Holyoke resident and photography archives instructor at Simmons University in Boston, Charles Abel, got a surprising phone call earlier this year. It was from an archivist at the Wisteriahurst Museum in Holyoke. Initially, the archivist asked Abel if he wanted to curate an exhibit of their historic cameras.
Abel accepted and he said, as he was going through the cameras he saw a 5 x 7 field camera.
“I was like, oh, wow, this would be so much fun and cool to take some pictures with it. And so, I tested it out. No light leaks. It worked! The lens worked. It was sharp,” Abel said.
The camera being a Gundlach Korona Pictorial View Field Camera. A 100-year-old film camera with a 125-year-old lens created by the Gundlach and Manhattan Optical Company in 1926.
Abel suggested a different idea to the museum. He wanted to do a show using this historic film camera to capture photos of modern-day Holyoke.
The exhibit features 26 black-and-white images. There’s one of Holyoke Mayor Joshua Garcia in his office. And another from beloved restaurant Nick’s Nest - an over-the-counter scene of take-out containers, salt and pepper shakers and the specials menu.
The images around the museum are silver-based negatives that were scanned and digitally printed.
Joel Rodowicz was at the exhibit. He’s a member of the River Mills Photography Club in Chicopee.
“The images are really crisp, really clear. And the silver gelatin process for developing pictures is a lost art. Now the chemicals to do this are very expensive and very few people do it,” Rodowicz said.
For many people in this room, these photographs are “timeless.” Patrick Raycraft, a freelance photographer from Hartford, Connecticut, said he wants to bring his friend who used to live in Holyoke.
“I already gave him a heads up because he has dementia and to see what his reaction would be, you know, and what, and what would, uh, stimulate his memory. I'm sure it would be amazing just to walk through it with him,” Raycraft said.
Many have taken photos only using digital cameras.
That’s true for Masslive photographer Sebastrian Restrepo who was marveling at the use of this film camera.
“So for me, looking at this is like, this is the meeting of two things, right? A well-functioning machine and a person who's got the vision to create something and do it right the first time in camera with none of the digital trickery,” Restrepo said. “Film is like a very good representation of the world as it was and that's kind of what I'm always after, too. And so for me, these images are fantastic.”
With these photos, Abel tried to do what the era of this camera did by taking photos focusing on patterns of light and shade as well as blurring certain details in the picture.
This harkens back to the Pictorialist movement, which was a shift from documentary photography in the late 19th century to the Fine Art realm which took hold into the 20th century.
One of Abel’s favorite photos is of some adults and kids at Holyoke’s Vega park with water sprinklers going off in the background.
“The kids wanted to look through the back of the camera and so I put the hood over them and so they could see what I was like looking at,” Abel said.
He said his favorite part of the project was getting to interact with people in the community and introducing them to a little piece of the past.