About twelve years ago while working in the CBC Vancouver media archives I came across a roll of Kodak Super-XX 120 medium format film in a box of unexposed film rolls, take-up reels and other odds and sods deemed superfluous and destined to be tossed. The film was wrapped in a piece of white paper with a note, “Ron Kelly Chinatown April 1956,” written on it. Peeking under the paper cover, I noticed the film’s paper backing was still there, meaning the film had been shot but not processed.

Out of pure curiosity, I decided to rescue the roll. I took it home, stashed it in a safe, dark place, and promptly forgot about it for several years. I even moved house with it before I rediscovered it in 2018 and finally took a chance and had the film processed.

Instead of a single roll, it turned out there were five rolls of exposed film wound onto the single film spool. At twelve frames per roll, there were sixty views of Chinatown and False Creek in Vancouver, presumably captured in April 1956. I still don’t understand why multiple rolls of exposed film were wound around a single spool nor how none of it was fogged. A photochemical mystery for certain.

Ron Kelly, whose name appears on the film’s paper wrapper, was a producer and director at CBC Vancouver in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1956 he produced and directed a CBC Vancouver TV programme called Summer Afternoon, a fantastic visual document of mid-century Chinatown in Vancouver. It was produced as a “mood piece,” following two young boys as they wander in and around shops, streets and the industrial waterfront of False Creek; the images captured by our mystery photographer in April 1956 follow a similar visual narrative arc. Looking down back alleys and along the raw shores of False Creek, the shots captured the daily life of this part of the city while exploring light, shadow, angles and reflections.

Comparing the visuals in the TV programme Summer Afternoon with the still photos, one can clearly see a similarity. It is possible these images were used in location scouting for Summer Afternoon. But for reasons we can only speculate on, they were never used as such or even processed. Why was this film abandoned and who actually shot these photos?

One image shows the photographer reflected in the window of a boat moored in False Creek. We can’t see the face, but we can see his hairline and that he is wearing a trench coat, neither of which are very distinctive. It looks like he is using a Leica-style folding medium format film camera. But even with this clue and my own subsequent investigations, the photographer of these images remains a mystery.

In analogue photography, the term “latent image” refers to the invisible image created on photographic film when it is exposed to light. The image only becomes visible once the exposed photographic film has been developed. My curiosity and photochemical processes succeeded in making the invisible visible—visible, yet not known.

Photos from the collection of Christine Hagemoen.