"Check this one out," my friend said, pulling a picture from the middle of the stack. He motioned for me to come behind the back counter, where he worked.
"What isŠ" I tilted my head. "Is she pissing?"
He laughed. "We can't figure it out. We think that's either her shoulder or her ass."
The photos ran the spectrum from black-and-white nudes captured for some Introduction to Photography course, to more daring erotica and bondage pics that featured ropes and whips, to a seemingly endless catalogue of show-me-your-tits party photos. Always the social anthropologist, I realized that I had discovered the most extensive archive of debauchery ever compiled of the University of Colorado student body. But when I was shown a blown-up eight-by-ten of a young female performing a naughty act with an icicle in the middle of a forest, all of my scientific distance went out the window. My favorite was a shot of two naked young ladies riding a single mountain bike through a dorm hallway. I wondered who they were smiling at behind the camera. I paused to consider a photo of six girls at Lake Havasu. They stood in a row, each lifting up one side of her bathing-suit top or wet T-shirt, as if waiting in line for a group breast-cancer examination.
I flipped through seven more stacks of pictures. My friend didn't know how long the stash had been in existence. "There are guys that have been here for six or seven years, even more, and it has just always been here," he told me. There was no telling how many generations of academia have had their likeness shuffled through the stash -- and how many of Jones Drug's part-time employees and their friends had gazed upon them breathlessly.
One twenty-year-old CU senior remembers the first time he heard about it. It was last summer, and when he told a friend that he'd just gotten a job at Jones Drug, a bystander asked if he knew about the photo collection. "I heard that they never did just girls flashing unless they were, like, really hot. Because they said that after spring break and stuff, they get so many titty shots that it was just boring to them," he remembers. "It usually took, like, a lewd sex act or something to make it into the stash. They just waited for the real gnarly stuff, like sex photos of sorority girls." The student wasn't sure if he believed it, and kept cool for his first weeks on the job, working as a cashier at the front register. Finally he asked a fellow employee if she knew anything about the photo-lab workers keeping a secret stash. She told him someone was feeding him bullshit.
He never saw the stash before quitting last year.
Employees at Jones Drug are certainly not unique among photo-lab workers who make extra copies of the most interesting pictures that emerge from the developing machine. They're not even unique in Boulder. Dave Drage worked at Amaranth Photo Imaging before it went out of business three years ago. They never really got full-on sex-romp photos, he says, but they did develop some nude photography. "Some of them were professionally shot nude photography, like erotic stuff, generally pretty artful. And there was stuff where people brought in a disposable camera and you could tell they were on a hiking trip or something, and they were like, ŒHey, dude, I'm going to take off all my clothes and pose nude in this river.' And it was just, like, really poor, bad photography of some naked person, like, squatting on a rock," he says. "So that kind of stuff, we would make a few extra prints and pass them around."
Before she worked at Jones Drug in 2003, Sofia Cisneros was an employee at a one-hour photo joint in Boulder's now-demolished Crossroads Mall. She says that stash rivaled the Jones Drug trove. "It was this crappy little photo place inside a dying mall, so no one ever came in there except for the perverts," says the 25-year-old. "It was pretty entertaining."
As one of Jones Drug's few female employees in the camera department, it fell upon Cisneros to balance out the stash with the occasional photo of the male form. One picture featured a muscular twenty-something guy laying naked on a mattress, staring down at his body with an amused expression. Only after examining the picture closely do viewers realize that there's a small white kitten sleeping peacefully in his crotch. How the cat got in the warm nook beneath his penis is unclear. Photo lab employees are required to report any instances of animal abuse, child pornography or anything that showcases a serious crime. Some of the stash photos were creepy -- like the close-up pic of a very hairy hand honking an anonymous, pale-white boob -- but none of them were illegal.
But is it legal for photo labs to hang on to copies of the funny, the weird and the naked? Julie Brooks, public-information officer for the Boulder Police Department, couldn't find anything illegal about the phenomenon: "As long as [customers] got all of their film and there wasn't a theft of photos" -- or as long as the pictures are not sold or posted publicly -- "there isn't necessarily a crime," she says. Although, she adds, it could lead to a civil lawsuit if a customer ever had proof that their likeness was housed in a stash. But the hundreds of individuals that currently make up the Jones Drug photo medley won't get a chance to find out.
Earlier this year, Tito Roberts announced that he would be closing the 2,500-square-foot convenience store at 1370 College Avenue on June 1. He had owned it since 1984, when he bought it from the Jones family. They had opened the location in 1960 as a satellite operation to the main Jones Drug on Pearl Street. That store has long since closed, but the shop across from the CU campus continued to thrive until recently, when foot traffic fell off and it became harder for Roberts to make rent. The staff was shocked to hear that the Boulder institution would be closing, but their concerns were alleviated after a store manager announced plans to renovate the space and reopen it himself later this summer.
The remaining question: What would happen to the stash?
In recent weeks, the pile has been pillaged by current and former employees looking to get a piece of the action before it disappears forever. My friend, who no longer works at Jones Drug, heard that a cashier who had been fired months earlier for stealing from the till returned one afternoon in May and made off with some of the best photos. "He had no right to do that," my friend seethes. "There were guys that worked there way, way longer than him that had first dibs. It was a total dick move." Fortunately, employees were able to pull up an electronic stash from the computer where customers printed digital photos.
Roberts says he has thrown away lots of old photos in the past few weeks. "Some dated from the early parts of the last century in black and white," he says. "Anything from party pictures to pictures like graduations." And as for the stash, specifically? "Yeah," he admits cautiously, "those ones that they had back there in the corner were all thrown away. There wasn't anything in there that was bad. It might have been embarrassing to somebody if they knew who it was. But," he stresses, "those people are long gone."
