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Help identifying long-gone standing view camera - Agfa? Ansco?

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A long time ago...

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FriedLouisStudio

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The pics are of me in about 1958 or 1959. I used to pretend that it was a howitzer!

8X10MSG.JPG

I believe the camera was large enough to have originally had an 11x14 back, but it looks like my parents used it then for making 8x10 copy negs with the flat lighting frame on the wall.

However, when my memories kick in in the early 60s (after we'd acquired a huge vertical Goodkin stat camera for that kind of copy work), all we were using this camera for was ID pictures for passports and chauffeur's licenses. It was fitted with a 6x9cm reduction back. We'd move the camera in or out, measuring the regulation head size right on the ground glass so we could just contact-print the negs, and shoot both sides of a film holder - usually Tri-X that we'd deep-tank develop in DK-50. Here's an example - a shot I took of my mom when she was teaching me how we made these ID photos in the mid-70s.

TedID.jpg

We sold this camera when we downsized the studio in 1983, and unfortunately, I never thought to ask my parents about it. I'm pretty sure they had bought it used in the 40s or 50s, I always assumed it was from the early 1900s. It was entirely painted a sickly off-green/off-yellow color. Is that a diamond-shaped Agfa logo on it in the next picture? This camera looks similar to the one or two antique Agfa or Agfa-Ansco stand cameras I've managed to Google up...

cowboy.jpg

Does anybody know? Thanks in advance!
 
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Donald Qualls

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Looks to me like it was originally a process camera, made to do exactly what it was set up to do before the ID photo gig: make copy negatives (as an intermediate step toward producing printing plates, canonically).
 

Ian Grant

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(Agfa) Ansco No 5 Studio camera. It is in my 1938 Agfa Ansco catalogue, it's also in the 1930 catalogue..

1706717091317.png



Yours was the deluxe version painted steel gray

Ian
 
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FriedLouisStudio

FriedLouisStudio

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Thank you! That's it.

But I never would have thought that color was steel gray! Maybe the paint had changed over time, the camera was decades old by the 60s/70s. Or maybe it was repainted at some point.
 
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