3 June 2022

An Envelope

A large manila envelope dating back to WW2. Itself containing many smaller envelopes that were used by photo businesses for storage of customer negatives and prints. The owner of the pictures was from Baden-Württemberg, southwest Germany. They show scenes whilst he was in the Wehrmacht, stationed in the Caucasus in Russia: a dusty road during a march; looking out of a freight train; reading a letter in a field of flowers; a downed plane; artillery.


Many of the photos are annotated on  the back in the then common Sütterlin script, mostly not legible for me.

"Perutz" is a brand of film that often comes up in these envelopes.  The verso of tiny vintage prints reveal paper names like Agfa Lupex, Agfa Brovira, Gevaert Ridax, Leonar. All brands that have been washed away in the tides of time.

The negatives for a lot of the more interesting pictures are missing.  And many of the 6x4.5 and 6x9 negatives are in poor shape. This 6x9 neg looked pretty good though, and I thought it deserved to be printed bigger...





...not least because the soldier who made this photo was my grandfather; a devout farmer, dragged against his will into hell, like millions of others. Wasting the best five years of his life, he would return with a damaged lung that would trouble him until his death.  Still, he was so lucky to be able to make it back and see his children and grandchildren.

Here he is on horseback. The photo is not dated, but he looks very much a teenager, so I presume it must be before the war.

6 comments:

  1. Marcus Peddle3 June 2022 at 17:07

    Thank you for sharing the interesting package and the photographs. I like the small size of the prints. Many places here in Korea don't print smaller than 4x6 these days. I could buy one of those small Canon or Fuji photo printers, but I think the cost per print is quite high.

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    1. Omar Özenir3 June 2022 at 23:34

      Thanks Marcus. All the pictures in the envelope are contact prints...which was usual in those days, as you might know. This size works very well for MF negs IMO...these contacts can be very intimate, very lovely. 35mm might be a stretch for contacts, although I have seen people mounting 35mm contacts on large boards and then framing them.
      The small printers you mention do look nice. I don't have any first hand experience though. As per cost, pretty much everything is expensive these days.

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    2. Marcus Peddle6 June 2022 at 08:18

      I didn't know that most pictures were contact prints back then. Very interesting.

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  2. Anonymous17 November 2022 at 01:53

    That large print is fantastic - properly authentic and not just because of the people in it. You've done a great job of making it look vintage too - well done!
    P

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    1. Omar Özenir17 November 2022 at 05:11

      Thanks Phil. The only thing I've done is not doing any spotting ;-)

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    2. Anonymous19 November 2022 at 02:15

      I can really recommend pulling negatives between your first and second finger. I saw the lady who prints HCB's archive doing this, tried it and never looked back with regards to dust. There's no oil between the fingers and the softness of your skin sort of elminates static and dust.
      I also use an ioniser - remember them - very popular in the 1980's. It really takes the dust down too.

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