A dark room: Concord Photo Services closes after owner decides to retire
Jul. 17—CONCORD
M ichael ST. Germain bounced around his downtown photo shop last Thursday doing all sorts of tasks. He helped customers at the counter, fixed one of the digital photo printers and measured custom frames.
A woman became flustered as she tried to navigate one of the six digital photo kiosks. St. Germain could see her distress.
"The computers see her and they shut down," he joked. The longtime customer agreed.
The rapid evolution of photography has kept St. Germain, 71, on his feet like this for more than five decades. Now, he's ready to retire.
Concord Photo Services — also known as Concord Camera Shop — officially closed Saturday.
The store on North Main Street changed with the times, going from mostly selling cameras to film developing and photo restoration. For almost 20 years, the shop offered prints from digital cameras, including those taken on smartphones.
"I decided back years ago that we needed to make changes in terms of what we were going to do," he said. "My peers thought I was a little crazy when I had 10 kiosks at one time."
St. Germain said the business remained viable right up until the end, with three full-time employees and one part-timer. He tried to sell the shop, but two potential deals never came through.
The shop also offered custom frames and products with photos, including flip-flops, T-shirts, cellphone cases, water bottles, mugs, bookmarks and jewelry. Custom face masks were popular early in the COVID-19 pandemic. The shop also converted old home videos, including VHS tapes, into digital formats.
The biggest change over the years was the elimination of camera sales — hence "photo services" in the name. The camera inventory started to shrink 15 years ago, and he sold the last one eight years ago.
"There wasn't any way to make any money selling the gear," St. Germain said. "The manufacturers wanted to sell direct."
Since announcing he would close the shop, St. Germain had to balance his final goodbyes with longtime customers with trying to get work done — assisting customers, fixing the Fujifilm photo printer and helping an employee frame a vintage poster of the 1977 film "Viva Knievel!"
St. Germain estimates the shop has produced more than 50 million photographs during his time.
"Everybody would come in and have a roll of film and do doubles," he said.
Waban Photo in Newton, Mass., will take over St. Germain's online business.
Kodak moments
St. Germain fell in love with photography working on a science project in high school, when he had to take photos of his experiment. He also worked at a camera store in Laconia.
The Concord store's roots date to 1904, when Brown & Burpee Opticians in Manchester started to sell Kodak cameras. The company eventually expanded to Concord in the 1950s. St. Germain started working at the shop in 1970 after time in the military and bought the business in 1980.
The store mostly sold cameras until the 1990s, when it shifted to developing pictures in its own lab.
Digital cameras — and later cellphones — brought the biggest shift in the industry.
He said he used to joke at conferences about men buying digital cameras and convincing their wives they would no longer have to go to the photo store because they would take care of it at home.
"It never happened," St. Germain said. "He had more things to do with his hobbies and couldn't spend time with the pictures."
Ellen Hayes of Concord stopped by one last time to pick up prints and buy photo albums. She's come to the shop for the past 25 years to buy cameras and have film developed.
"I'm someone who likes to have a photo album of what we've done," she said. "I like to be able to open the photo album and look at the pictures from last Christmas or whatever it might be. I'm always coming in here getting 100 pictures or so developed and into the album they go."
She said it will be tough seeing the shop close.
"He's been able to keep up with the times and how technology has changed," she said.
Last one standing
Photosmith in Dover claims to be the last such business on the Seacoast. The store, which opened in 1981, offers some of the same services as Concord Photo Services, including film developing, digital printing, scanning services and photo restoration. Home movie and slideshow transfers also are popular, according to Laz Canny, lab manager.
"As everyone else kind of faded away, we just became the last ones here," he said. "It has been a good spot in the local community where people will drive up from Massachusetts or come over from Maine."
Photosmith, however, doesn't offer frames and gifts.
The store sees a lot of younger people getting into photography and wanting to shoot with 35mm film.
"There are a lot of families who have photo albums. More than you would think," Canny said. "They want to show their kids, 'This is us at Disney World. This is us at the beach.' It is what it has always been, but for whatever reason the last 20 and 30 years people have gone away from it."
St. Germain said cellphones have become ubiquitous in the industry, but many still love prints.
"There are three ways of archiving stuff: One is you can put it in the cloud, you can put it on your computer or you can have a hard copy," he said. "The only sure-fire way of maintaining it is having hard copies."
Surviving COVID
St. Germain said early in the COVID-19 pandemic he worked in the shop by himself for 16 or 17 weeks as his employees found other work or moved away. He had to train new workers once restrictions were lifted.
"It was a struggle to get everything done," he said. "It took its physical toll on me."
Many customers took the time during the pandemic to sort through old photos and put together family albums. The company offered "shoebox scanning," with customers dropping off loads of pictures to be converted to digital files.
"We've done literally hundreds of those boxes," he said.
Canny said the pandemic also brought a boost in customers at Photosmith.
"People are being like, 'Oh, this is really important because just posting on Facebook doesn't mean anything,'" he said. "We were slammed during the pandemic. ... People went through their old home movies and old photo albums."
Canny expects the Dover shop to remain open as long as Kodak keeps making film.
St. Germain's retirement prompted many customers to stop in and have their last orders completed before the shop closes. He will miss the customers the most.
"When I thought about it, with 50 million photographs it was pretty hard not to be part of more than two generations of people coming in from parents to their kids and their kids' kids," he said. "We see a lot of that."