A "boat load" of old negatives


Dusty old negatives!


A montage shows the wide variety of photos shot by Jim Denmark from 1917 to 1956. His grandson, Jay Denmark, has had more than 5,000 of them posted online to sell, as a sideline to his own photography

News & Observer, Raleigh, NC

November, 2006

Jim Denmark amassed about 70,000 negatives during his 39-year career as a Raleigh portrait photographer. The photos captured little girls in bows. Boys in oversized hats. Women in furs. Men in uniform. But when Denmark died half a century ago, the negatives were relegated first to a colleague's attic and later to a dark corner of a Raleigh warehouse.

They re-emerged three years ago after a chance meeting between Denmark's grandson and the photographer his grandmother had entrusted with the negatives after her husband's death in 1956.

Jay Denmark, also a portrait photographer, saw in the negatives a chance to honor his grandfather's legacy -- and a potential side business for his studio.

"These could have easily gone in a trash can 50 years ago," Denmark said. "To me, it's like a treasure trove."

Modern technology has allowed him to convert many of the negatives into high-resolution digital images, then make them searchable and widely available over the Internet. Over the past year, Denmark has posted 5,071 images to his Web site, and expects to add up to 3,000 more.

A digital (downloadable) file of a 5-by-7-inch photo costs $29, and prints of the portraits run $50 to $385, depending on the size of the print and whether Denmark does any restoration or enhancements.

Denmark, 48, has invested about $10,000 in the process thus far, paying a succession of part-time employees to scan in the negatives and a local firm to rewrite commercial software that lets buyers download photos after they enter their credit card numbers.

In the meantime, Denmark has continued running his business, Denmark Photography Studio & Multimedia Services, which specializes in head shots of lawyers, real estate agents and other professionals. The money he makes from selling his grandfather's photos is secondary to the history behind the pictures, he said.

"We're looking at this as a long-term type of investment," Denmark said. "If we can make our money back on what we have invested, we'll be pretty happy. If we make any money beyond that, I'll be even happier."

The photos span Jim Denmark's career from 1917 to 1956, but a few go back to the 1890s. Soldiers, Rex Hospital nurses and Meredith College students were frequent customers to the studio on the second floor of the Hudson Belk building downtown, Jay Denmark said.

With names attached to most portraits, he hopes the subjects' relatives will be able to find their loved ones on his Web site.

"It's almost like a duty to try to get the photos back to their families," he said. "I get shivers sometimes scanning these photos."

Denmark hasn't yet sold a historic portrait. He kept the photos quiet until he could post at least 5,000 images on the Web.

The negatives occupy 40 shoebox-sized archival photo boxes. Each box contains a neat collection of manila sleeves with several large-format negatives inside; Denmark picks the best image from each sitting to scan into the computer. The sleeves carefully catalogue the customer, the amount paid (usually $1) and the amount due.

In addition to the portraits, Denmark also found negatives of events such as a boating trip to Beaufort, the 1918 Central Carolina Fair in Greensboro and Amelia Earhart's visit to Raleigh to christen an airplane.

He's talking with archivists and museums about the historical photos, and he'd like to display some of the best shots in galleries.

But he thinks the most value is in the portraits.

"I know if I searched and found a picture of my grandfather in his youth, I would in a heartbeat pay $1,000 for that image to pass it down," Denmark said. "That's how rare they are.