Many digital photographers know the pain of losing files to corrupt cards or hard drive failure, but a San Francisco photographer is on a mission to find the photographer who lost five years' worth of historic images shot on film.
A collection of 102 unprocessed rolls of film and 53 pages of film slides was discovered in a storage unit in the 1980s, passing through different dealers and collections until 2023 years ago, when San Francisco photographer Bill Delzell stumbled upon the mystery.
Delzell was immediately devastated by the thought of losing what appears to be five years of historic work, and is now spearheading some of the efforts to find out who was behind the iconic images.
“This film is completely unprocessed, and none of these photographs were ever seen by the photographer that made them,” Dezell said in an interview with CBS Mornings.
While 75 rolls of film remained undeveloped at the start of 2025, the more than 5,000 images that have been developed so far hint at a passionate photographer who captured a number of historic moments in San Fransisco in the late 1960s.
The images include civil rights demonstrations, Vietnam War protests and a Grateful Dead concert, along with historic figures including Muhammad Ali and Timothy Leary.
ABOVE: Watch the CBS report on the mystery photographs
“I was stunned by the quality of the work, and to think that someone spent five years capturing these moments in time and then to have lost the work just hit me really hard.”
A successful Kickstarter campaign raised more than $60,000 (around £46,000 / AU$94,000) to pay for the development of the rest of the film, with a book and documentary also part of the campaign’s goals.
Now, Dezell, who also leads the nonprofit SpeakLocal, is continuing to share the mystery in hopes of identifying the photographer behind the images.
Internet sleuths on Reddit are chiming in, while Delzell has also secured help from the Internet Archives as media outlets help spread the mystery photographer’s story.
One of the biggest clues so far is a photograph of a window that shows the photographer’s reflection, but the image of the person with a camera over their face shows little more detail than a thin build.
The project's Reddit page has generated a number of suggestions, from fingerprinting the film canisters to the suggestion that the collection could have been from a photography class and not a single person.
It’s unclear how the images wound up in a storage facility, with the possibilities ranging from losing track of the film rolls to not being able to pay to develop so many rolls of film.
Photographers – and internet sleuths – can chime into the conversation on the Who Shot Me Reddit thread.
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