Nowadays, your favorite camera is probably in your pocket, but decades ago you used to have a 35mm with film that needed to be developed. Sometimes people forgot to develop a roll, which may have found itself lost over time or stuck in a camera and eventually tossed aside. Azriel Knight from Calgary seeks out undeveloped film and tries to learn the story behind the pictures at his website www.MysteriousDevelopments.com .Knight finds undeveloped film at places like garage sales, estate sales, and local thrift stores. Sometimes he develops photos that intrigue him enough to try discovering who the people on film were. Earlier this year, he learned who the musicians in a set of old pictures taken around 1980 were thanks to the power of social media. And, of course, they were from Jersey.
After developing an old roll of film, Knight first tries to piece together as many clues as he can from the photo. "Dating the film is important, and there are special codes on many negatives themselves that will tell you where the film was manufactured and what year," he explained. "Obsolete film sizes, graphics used for older versions of film, and processing types also quickly narrow down to what part of the 20th century you're dealing with. The fading and damage to the negatives give a bit of the story too. I zoom in on any details I can find. A 35mm negative is, for all intents and purposes, 25 megapixels, so you can see quite a bit. In the case of the band photos, the biggest clues included the venue's name ("Dizzy Duncan's) and the "Iran Sucks" button on one of their guitar straps. Those two little things let me know this was New Jersey around 1979 or 1980, and the film was produced in Rochester just a couple years before so that was confirmed."
Knight made a video last year asking the public if they knew anyone in the photos. A few months later he got an email from Billy Schorling, who used to frequent Dizzy Duncan's. He said he thought the band looked familiar. A couple of weeks later he saw their photo on a New Jersey club owner's Facebook page and quickly told Knight the news.
The band, now known as The Bad Land Band, was an eclectic group, described by lead vocalist Rich Gulya as "electric bluegrass." The photographer is still unknown, but lead guitarist Richard Verge suspects it may have been his brother who lived near the club and was a semi-professional photographer. His brother died at a young age, so we may never know for sure, but it's possible his camera and film may have been sold. Knight thinks it's very possible Richard's brother was the photographer, since many of the images feature him.
Most of the time, it is more difficult to learn who the photographer was than to learn who the people in a photo are because the camera is pointing away. "In the case of The Bad Land Band, we could only suspect who the photographer was because they were 35 year old band photos and anyone could have been behind the camera," said Knight. "I asked the band, several times in different ways to narrow down the exact night — right to the length of their hair compared to other photos of the time. The best guess is Spring 1980. Even then, they always played packed shows and lots of people brought cameras."
Based in Canada, Knight has acquired lost film from all over North America and even overseas. "The main goal is to reunite the photos with either the photographer or someone in the photos; the second is to present the public with a glimpse into history with never before seen images. I look for important landmarks and events, which isn't as hard as you'd think because that's what people mostly photographed in those days."
The Bad Land Band photos came from an undeveloped roll of film acquired in New Jersey. Knight says that the two rolls of film likely sat in some kind of storage for most of the time based on the damage to the film. "There was what's called light leaks on some of the first images from sitting in a slightly crushed canister over the years," he explained. "What's amazing about film is that those same images protected the ones closer to the center of the roll. You can also tell the point where the photographer's camera failed, which explains a likely reason the film was forgotten."
Knight's hobby began when he purchased a few old metal spools for a medium format camera and discovered that a couple still had undeveloped film on them. After developing the film, he was hooked. "It was rather haunting the way they faded but still held enough of the image to make everything out, even faces," he recalled. "You get a glimpse into the past that even the photographer never saw. And when you photographed something on film in those times, it was because it was important.
"The end goal of Mysterious Developments isn't just to find out who took the photo or who's in it. It's a best case scenario, but there's so much more to enjoy," he explains. "Successfully developing an 80 year old roll of film and seeing the images, however faded, is pretty amazing. Finding never before seen pictures of landmarks or events is very satisfying, you learn something about the world every time. Photography is important, and images that were considered arbitrary when they were captured may be historically important today. Did you know the public recently discovered a never before seen photo of Hitler? Or century old Antarctica expedition photos frozen in a block of ice? Film is incredibly resilient and there's a lot out there."