The Stolen Camera Bag

An old story of my father's: he mentioned once that he had lost not one but two bags full of camera gear in his life, on separate occasions, both stolen out of locked cars. In the second case, the "put the word out on the street" that he would pay the equivalent of $100 (roughly $450 today) to get the empty bag back. He was later approached by a man who returned the bag claiming he "found" it. The camera equipment was gone, but the passport and $1,000 in traveler's checks ($4,500 today) were still there. The finder admitted he had tried to cash the checks but wasn't able to. Dad said the $100 was worth it and he paid the guy without complaint.

That must have happened in France. My father was an amateur photographer who liked to write and take pictures for articles for food and travel magazines—the catch being he usually spent more creating the articles than he earned from them. One trip that cost $3,500 yielded $650 for the article. But it offset the cost of the trips, and the trips were the main thing for him. He loved traveling to France, and at the end of his life estimated that he had spent a year and a half of his life in France, over 31 trips. (He once went for just a weekend, which I thought was kinda over the top).

I don't have any more details of the story about the camera bag. My first-ever published picture, when I was a teenager, was the lead illustration in an article of my father's in Holiday magazine* (I was "second camera" for the shoots, as a failsafe in case something went wrong), but, as was unfortunately rather characteristic of him, my father didn't give me credit for it. He said it would just "confuse things." I don't have the picture or the issue of the magazine. Oh well.

Mike

*I could be wrong about which magazine it was—there were a number of them, with titles like Travel and Gourmet, that all tended to blend together to me.

Book o' the Week:

Inspiration Leica Akademie (English and German Edition). A "group show" of 76 Leica Akademie photographers from 16 countries worldwide, curated by Heidi and Robert Mertens. It looks to me like this is going out of print soon, so act soon if you want one.

The book link is your portal to Amazon from TOP, should you choose to support the site.

Link to B&H Photo

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

John Nollendorfs: "Reminds me of the story Brett Weston used to tell. He was out shooting with his Dad, and was having trouble with a composition. Called his Dad over, who looked under the drop cloth, turned the 4x5 back 90 degrees, and claimed the shot as one of his own!!"

Herman Krieger: "Would a bag man in France be called a baguette man?"

Bob G.: "As an early settler in Boreum Hill, Brooklyn, the apartment of my future wife and I was broken into. What is probably a common occurrence today, could have been the disappearance of all my camera gear if placed in average locations throughout the apartment. It was saved by storing it under the kitchen sink."

Mike replies: Very smart. I used to keep my camera on the front seat of my rather messy car, in an old, soiled, tattered brown kraft paper grocery bag with the top rolled shut. It looked so unpromising nobody ever broke the window to check what might be inside.

Thomas Mc Cann: "Years back I had a camera bag stolen from the boot of a hire car in Dusseldorf. While I had the camera and one lens with me, my other equipment, lens, etc., was in the bag but even more important were my wife's and my airline tickets and passports. Didn't discover the loss till we were at the airport. Aer Lingus were excellent but the local police were called because of the missing passports. (They took my wife aside to have her confirm her status and that I was not a white slave trader.) Two weeks later I got a letter from the Dusseldorf police saying my bag had been handed in and if I paid €18 they would return it.It was a good Billingham bag so I gladly paid the €18. Imagine my surprise when the bag returned with its contents intact. Air line tickets, Passports, camera gear etc., the works."

Omer: "Forty years ago all my camera gear was stolen from an apartment I was living in. I knew it had been an acquaintance but wasn't sure which one. The odd thing about losing the gear was the feeling of having been set free."

Dogman: "Years ago, a friend got a job shooting for an annual report. His job was photos at a gas refining plant in a small town nearby. He wanted to borrow a lens and asked if I wanted to tag along. I sat in the car, waiting for him to finish, but I got bored. As the sun came up, I picked up one of his cameras with a 50mm lens and clicked off a couple of shots to occupy myself. The company used my photo. He got paid, I didn't. No matter...pretty good story."

Mike replies: Reminds me of a story (I hope I'm remembering it right) that Richard Avedon was once asked to snap a picture of some tourists with their camera. They had no idea who he was, and he didn't tell them. His comment—I think—was that if he told them who he was he would have to charge them $5,000. What struck me about it was that someone has an original Richard Avedon among their photos and they don't even know it.

Chester Williams: "Had all my equipment stolen while I was at home, at 9 a.m. Funny thing is that my neighbor called me when the thief was leaving my home and told that some guy was trying to break in. I rushed outside, machete in hand, and captured him. Not wanting to go through the police hassle of reporting an attempted break-in, I let him go...not realizing he had all my stuff in two backpacks!!"

