Some of Bettwieser's recovered film includes photographs from World War II. (All Photos: Courtesy The Rescued Film Project)Posted on 03/22/2016 2:43:17 PM PDT by NYer
Some of Bettwieser's recovered film includes photographs from World War II. (All Photos: Courtesy The Rescued Film Project)
It’s happened to everyone. You’re rifling through a bin at a thrift store, or a garage sale, or an unmarked box in your attic, and you find an undeveloped roll of film. The thought crosses your mind: should I get this developed? See what’s on it?
But who has time these days to find a convenient place to develop it, let alone pay for the process.
That question, and that obstacle, are exactly what led Boise, Idaho-based photographer and video producer Levi Bettwieser to start a website called the Rescued Film Project. After years of stockpiling his own thrift store finds, amassing about 140 rolls of 35-millimeter film, he spent a day developing them all.
“I was astounded by the amount of images I was able to get off just those few cameras in my local area,” says Bettwieser. “And I connected with them because a lot of them looked like images I had in my photo albums as a kid.”
That was three years ago. Bettwieser quickly tapped out his local thrift store supplies and started going after rolls sold through online auctions.
His site posts his finds, as well as soliciting donations of other people’s undeveloped film. In those first batches he developed there were all the usual things people snap photos of: celebrations, vacations, loved ones. Nothing “too astounding” according to Bettwieser. But one series of images stood out.
The images were surreal, otherworldly. “It seems to be these two young boys who are sharing and taking pictures of each other under water and there were some really incredible bubbles,” he says.
Bettwieser wavered about his decision to put the found images online, as he didn’t want people to feel like their privacy had been invaded or that they were being made fun of.
But when he took the plunge, he also offered up his services to people with undeveloped rolls. Volunteers send their film to him after signing over their rights to the images and Bettwieser keeps the negatives. In many communities, the resources to develop such film is vanishing or gone. Large photo processors, like Walmart, typically don’t have experience handling different sizes of film, degraded film, or black and white film. And even where experienced photo processing facilities exist, some people simply don’t want to spend the money on film that may or may not offer up images. For those who don’t want to give up the rights to their images, Bettwieser recommends places they could pay to have it developed.
“I don't care who’s processing the film as long as it gets rescued,” he says.
Since he started soliciting film, Bettwieser has received about 140 donations, and some of those have been single donations of over 100 rolls. He receives around three donations a week and has a backlog of around 2,000 rolls to process and several hundred images to scan. There are over 16,000 images in his archive. The project is a one-man operation that he works on before and after work and on the weekends.
“When it starts to feel like a job or work that's when I have to step away from it,” he says.
Most of the content he finds falls in the G-rated to PG category. He does find the occasional naked photo, which he doesn't publish. Those are rarer, he says, probably because people were more careful about taking revealing photos when they knew a processor would have to look at them.
“From the earliest images all the way up to my newest images, they usually revolve around holidays, typically Christmas and Halloween,” says Bettwieser. “Those are two of the most common types of images I get. Birthdays and birthday cakes. I probably have more images of birthday cakes than I do actual birthday parties, which is kind of interesting. Cats and dogs. There’s a lot of pictures of cats and dogs, and vacations.”
He has uncovered more unusual fare, though, such as several images from World War II that made a splash online when he published them in 2015. Those images were the result of an $800 investment, his largest and most “nerve-wracking” purchase to date.
And there were the 10 rolls of black and white 35mm film from New York that appeared to be the work of a voyeur who photographed women on the street from their window.
“But he was also a great photographer, there were some really amazing landscapes of the New York skyline with the World Trade Towers and fireworks at night,” says Bettwieser. “That was probably one of the most interesting batches I got in terms of I had several rolls from one photographer which gives you a better sense of who they are.”
He also received a cache of black-and-white images of California car crashes that depict vehicles slid off the road and people being carried away in stretchers. One roll of film offered up images of an arctic voyage aboard a ship and with a biplane.
The images he unearths have tantalizing, if unknowable, mysteries embedded in them.
“You see a bunch of Backstreet Boys posters on the wall, it’s an early ‘90s kid,” says Bettwieser. “It’s fun, but it’s also frustrating, sitting there and trying to tell the story. I love pictures that have a lot going on in the background. A lot of people, the first thing they’ll look at is the person in the photo, and they’re usually smiling like you do in a photo, but you don’t know if they’re actually happy in that moment. Looking at their environment tells you more about them, what’s on their shelves, how nice it is, how clean it is.”
Eventually he would like to make his site more searchable, with metadata and crowdsourcing so that people can reunite the images with people close to them. This happened once, when he posted a photo on Instagram and a Portland woman recognized her father at a family gathering where she was given a dog as a childhood gift.
One thing, though, is notably missing—selfies. Bettwieser says he does occasionally find photos of the camera-wielder but that they usually show up at the end of roll when someone is trying to “burn off” film.
“So many pictures in the archive are the truest form of what’s going on at that moment and there’s no self-editing, no instant playback, people’s eyes are closed,” says Bettwieser. “They’re more honest.”
Of possible interest, ping!
This man is a hero!
Every image he saves are memories that wont die.
I wonder who still processes Kodachrome. Good luck with that.
Amazing. Photographs always fascinated me like crazy. They make me wonder if the past has a constant existence related to the present. I mean what is the difference between something that happened in the past and something that never happened? If they both have a value of zero as it pertains to the present, then how can photographs exist?
“Every image he saves are memories that wont die.”
My wife has over four thousand photos on her iPad ...
Saving for future reference...
I’m glad that he does this.
Old photos are very interesting to me. I kind of miss what darkroom experience I had.
My family has mountains of snapshots and it would be a few years worth of labor to go through them.
LOL!
I have 14 years worth of burned CDs, obsolete photo cards, and thumb drives of photos I need to secure before I actually do lose them. Almost lost my honeymoon photos.
70 year old film definitely holds better than these formats.
Thanks NYer. In another 150 years, someone will be specializing in recovering lost images from digital media. :')
We went through mom’s old albums the couple of weeks before she died at 94. Her mind was still sharp as a tack as she went through the photos all the way back to when she was three years old. Names of friends and all of the stories. We were very lucky. And most of the old black and white photos were probably as sharp as the day they were taken. The color ones from the seventies weren’t the greatest iirc.
I sold a Colt .25 semi-auto that belonged to my grandfather that was issued to him by the Detroit Police Dept. to a Colt firearm collector.
He has a website of all his Colts and along with the handgun I also provided some old photos of my grandfather in his DPD uniform as well as my dad and he posted everything on his website.
It's kind of cool that they will be forever archived on the internet............
I was stationed in NYC in 1967, AFP.
Color dyes, with the exception of dye transfer, will fade far, far sooner than metallic silver.
Ping
Very cute.
I recently completed a self-imposed task of scanning and cataloging a bazillion family photographs. Some of them came from a great aunt who was born in 1890. Fascinating stuff.
Many people don't realize that the lifespan of CDs is limited. Some brands are better than others. But many cheap brands have a thin layer that will degrade and flake off after a couple decades, rendering the digital data unreadable. Best option is to get a photo processing place to print your most cherished photos to both paper and a new CD/DVD. At least on paper, a photo will last for many decades (professional silver paper, not inkjet printed paper!).
Every photograph is a historical document.
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