The tenant had died and left behind boxes stacked from floor to ceiling, and Kristen’s employer—a Boston-based property owner—had hired her to free up the space, saying she could keep the contents if it paid for the labor. After she and her husband discovered just how many cameras were in there—ranging from vintage to antique, many in mint condition—they effectually became custodians of a camera museum. Some indeed!
Moreover, they were worth a ton of money.
“When we first got in there, we couldn’t even walk; there was boxes from floor to ceiling in the entire storage unit,“ Kristen’s husband, Fridrik, told The Epoch Times of the discovery. “It’s been fun, but it’s been very stressful.”
Initially, they figured there might be 20 or 30 cameras inside. After peeking inside a few boxes and seeing them, they guessed it was more like 100 or 200, but their estimates proved wildly inaccurate. “It was just box after box after box just filled with cameras and lenses—old, vintage film cameras and lens,” Fridrik said. “There’s probably 1,500 lenses and 1,000 cameras. … The condition varies from cameras that were just junk to absolutely mint, never been used, looked like they were brand-new condition. … The vast majority of them are very, very good.”
Not only was the discovery voluminous, but it was of superlative quality. Among the wares there were several of the best cameras money could buy at the time—considered antiques and worth a pretty penny today. “At first, when unboxing these cameras, I had no idea how much they were worth and what they were,” said Fridrik, who mentioned finding brands such as Orion Miranda and Minolta. “They were very rare and they’re worth between $1,000 or $2,000 each. … As we kept on opening boxes, more and more boxes, we had more cameras—we had a lot more cameras. It was kind of becoming overwhelming.”
After fathoming that they had a mini treasure trove on their hands, they couldn’t just start selling them; they first had to do some research to educate themselves and find out what the going rate was. Some preliminary investigation revealed that they had tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of dollars worth of antique equipment.
“I googled, ‘What is the most valuable Minolta camera?’ and they came up with the Minolta SR II and then the Minolta CLE,” Fridrik said. “And literally the next day, after I did that research I went to storage; I was going through boxes and I found a Minolta CLE with two Minolta M-Rokkor lenses and a Leica lens inside it. I immediately listed it on eBay and it sold for $1,200, and I was blown away by it. I probably could have gotten more had I been patient and known what I was doing, but it was pretty exciting at the time. We, later on, found a Minolta lens that sold for $2,300 on eBay.
“Chances are, if you want to know something about an SLR camera from the 50s to the late 70s, we probably have it or at least something very similar to it.”
Sharing their most prized finds, he said: “Orion Miranda T is most expensive, and Minoltaflex 1 from 1936-37 is probably the oldest.”
With this whole discovery—including the rows upon rows of camera bodies and lenses stacked in their apartment—Kristen and Fridrik have become like camera merchants; it’s become a full-time job. “We both work and we have two kids,” Fridrik said. “Every second outside of that, we are either organizing something with the cameras or dealing with something: selling them, moving them, storing them, organizing them, cataloging them. It’s a lot, a lot of work. Like I said, it’s completely taken over our lives.”
The couple say the windfall has dramatically impacted their living space—they’ve had to rearrange their lives around it. In order to store all the cameras in their apartment, they got rid of furniture and rearranged pretty much everything inside. There are cameras literally stacked in every nook and cranny, including inside cabinets, in the back hall that is supposed to be a fire escape, and under the couch. “Kristen is pretty crafty with organizational skills and she somehow made it work,” Fridrik said. “We ended up throwing unnecessary things out of our apartment, and we bought some different types of furniture and shelving so that way we could get all the cameras to fit. …
“The entryway that we have is filled with shelves from floor to ceiling, and just 10 cameras deep and probably 50 wide. Just cameras everywhere. It’s pretty cool. Definitely pretty cool.”
Besides hawking the antique cameras for cash on eBay, Fridrik said they plan on keeping specific ones they like and, sometime this month, will be donating others to the Photographic Historical Society of New England.
