Today I stumbled on The Rescued Film Project (run by Idaho photographer Levi Bettweiser) which salvages undeveloped rolls of old camera film of all kinds and from all eras, researches how best to process them, and archives the developed images on the project website; they also have an instagram and tumblr page. Many of these are, as you’d expect, amateurish photos of domestic life more interesting as artefacts (some quite moving nonetheless), but there are also some arresting photos in their own right — especially of city streets (the sort of photos you see in ’Dirty Old Boston.’) Bettweiser’s most recent find was a cache of 31 rolls of film shot by an American soldier during the First World War, some of the rolls wrapped with scraps of the soldier’s personal letters. (They also made a short promo “making of” film about their work rescuing the images from this particular cache: it’s on vimeo and youtube.) I’ve noticed in the comment threads of the video one or two photographers accusing him of not handling the film properly — I wouldn’t know if those comments are fair, but I assume he knows what he is doing — and also some criticism that he developed the photos with minimal editing and enhancements (but that seems to be a deliberate decision.) The project currently has a few hundreds found rolls still waiting to be developed and uploaded. They’re a non-commercial community archiving project and differ from groups like Film Rescue International (which is a commercial group that processes and restores old film for private individual for a fee.)The website says, of their mission: “Every image in The Rescued Film Project, at some point, was special for someone. Each frame captured reflects a moment that was intended to be remembered. The picture was taken, the roll was finished, wound up, and for reasons we can only speculate, was never developed. […] We believe that these images deserve to be seen, so that the photographer’s personal experiences can be shared. […] Film is an organic material that degrades over time. We are committed to rescuing as many images as possible, before they’re all gone.”
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