It’s interesting how things circle back around, reveal themselves, and allow you to reflect. Jim has had this old glass plate camera packed away in his studio for some time and just recently dug it out when he wanted to send me a photo and information to write a story. It was sent to him many years ago by his dad and thought he might want it because he was interested in photography.
Not much information or history was exchanged on it. How did his dad get the camera from his father? Was grandpa into photography and take many pictures with it or was it part of his collection? There’s not much to go on but a beautiful, old camera with a lot of character and, perhaps no doubt, many captured images lost and stories left untold.
This Chautauqua camera manufactured by Seneca Camera Manufacturing Company looks to be from the early 1900’s and is in pretty good shape considering its age. It came in a case with lenses and a light meter that’s still working and looks to be in good shape, too. It also came with a few 4×5 glass plates that Jim isn’t familiar with on whether they were exposed or not.
From doing a little research on this camera and how it operates, I still can’t tell you much about it and how it works. It looks confusing. But I marvel and find it interesting mostly with how they used these devices and produced such important moments in history with the limited resources they had. There are the bellows, lenses, shutter, rotating/reversing optical viewfinder, glass plates and I’m sure more that I’m missing in the details. I look at it and think, “Where do you start?” It’s much like today when we ask teenagers to make a call on a rotary phone.
I believe the pictures taken back then with this camera on the glass plates produced prints in old sepia or tin images, unlike the digital photographs we have today. In old images when I see or hold one, I am not only transported back in time, but I feel the energy in the photograph. I miss that in the images we have today. There’s a separation when viewing some of them on our devices, and physical photographs don’t seem to ever lose that. In the digital images, it’s like you can’t quite connect to what’s been frozen in time, the same as when you sort through old photographs and physically hold them. It’s the ability to feel the energy of a moment captured that will never come again.
What I also find interesting is the man who had the camera, my husband’s grandpa. I only met him briefly a couple of times in Toledo, Ohio, when we first got married and before we moved out west. He seemed to be a quiet, gentle man not much into conversation, perhaps a little shy. Growing up, hubby only remembers a couple of things but not much else about him.
Like one time, when he was a teenager, his grandpa took him back into a room where he operated a ham radio and showed him how he could talk to people all over the world. Another thing hubby remembers is that he collected anything and everything and stored it in the basement of their house – rows and rows of organized stuff piled high neatly on top of each other with little aisles in between. If he came across someone needing something, chances are he’d have it and could produce it without much hunting. He knew exactly where everything was.
I’m sad that we know very little about Clarence A. Ruppel, only his date of birth and death and that he worked on the coal docks. There’s no one alive today to ask, and there isn’t even a picture of him left behind.
From this old camera, I can only speculate that he had many interests, dreams, and desires. It would have been nice to hear his stories and learn about his background and history. How can someone slip quietly through our everyday life of coming and going and not notice or learn much about them, as if they were invisible. Maybe he wanted it that way, private and in his own world with his collection and ham radio – strangers talking with each other over the air waves he’ll never meet.
Life is strange sometimes in how we remember people and the things connected to them, like an old camera. They come in and out of our lives. Some for a long time and others for brief moments and they leave impressions with us in different ways. I wonder what it all means and how it fits in the bigger picture of things. Whatever it is, my heart feels warmer to have a little piece of history to look at and hold that reconnects us to family – to grandpa.
Pat from the ‘ol kitchen table