Tom Burke: "Apropos insurance payouts following photographic equipment thefts, a friend of mine suffered a break-in of his flat (apartment) and his camera, etc., was stolen. He got the insurance cheque, replaced the equipment, and a month or so later suffered another burglary. The police officer told him that this was quite common—the thieves would know that there was likely to be a set of better, newer equipment at an address they knew how to get into….

"Another point: I don’t know how it works in the US, but here in the UK we no longer get cash settlements for insurance claims (or only rarely). About 13 years ago we suffered a burglary and about £8,000 of various stuff was stolen—cameras, lenses, laptops, and so on. We were insured, but instead of a payment we had a call from an adjuster who discussed and agreed with me suitable replacement equipment: so my Nikon D70 was replaced by a D80, my 12” MacBook Pro by a newer model, and so on. All of it came from a single company. None of it was current model, but it was all new, i.e. unsold. The D80 had recently been replaced by the D90, for example, and unsold examples of D80's had been bought by this company very cheaply, I expect, who then struck deals with the insurance companies to settle claims. I couldn’t object: I was being indemnified; indeed, the replacement was theoretically better than the stolen item—it just wasn’t the latest and greatest. And there was no chance to completely change photo supplier—I’d lost a couple of Nikon DSLRs and lenses so I would get Nikon replacements—no opportunity to say that I’d actually prefer to go back to Canon."

Pak-Ming Wan: "I live in Paris and where I've had my mobile phone stolen twice...and my Leicas, never. People think it is a film camera and wonder why I'm such a Luddite with such a lousy camera."

Mike replies: My teacher and mentor Steve Szabo lived on a houseboat on the Potomac in the 1970s, when two of the current photographic crazes were Deardorff 8x10 view cameras (Steve was at the forefront of that movement) and $5.95 plastic toy Diana cameras. When thieves broke in to the houseboat, they stole the dirt-cheap Dianas but left the much more expensive Deardorffs. Steve's guess was that they recognized the Dianas as cameras, but had no idea what the mysterious Deardorffs, folded flat, might be.

Comments

[Jeff]

In today’s world, I would be far more concerned about identity theft from the loss of passport and traveler’s checks. My insurance would cover full replacement value for the rest.

[Peter Komar]

Nothing infuriates me more than stealing someone’s belongings whether from your car, home, etc. it’s really just evil to me. I had a work colleague that had his prize possession, a Leica M3 double stroke with lenses, stolen in a foreign country while on a long trip with his adult son. He handled it well but I’m sure he was heartbroken. I have heard of many camera gear thievery stories, makes me wary of traveling with expensive cameras and lenses. I realize there are more good humans than bad but I wish stealing from strangers was not a trait for those who do it.

[Dan Khong]

No doubt you learned from a young age that being a photographer is a tough way to make a living.

[c.d.embrey]

I've never used a camera bag. By the time you get the camera out the shot has gotten out of Dodge.

[darlene]

I had assistants paid to watch gear at some on location jobs, but I still had a few items stolen. Always made me think it was the hired help behind it, and I do not mean mine.

[Ernest Zarate]

I’ve had two separate incidents involving vehicles with camera gear being broken into. 1) At a shopping center, someone busted into the driver window, gained entry, and ripped out the OEM radio/cassette player (cheap). Made a mess of it too. But… they left behind my camera bag. Inside that was my Leica M6 with 35mm Summicron lens. 2) On the street in San Francisco, someone busted out all the windows on the passenger side of my Sienna, and stole my camera bag with Canon 5D Mk II and 24-105 L and 50mm f-1.4 lenses.

So I’m one for two. Insurance paid for damage repair and helped with replacing the Canon. But what a headache to deal with. Plus driving home from SF at night with all the windows on one side gone… not fun.

[Jack Mac]

Mike,
Your Dad should have put an Apple AirTag in the camera bag. Then he would know where it went. Oh, fifty years too early. But highly recommended today.

[Mike]

I once lost a camera bag full of gear while traveling when the lock on my locker was cut at a place where I was spending an afternoon. I was gutted, but what I was most upset about was that the bag contained six rolls of exposed film. Insurance meant I was able to replace everything - in some cases with better gear - but there was no getting back that film.

