HR64#01, December 2009, by Joao Margalha

At every flea market worth it's salt you'll find boxes and boxes of old, sepia-toned photographs and the occasional bag of mystery-film. I can hardly help pausing each time to examine the sealed canisters and imagine what images might be inside. I rarely end up buying these mysterious rolls, but the thought of finding the next Vivan Maier compels me to keep looking.

Untitled, by Vivan Maier

In 2009, John Maloof acquired a large collection of between around 40,000 undeveloped negatives at an estate sale in Chicago. Starting his research with a name written on an envelope inside the box, "Vivan Maier," John began to piece together the story of the photographer. Vivan was a French nanny who photographed the streets of Chicago throughout the 50s and 60s. Though she was an extremely prolific photographer, she apparently never showed her images to anyone. Strangely enough, Vivan passed away just days before John discovered her identity and tried to seek her out, stumbling instead upon her recently printed obituary. The story itself is fascinating enough, but what is most interesting about it all is that images John began to develop proved to be far more than snapshots. Vivan's images are funny and sophisticated—a brilliant look at a world long gone.

HR64#10, December 2009, by Joao Margalha

This story&mdash:one of my absolute favorites—immediately came to mind when I saw the work of contender Joao Margalha, who has been developing cracked 1960's-era studio portraits from negatives rescued from the archives of a commercial photo studio. Whereas Vivan's work presents a free-roaming viewpoint of her time and place that irresistibly draws me back into her time, the formulaic aspects of Joao's studio portraits reveal a different side of history.

Joao writes:

What seemed to be a singular moment was after all a standardization effort derived from issues of taste and technique. We realize that these were families without fathers. These were the times of heavy migration and colonial wars in Africa.

Joao is also highly aware of photography as a medium, referencing the writing of Walter Benjamin. Joao writes that images (such as Maier's) are "capable of producing a new representation of reality," but that his cracked negatives "dissolve the aura and remind us that they are just pictures." By developing these old negatives and distributing the images on the internet, the life of the work is extended both in time and space. The portraits are newly compelling as decayed artifacts existing in the present moment. Images like these present the kind of quandary that would keep Walter Benjamin up all night at his writing desk.

Joao is also a photographer in his own right, this being just one of many bodies of work. You can explore more of his work on his website.