Austin Bell’s Vintage Cameras Breathe New Life into Marco’s History

September’s exhibit at the Marco Center for the Arts’ La Petite Galerie features black and white photographs of historic locations in Marco Island. Artist and photographer Austin Bell used three vintage film cameras to capture each image in double exposure, one context on top of the other, a visual representation of both spatial and temporal locomotion. His black and white photography, with lots of gray tones, adds a compelling element, yet each scene is simple, subtle, authentic, and almost magical.

The title of the exhibit – “Re-Location,” highlights Marco’s dramatic physical transformation since the first pioneer settlers arrived more than 150 years ago. As you travel around Marco Island today, there are very few physical remnants of pre-1960 Marco Island. Some of the surviving structures have been “Re-Located, Repurposed or Replaced” to make way for new development. In several instances, entire buildings were picked up and moved to new locations. 

Did you know that the former location of the Marco Post Office is now a restaurant on Bald Eagle Drive? In the late 1960s, the Island grew and needed the services of a bigger (four times bigger) state-of-the-art post office, which soon opened on East Elkcam Circle.

According to Austin, he used black and white film for a couple of reasons. First, color photography didn’t exist at the time most of these places were built, and the cameras he used pre-dated color film. Had Austin used color for the double exposure, there may have been some visual clashing that would have taken away from the point of the image, which is the history.

Second reason, from a technical standpoint, Bell thought he could get more interesting images in black and white since he was doing double exposures. In this technique, Austin Bell has layered the present on top of the past, resulting in a photograph that speaks to the “passage of time, the glorification of the past, the impact of development and the importance of historic preservation.” 

For this project, Austin used three vintage film cameras to create the photographs in this exhibit. Two of them, a Target Brownie Six-20 and a Brownie Hawkeye, originally took 620 film, which is no longer made. Austin had to respool 120 black and white film onto an old 620 spools prior to loading it into these simple box cameras, which have no manual settings. 

For each unique double-exposure, Austin had to drive or walk to each of the two locations, sometimes miles apart. The dimensions of each photograph depended on the camera being used, which is why some are square, and others are rectangular. The negatives were then scanned at a high resolution and printed on canvas.

Austin Bell is a documentarian by nature and a museum curator by trade. He is the Curator of Collections for the Marco Island Historical Society, a Consulting Scholar to the Penn Museum, and the founder and owner of Florida Man Photography. A Florida native, his photography has been exhibited throughout Florida and has won awards at the Marco Island Center for the Arts, the A.E. Backus Museum & Gallery and the Rookery Bay Environmental Learning Center. 

Austin is the is the author of three books including, “The Nine Lives of Florida’s Key Marco Cat,” and a winner of a 2021 Florida Book Award. His book, “Lost and Found: The Adventures of Marco the Cat,” received the James J. Horgan Award, given each year to an outstanding book for young readers on Florida history. Signed copies of Austin’s books are available at the Historical Museum’s gift shop.

He holds a B.A. in Anthropology and M.A. in Museum Studies from the University of Florida and is an alumnus of the Smithsonian Institution’s Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology. A Florida native, Austin resides in Marco Island with his wife Erin, daughter Chloe and two newly adopted kittens.