Chicago. Late 2007.
John Maloof was a real estate agent and the president of a local historical society. He was also co-writing a book about the history of a neighborhood on Chicago's Northwest Side.
The book needed pictures of how the area used to look. More than 200 old photographs, by his count.
So he went to an auction and paid about $400 for a box of old negatives. He bid more or less blind. The box was labeled only with vague hints of the 1960s.
It turned out to be enormous. He later described it as “a huge grocery box stuffed with tens of thousands of negatives.” There were about 30,000 of them.
The box had come from a storage locker rented by an elderly woman. She had fallen behind on the rent, and the locker had been repossessed. Its contents were sold off at auction.
Whatever she had stored there was now in the hands of strangers. Maloof was one of them.
He went through the negatives, looking for his neighborhood. None of the photos suited his book. So he put the box away in a closet and got on with his project.
It was $400 spent on nothing he could use.
Later, he took the box down again and began scanning. The pictures were not of old buildings. They were pictures of street life, of people on city sidewalks, taken decades earlier.
The photographer had kept on shooting, roll after roll. Yet there was no name anywhere on the box.