Back in 2015, I went on eBay and bought myself a Coronet 4-4 Mark 2 camera. These little 1960s lumps of plastic are fine examples of what are known as toy cameras, crude and basic devices designed to be cheap, with very simple lenses. They were intended as very simple snapshot cameras, but have become popular with creative photographers (like me) who admire their unpredictable and sometimes very dreamy, lo-fi results.
Anyway…the camera arrived from the eBay seller with a partly used film inside! How exciting! I wondered what might be on it, so I shot the last few photos, and opened up the camera to see what I had. It was a roll of Kodacolor X film, an early colour print film that was made between 1963 and 1974. So, at the time, the film was somewhere between 40 and 50 years old, and required the obsolete C-22 processing system. I figured the chances of getting any images out of the film were very low, but I found a company able to process it (for a HUGE sum of money) and sent the film off to them. It took months to get it back, but when I did, I was in for a surprise. I got eight rather eye-popping psychedelic images of an old couple on holiday in what looked like a British seaside town in the late sixties.
I posted the images on my now long-defunct Livejournal blog, and thanks to the first image being of a distinctive landmark, one of my friends identified the location as Eastbourne – this first shot on the film shows Beachy Head Lighthouse from a boat.
The rest of the pictures were alternately of a man and a woman posing in various locations, presumably Eastbourne, with the woman’s clothing making it look decidedly like the late sixties. Clearly the couple took turns photographing each other.
They clearly weren’t very talented photographers, with some issues with the film not being wound on enough, and a bit of camera shake, but I hope they had a nice holiday. I wonder if there’s a story behind the camera being forgotten about, and the pictures never being seen?
I wondered if I’d stumbled across the long-lost relatives of the eBay user who sold me the camera, so I got back in touch to ask if he knew anything about them. Sadly, he’d obtained the camera as part of a job lot of stuff auctioned off by a house clearance company, so he knew nothing about where it had come from.
My original blog post was online for a couple of years without any joy in identifying these people, but I’ve got very curious about it again because I’m currently writing about toy cameras for my column in The Idler magazine. The article will contain a link to this page, in the hope there’s some detectives out there who can identify this mysterious – and presumably long-dead – couple.
To assist a bit, here’s a couple of the images in black and white, with the quality enhanced. The bizarre colours are a combined effect of the camera’s very simple lens, designed for black and white photography, and the aging of the film.
Finding something like this feels like a genuinely once-in-a-lifetime experience. It was so strange being the first person to see these images, many decades after they were shot, possibly the closest you can genuinely get to seeing a ghost. Maybe one day I’ll solve the mystery of who these people were.