The assortment of old film rolls wasn’t exactly an auctioneer’s dream. The photographer was unknown, half of the canisters were unmarked, no one even knew whether anything remained on the aging emulsion, but a camera hunter raised his paddle. The lot was shipped across the country and after hours of grueling work, a self-taught processing expert coaxed negatives from the emulsion. He discovered a trove of photos from the European theater of World War II.

The collection of snapshots would have remained lost to time if not for the efforts of The Rescued Film Project and its founder Levi Bettweiser. It’s a labor of love run out of Bettweiser’s Boise home where every roll of film is developed by hand. Everything gets processed for free and archived online among a motley assortment of found photos. The collection has been thrown together from contributions mailed in by thrift store scavengers and flea market prowlers.

“We have a relationship with the camera picker who won them at the auction,” Bettweiser says of procuring the WWII rolls. “He bid and then sold them directly to us. I don’t believe he had much bidding competition.”

Dealing with 31 rolls of vintage stock isn’t easy. Half of the collection was American film brands, half European, and there were multiple formats to contend with. Bettweiser batched things together by size and type of emulsion in an effort to streamline the process and not waste chemicals unnecessarily. The developer gets mixed in the kitchen and the film gets loaded onto developing reels in the bathroom — in total darkness.

It wasn’t until the images were ready to be scanned that the results began to swim into focus, scenes from long ago and a world away. Minor adjustments on the computer brought soldiers, ships and barracks back from the depths of time, and of the roughly 150 negatives that were digitized almost all proved to contain discernible images.

“I guess the biggest thing is to just not assume that there isn’t an image on a negative just because you can’t see it with your naked eye,” Bettweiser says. “I scanned in some negatives where I couldn’t necessarily see an image, but once I scanned it and adjusted the curves/level I was able to see the images and make out the scenes.”

Although the film is too worn out to make prints, everything is available online for the world to pour over. The reaction has been overwhelming, shedding light on The Rescued Film Project which only went public with its esoteric mission six months ago. In the wake of publishing the WWII photos emails and media requests came in so fast Bettweiser fell behind on his processing schedule.

But the attention has proven invaluable. A couple historical organizations have gotten in touch with offers to help research and verify where the photos were originally taken, bolstering the Project’s own efforts using what little information had been recorded on the rolls’ packaging.

There’s also been a number of donations, which eases the out of pocket funding Bettweiser has managed to provide from his freelance photography and video production work. Any money that comes in goes directly to chemicals and gear to continue finding the world’s orphaned photos and bring them to light.

Watch a video on The Rescued Film Projects efforts to bring the lost WWII photos to life.

All images and video by The Rescued Film Project

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