A Spy's Eye View

NOT ALL OF James Bond's gadgets were fictional. In the 1969 movie On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Bond uses a strange-looking metal square to photograph supervillain Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s secret plans. The same metal square appears in the 2013 season of the Cold War-themed show The Americans, when an FBI asset is sent to copy documents in the Soviet Embassy.

- Matthew Petti

The device is called a Minox subminiature camera—and it’s surprisingly easy to find. Although its products were commonly associated with spies, Minox produced hundreds of thousands of film cameras for civilian customers during the 20th century. They go for between $100 and $200 on the secondhand market today. The catch is finding and processing the bespoke 8 mm by 11 mm format film the camera uses.

These recent photos were taken with a Minox B camera, made in 1966, and developed by Blue Moon Camera and Machine in Portland, perhaps the only commercial lab in the U.S. that still processes Minox film. The process is a reminder of how much we take for granted in the age of smartphone cameras, and how resourceful people in the past were. Portable photography used to be difficult and limited to people possessing specialized resources.