Like antiques dealers or cratediggers, what keeps a lot of archivists going is the hope that one day they’ll stumble across something that either the world has never seen or was thought to be lost forever. That’s exactly what happened to Matthew Cowan, one of the folks overseeing the Photography and Moving Images collection for the Oregon Historical Society. He just didn’t realize it.
One element of Cowan’s job is to show off pieces from the OHS’ massive collection of films and photos, most of which are housed in the society’s 100,000-square-foot Gresham warehouse. This includes a semi-regular series held at the Hollywood Theatre, where Cowan screens historically relevant or unusual films. Last year, scanning the warehouse shelves in search of inspiration, he came upon a can of 16mm film ominously labeled Pages of Death.