Help Identify the Photographer Who Captured Many Images of 1960s San Francisco

If they were taken in the 1960s by someone in their 30s who lived to 80, that means we probably have roughly another 60 years until these are free from copyright and you can actually publish them in a magazine.

I'm surprised the magazine let them publish as much as they did, given the lack of concrete copyright provenance.

Just think how many historical books and pieces of art and photos we could archive and sort and look at if copyright didn't last literally longer than a human's lifetime.

I thought we had already solved this mystery, but I was thinking of a different 1960's San Francisco photo archive discovery -- the Kodachrome slides in a cabinet left on a street.[0]

[0] https://sfmemory.org/TiffanyCabinet/

Very cool, also amazing that someone did all the work of taking and collecting and storing the material and not accidentally, like, label a roll of film or a print or something.

I found it mildly amusing in a meta sort of way that the article about a collection of photos by an unknown photographer features a bunch of the photos, while crediting them to the current owner of the collection (Bill Delzell).

I understand that in a way he provided the image, so in that sense he is the source, but that's not being made clear in the captions.

Sometimes, these questions are best left unanswered, and the objects, divorced from their creator…

I recall at one of my schools there was much fanfare about several boxes of slides found during renovations in the early 90s, of life in and around the school during the 50s and 60s. Fantastic photographs, from what I recall.

Anyway. They did an exhibition, creator unknown… and one of the teachers from the era came by. He immediately knew whose photos they were - a master from the time who had been rumoured to have been having an affair with a boy, and ensuingly shot his wife and himself. Back then, as when I was there, masters quite commonly lived in cottages, if married, or apartments at the school, some of which had become classrooms by my day.

The identity of the photographer immediately clouded the lens through which his work has been seen, as people suddenly thought to ask questions like “yes, why was there someone with a camera when the boys were dressing for school?”

It's interesting how we always take pictures of the wrong things. The treasure of this collection is he took pictures of things that other photographers thought were uninteresting.

Like everyone takes pictures of Disneyland. But who takes random street scene photos?

Once around 1988 or so my dad and I just drove around running his video camera. It's interesting now as the there's been enormous change. I wish I'd done this in downtown Seattle, as it has all been redeveloped. The old Seattle is gone.

Reminds me of the photos of Vivian Maier, discovered in a storage locker after her death. The documentary "Finding Vivian Maier" tells the story. Amazing photos! https://www.vivianmaier.com

Crazy how this feels like finding a dead man’s hard drive full of gold—thousands of shots while today’s “street photographers” beg for likes. Honestly, part of me hopes no one claims it. Feels cleaner that way—art for the sake of it, not some guy dropping a Netflix doc later.

> The collection’s 75 undeveloped rolls of Kodachrome film likely amount to about 2,700 photos

I wonder how they’re planning on developing that film, since the chemicals to develop Kodachrome haven’t been available since 2010.