunch of slides in my closet from my aunt, from the 50s-70s, that are definitely going to wind up in a FPP on some future incarnation of Metafilter.* One set includes shots of a parade float featuring Mr. Zip. Users of the future, consider this your one hint.

*Of course, all future incarnations of Metafilter will look pretty much like all past incarnations.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 6:21 AM on May 20, 2011 [1 favorite]


So cool! I wonder how many shots feature the black car. It's almost like a family member!
posted by Calzephyr at 6:40 AM on May 20, 2011 [1 favorite]


I love these sorts of stories, especially because in my own life, there is a paper bag full of 8mm films (including my first steps) that a family member "lost" many years ago after they were stolen from us. I'm always hoping some kind soul will attempt to find our family to return them.
posted by kuppajava at 7:28 AM on May 20, 2011


God, I want that boat.
posted by marsha56 at 9:05 AM on May 20, 2011 [2 favorites]


These photos made me think of Mad Men more than once.. especially Photo #8 in the last link, for some reason.
posted by mbatch at 10:33 AM on May 20, 2011


(Stephen King treatment)

The people in these pictures were possessed by demons or became zombies or something and the city had to get rid of them and all traces of their existence in order to rid itself of the curse.

But somehow, the box of color slides was missed...
posted by mmrtnt at 12:12 PM on May 20, 2011 [1 favorite]


God, I want that boat.
posted by marsha56 at 12:05 PM on May 20 [+] [!]


I looked at that boat and thought the same sort of thing. I wonder if the family actually owned that boat or it was a day rental. Regardless, the wood boat is gorgeous.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 3:59 PM on May 20, 2011


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