Camera Possessed
Noel Laflin
12-4-23
A little over half a century ago, my father found two old
cameras in a dusty box lying on Ruby’s garage floor.
Being in charge of our next door neighbor’s wish to clean things
up before the sale of her home, my dad asked Ruby whether she wanted the
cameras. She said they were both his if he so liked as she did not even recall
owning either. They most likely had belonged to a sister that had moved out
years before – but even that was just a guess on her part.
One was an old 35mm Ziess Ikon – circa the early 1950’s, still
in a well-worn leather case. The other was a vintage Kodak folding camera,
produced sometime between 1914-1927. It took a moment or two to locate a
slightly beveled button on the Kodak which opened the front and allowed you to
withdraw the lens on its bellows and lock into place. It was like a cool puzzle
box in a way.
Upon inspection, it turned out that there was still film in the German
made Ziess Ikon, so on a whim, my dad took it to be developed. The prints came
back showing scenes from Knott’s Berry Farm’s Ghost Town and, strangely enough,
photos of a familiar looking asphalt company situated along the Santa Ana
River. What proved strange is that asphalt facility is where my father worked.
It remained a mystery as to who had taken any of those random shots, especially
as to where my dad worked. It always spooked us a bit when we wondered about it
aloud.
What became even more mysterious were the missing shots that I
took of an old graveyard in Minnesota later that summer. All the other photos
from that trip had turned out, but the old creepy cemetery frames were mere
blanks.
I decided the camera was haunted and never used it again.
But the vintage Kodak became a friend that accompanied me to
summer camp a couple of years later and documented the building of an old log
cabin. I figured that if we were building something that looked old, that I
should shoot its progress with something equally old.
I had also built a small dark room at camp that year and developed
8x10 black and white prints late at night. The familiar warm images of the
cabin and other favorite sites at Ahwahnee taken by the old fold-out antique
Kodak were a joy to behold as they came to life in the developing and fixing
trays.
If I had been shooting with the haunted camera there’s no way I
would have spent nights alone, in the woods, sequestered in a small dark closet
with whatever it did or did not decide to show me.
Both cameras now reside in a box on a shelf in my garage. They
have been there for years - especially since the advent of the digital age.
I am pretty sure there’s no undeveloped film in either one, but
wouldn’t it be cool if there was? If so, I hope it’s in the old Kodak and not
the haunted zeitgeist disguised as a camera.
