Mysterious cache of photos from 1960s San Francisco

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

A huge cache of over 8,000 photos was found in an abandoned storage locker. About a third of them are on undeveloped film, and therefore have not yet been seen. The photos are of a large number of public events in San Francisco in the late 1960s: a Grateful Dead concert, a young Carlos Santana playing guitar, a speech by Muhammed Ali, protests against the Vietnam War and for civil rights, etc. No one knows who took these photos, why they were abandoned, or why so many of them were never developed.

The current owner has a Kickstarter campaign to fund the processing of the remaining undeveloped photos, to categorize and curate the whole collection, and ideally, to identify the photographer. There’s one tantalizing clue in one photo of a shop window, in which it appears that a reflection of the photographer can be seen.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/can-you-identify-the-mystery-photographer-who-captured-thousands-of-captivating-images-of-1960s-san-francisco-180986107/

2

This is really cool; thanks for posting it!

3

This ought to be interesting.

I hope he gets the film developed and he finds the photographer.

4

I’m kind of interested in identifying the photographer, but I’m really interested in learning why whoever-it-was abandoned all this footage. Why was it in a storage locker instead of their home or office, and why did they never come back for it?

I know the reality will probably turn out to be something much more mundane, but I’m seeing the setup for a mob investigation thriller, here.

5

I thought maybe it could have been my Uncle, until I read that the images might actually hold some interest and be of cool events and stuff.

My Uncle was the Undisputed HeavyWeight Champion of the World for Boring Slide Shows.

6

Yeah, maybe one of the photos accidentally captured a mob hit, or a politician having an affair.

And why was so much of it never developed? The photographer spent a huge amount of time taking thousands of photos which they never even saw. Again, it’s probably something mundane like they couldn’t afford to have them all developed at once, but it piques one’s curiosity.

7

I’d bet on the extreme high likelihood the photographer is dead. Probably pushing 45 years now.

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Well, they’re probably dead now. But did they die shortly after putting them in the locker (hence why they were never retrieved), or did they forget about them until their unrelated death much later?

A significant detail from the linked article, not mentioned yet here, is that the collection was recovered from the locker in the 1980s, and has changed hands a few times since then. What’s new is just that they now have an owner who cares enough to try to figure it out.

9

That same thought struck me as I was reading this (really cool) article. Who originally got the film in the 80s and why didn’t that person or organization do something with it?

10

Very cool. I was in SF during the summer of 1969. I wonder if I ever ran across her (the window reflection image definitely looks like a woman to me).

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The Kickstarter page says

The work reached two Bay Area historians in the 1980s, who meticulously began developing the film to reveal its hidden contents.

So I guess some work was indeed done on the film in the 80s. Perhaps they ran out of money or resources before they could finish.