[Jerker Andersson]

Years..., no, decades, ago in 1990, my shitty old VW Golf from ten years before that, was broken into one night in my hometown. It must have been a gentleman thief, because he (yes,statistics point to that) didn´t smash or break anything. Instead he carefully unlocked the door with a thin latch, slid along the window on the passenger side. The gentleman then carefully pryed my simplistic stereo from the dashboard, inspected it and put it under the passenger seat before closing the door and walking away. So, just a gentleman, not a thief.

Another time a year later: I stopped to fill up petrol and have a coffee in a shabby part of Amsterdam on my way home to Sweden from France. It was at about 4:am and at the table behind me there was a small group of loud young men who spoke with a mix of dutch and arabic, and somehow I got a feeling they were talking about me (dutch and swedish are not that far apart, language cousins, you might say). So I was already quite tense when I got up to walk back to my car, and one of the men put his hand on my shoulder and asked me to stop. No. Not like this, not me, I just want to get on home, I thought. F... But, no, he politely told me that I had left my camera, a Pentax K 1000, on the floor under my chair. And wished me a safe trip. He must have seen the near panic in my eyes, and I learned a lesson to trust my neighbour a little bit more. I offered to pay for his coffee but he declined.

[Trevor Johnson]

The Leica Akademie book looks like one that deserves to be out of print and stay that way. It is a bit like Erwin's later books, which I have, when he had gone somewhat off piste from his excellent, earlier, informative work.

[Lothar Adler]

A friend of mine worked in a photo store for many years and always tells me the actual and sometimes amazing stories of customers who had to buy new cameras and lenses because they were robbed.
I got into the habit early on of really never leaving photographic equipment in the car, never thinking about whether I thought a parking lot was safe, because it's all nonsense.
Probably all of those who were stolen judged the parking lot to be relatively safe, because otherwise they wouldn't have left the equipment there.
The craziest story for me happened to a couple who are friends of mine during their vacation in France.
They were swimming in a lake, and both of them didn't take their eyes off their car for a second! and the car was parked in plain sight on the shore. Nevertheless, when they returned, everything of value had been stolen from the car, because the robbers had crept up from the opposite side of the car and broken it open.
I know the wildest stories from France and Italy, but "the crown of creation" probably lives everywhere.

[Sean]

Whilst visiting the Tate Gallery in Liverpool, I was told to leave my camera gear in their storage area. It was clear to the attendant, that I was uneasy about handing my gear over. He said, “There are works of art worth millions here”. The look on his face when I asked him if any of it was left in the bag room...

[Earl Dunbar]

Just to clarify, “just for a weekend” is NOT over the top. You never know, you may run into one of the Turnleys. Or both - especially if you know which which bistro(s) to haunt at lunch time. FWIW, YMMV, YADDA.

[Jack Stivers]

A long time ago, a camera bag stuffed full of Hasselblad bodies, lenses, etc. was stolen out of my car. I filed a police report and made an insurance claim. The day the big check arrived, I got a call from the police saying my gear had been recovered.

The guy who taken the bag tried to sell the equipment at a camera shop, and the owner knew this guy didn't know what the heck he had. The owner tried to delay the guy while an employee called the cops, but the thief got worried and ran out without the gear.

I was almost sorry to get it back as I had planned to purchase somewhat different gear than I had lost.

[Joseph L Kashi]

I usually keep my beat-up old camera bad on the floor of a beat-up old Saturn, with a dirty jacket on top of the bag, and a large German Shepherd on the seat. I of course lock the car, so that no one steals the German Shepherd, seriously.

[Robert Roaldi]

Is stealing these items lucrative? How much money can they possibly make? Who buys stolen cameras?

[Steve Aitch]

The only camera I've ever had stolen was my '70s
Boots Bierette vs. It was in the girlfriend's car glove-box at the time! The car was recovered at the end of the road - joy-riders had driven it in circles until they ran out of fuel (the fuel line needed a good clean), but they kept the camera.

As for "Just for the weekend", when I worked for a London based airline, a lot of the staff used their staff-travel perk for (long) weekends away, all over Europe and so on - anywhere you could fly to in less than a day.

Heck, one chap I worked with went for an afternoon in Hong-Kong. He managed to get a seat on a Concorde charter, had his afternoon in Hong Kong and then got a late flight home. Granted the return flight took most of a day, but...

[Ed Hawco]

I once left a bag full of camera gear next to a one-armed bandit in a Las Vegas casino at 2:00 in the morning, and didn’t notice I had left it behind until an hour later. To my amazement, I was able to recover it from the casino’s security desk, where someone had dropped it off. The security guy said he wasn’t sure who should be more surprised; me or him.