Ansco cameras and Speedex film From Portrait.

Portrait.

Ansco cameras and Speedex film.

Early photography was a bit more complicated than the digital cameras and camera phones that we use today. The Ansco box camera was a small, handheld camera created for the average person to capture the world around them. Before digital photography was invented, analog photography was how people took photographs. The Ansco camera was lightweight and could take 2.25 by 3.25 inch photographs using Speedex film. It also had steel rollers for winding the film, allowing for the images to expose onto the film strip roll to create photographic negatives. Once a reel of film was finished, the negatives were likely taken to a camera store for print processing, where they were developed in a darkroom. This process could take up to months to complete. Cameras were typically sold with leather, snap-button cases to protect the camera, a valuable object at the time.