The photographs on the floor caught Camille Roth’s eye as she browsed through an estate sale. When she bent for a closer look, Roth caught her breath.
Artfully composed and carefully processed on archival paper, the images showed iconic Denver landmarks, mountain vistas, a woman harvesting beets and other scenes from the 1930s and ’40s.
“I realized I’d discovered what I thought was something very special,” she said later.
She looked through them, culling her favorites and reluctantly leaving the rest.
“I appreciated how well they were processed and how carefully the photographer did all of his work — someone who clearly cared about his craft,” Roth said.
“Seventy years later, they look like they were printed yesterday.”
After tracking down the family associated with the estate sale, she learned the photographer was family friend, amateur photographer and former Denver criminal court judge Ellet N. Shepherd.
A member of the Denver Lensman’s Camera Club, Shepherd processed his prints in his own darkroom and won a merit award for an architectural photo he submitted to the 1939 World’s Fair. He once made a 4-by-4-foot print of two camels by exposing the negative on the floor of his house.
When the family gave her the rest of the unsold photographs, Roth shelved her original plan to sell them.
Instead, she created a blog, camilledenver , and posted the images along with what little she’d learned about each scene, and a brief biography of Shepherd.
Then she consulted with Denver Public Library senior special collection librarian Wendel Cox, who gently told her that the photographs were “a lovely example of that camera-club genre,” if not high art.
“I think the pictures capture the passion of someone finding a new technology — relatively new at the time — that he got to share with the camera-club community,” Cox said.
“I think it’s interesting that Camille wanted to save them from anonymity, and she did that with the new technology of this time. She put these pictures on a blog and shared them with the world.”
