Estimated read time: 1-2 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
SAN DIEGO — A man on the hunt for antique photography equipment got more than he bargained for with the purchase of an old French camera: eight never-before-seen photos taken during World War I.
Photographer Anton Orlov details the story on his blog, The Photo Palace. He said he traveled 100 miles to assist a friend in identifying some antique books on photography. In a cluttered little antique shop, he found a room piled high with photography equipment, including 19th-century wooden cameras, hundreds of lenses and shutters and thousands of other camera parts — most "probably hopelessly and forever disconnected from their original counterparts."
A French stereoscopic camera called Jumelle Bellieni caught his eye, and he "knew that I had to have it for my collection." It was when Orlov took the camera home to clean it that he found something interesting: a stack of little glass plate holders, some containing the original glass.
Orlov said he had a difficult time determining what the eight photos were of, at first, but he soon discovered they had been taken somewhere in France during World War I.
One photo is of a house in a river after a bombardment; another shows three soldiers standing with the remains of an airplane. There are a couple soldiers with a bomb, and another duo standing with the countryside in the background. One soldier stands in the middle of ruined train tracks and houses.
"I absolutely love finding images that likely have never been seen by anyone in the world," Orlov said.
