Pictures From the Past
Every once in a while, metal detecting turns up something that isn’t valuable in the traditional sense, but somehow feels even more personal.
I was hunting an old property when I dug what looked like a small metal canister. My first thought was that it might have held makeup or some other small personal item, but when I opened the lid, a tightly wound strip of old film suddenly began spilling out.
It was all caked with dirt, extremely brittle and most of the roll was fused together after spending decades underground. Water has also penetrated the cannister so the film stained, cracked, creased, and likely ruined.
A few of the outer layers were still loose enough to carefully unroll, though, and when I held one of them up to the sunlight, I couldn’t believe it.
There were still pictures on it.
Through the dirt and deterioration I could make out the negative image of what appeared to be a woman standing along a sidewalk, with a large, boxy automobile parked nearby. Judging by the style of the car and the age of the property, the scene looked like it could have been photographed sometime around the 1920s or 1930s.
Freshly dug roll of 35mm film being unrolled
That’s when this rusty little canister suddenly became something much more interesting.
At some point, someone stood in that exact neighborhood with a camera and captured an ordinary moment in their life. Maybe it was a mother, a sister, a wife or a friend. Maybe the car was brand new and they were proud enough to take a picture beside it. Whatever the story was, the photograph was taken, the film somehow ended up buried in the ground, and the images sat there in complete darkness for generations.
Then, perhaps 80 or 90 years later, I dug them back into the sunlight.
I’ll probably never know who the woman was or why that roll of film ended up underground.
But for just a few seconds, holding that fragile negative toward the sky, I got to see a moment that someone thought was worth remembering nearly a century ago.
And somehow, after all those years, it was still there.
WATCH THE HUNT
Watch the full hunt below, or jump to 15:29 to see this old roll of film come out of the ground.
