Photo: Brooke McCarthy / WBZ NewsRadio
ESSEX, Mass. (WBZ NewsRadio) — A man in Essex is taking it upon himself to rescue physical photos that were seemingly lost to time by uploading them to an online database, permanently solidifying their spot in history.
WBZ's Brooke McCarthy spoke with the self-proclaimed Photo Detective B Wells Douglas about his project, the Vintage Film Finds Archive, which has about 100,000 slides, negatives, and prints.
Photo: Brooke McCarthy / WBZ NewsRadio
"Instead of sending them to a landfill, they send them to me. Every person has their own style of looking at the world and it really comes across in how people photograph. There's a lot you can learn from looking at these," Douglas said.
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In his home office, the photo detective uses a mirrorless camera to photograph and preserve each roll of film, and looks for clues about the subjects along the way. Most recently, Douglas traced back a whole box of photos back to a woman in Lynn.
"I was able to bring her name back to the photos of her," Douglas said.
Douglas also runs a blog on the archive website, where he details how he does his work in preserving film and the equipment used in the process.
WBZ's Brooke McCarthy (@BrookeWBZ) reports.
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