Vintage 1960s-80s Framed Bonfire Photograph American Hoechst Photo Contest Original Contest Entry Still Life 🔥

Size: 10.5 x 8.5 x 1.5 inches ~

🔥 The Company That Ran This Photo Contest Lost Its Name in 1987. The Entry Blank Is Still on the Back.

Turn this frame over and there is a small pale-green form taped to the kraft-paper backing, printed AHC PHOTO CONTEST — ENTRY BLANK (One per entry), with the instruction "(Please clip this entry blank to your photo)" right under the heading. Frank Przewoznik of South Plainfield, New Jersey did what it asked. He printed his name in capitals, gave his AHC location as Bridgewater, ticked Still Life, and wrote down the camera, lens, shutter speed and f-stop he used for the picture on the other side: a close, glowing photograph of a bonfire.

AHC was American Hoechst Corporation, the United States arm of the German chemical and drug maker Hoechst. In 1987 American Hoechst took over Celanese and the name became Hoechst Celanese. The German parent was folded into Aventis in 1999 and finally into Sanofi. A company that once made fibers, plastics, medicines and sunglasses in plants across the country is now a line in merger histories. What survives of its everyday life is paper like this: one employee's photograph of a fire, framed in gold, with his contest paperwork still attached. 🔥

🖼️ What It Is

A framed color photograph of a bonfire. The fire is shot close. Logs at the bottom of the picture glow deep red and orange, and tall yellow-orange flames twist upward into a background that falls away to near-black. The photograph is set in a gold-finished wood frame with a red inner lip. On the back, a kraft-paper dust cover is held in with small brads, and a sawtooth hanger is already fixed to the frame, so it goes straight onto a nail.

The frame measures 10.5 x 8.5 x 1.5 inches: 10 1/2 inches tall, 8 1/2 inches wide and 1 1/2 inches deep.

📋 The Entry Blank, Line by Line

• Heading: AHC PHOTO CONTEST / ENTRY BLANK (One per entry) / (Please clip this entry blank to your photo)
• Name: FRANK PRZEWOZNIK, hand-lettered in capitals
• Home Address: a street in South Plainfield
• AHC Location: "AHC" on the Division line and "BRIDGEWATER" on the Location line, where the printed example underneath reads "i.e., Peru, Ill."
• The Theme of My Photo is (Check one): Still Life, ticked. The other printed choices are The Animal World, Landscapes, People Portraits and Sports Action.
• Camera Used: "CANNON" · Lens: 50 · Shutter Speed: 1/60 · "F" Stop: "5/6"
• Printed note: "If you need more than one entry form, write a note to the AMERICAN HOECHST REPORTER. We're located at Bridgewater, N.J., headquarters, Rte. 202-206 North, Somerville, N.J. 08876."
• Border: a dashed cut line with a small pair of scissors printed at the bottom, the mark of a clip-out form

"CANNON" is Frank's spelling of Canon, and "5/6" is how he put down f/5.6. Both stay exactly as he wrote them. A misspelled camera brand in a working man's handwriting is the kind of detail that makes a piece of paper feel like a person.

📅 How Old Is It? The Fine Print Says

Two printed details bracket the date. The note ends with the ZIP code 08876, and the Post Office Department introduced ZIP codes on July 1, 1963, so the blank was printed that year or later. And the form speaks for American Hoechst, a name that ended in 1987 when the company acquired Celanese and renamed itself Hoechst Celanese Corporation. So the entry blank, and the photograph it was filled in for, come from the years between 1963 and 1987.

🏭 Hoechst: From a Frankfurt Dye Works to New Jersey

Hoechst began in 1863 as Teerfarbenfabrik Meister, Lucius & Co., a coal-tar dye factory started by Wilhelm Meister and Eugen Lucius in the town of Höchst on the river Main, just outside Frankfurt. Synthetic dyes led the chemists into medicine, and the company became one of the great drug houses of its age. Hoechst put out the local anesthetic Novocain, Paul Ehrlich's syphilis treatment Salvarsan, and early commercial insulin.

The next chapter is the one the company spent decades living down. In 1916 Hoechst was one of the co-founders of IG Farben, and in 1925 it was merged into that conglomerate. IG Farben's conduct in the Second World War, including the Buna works it built beside Auschwitz and ran on prisoner labor, led the Allies to break the combine apart. Hoechst was re-founded as its own company in Frankfurt on December 7, 1951. Two years later it set up an American subsidiary, American Hoechst Corporation, based in Somerville, New Jersey.

American Hoechst grew into four businesses: fibers and film, petrochemicals and plastics, specialty products, and health care and agricultural chemicals. The 1970s brought heavy losses in synthetic fibers. In 1974 it bought Foster Grant of Leominster, Massachusetts, the sunglasses company of the "Who's that behind those Foster Grants?" advertisements and a major polystyrene producer. By 1981 American Hoechst was selling $1.6 billion a year. Late in 1986 it made a $2.8 billion friendly bid for Celanese, and in 1987 the combined business became Hoechst Celanese.

🗺️ "i.e., Peru, Ill." — The Plant in the Example

The form's printed example for "Location" is Peru, Illinois, a small city on the Illinois River in LaSalle County. Hoechst made polystyrene there. In 1986 Hoechst announced it would shut its polystyrene plants at Peru and at Chesapeake, Virginia. Jon Huntsman, whose Utah chemical company was buying up plants other firms wanted out of, offered $45 million for the facilities, payable at the end of five years, and Hoechst accepted. A blank that asks for your division and your location, and uses Peru, Ill. as the example, was written for a company with people in many places, and it records one of those places before the map was redrawn.

🏘️ South Plainfield and Bridgewater

Frank gave his home as South Plainfield, a borough in northern Middlesex County that separated from Piscataway Township and incorporated on March 12, 1926. The Depression stalled the new town: through the 1930s most residents got by farming, taking day labor, or working WPA crews building roads, bridges and sewers. Things turned in 1936, when Cornell-Dubilier, the capacitor maker, moved into the old Spicer Manufacturing works on Hamilton Boulevard - where Spicer had made universal joints and drive shafts for cars and aircraft - and brought factory work back to town. After the Second World War the housing developments arrived and the farm borough became a suburb, 24,338 people at the 2020 census, on a little over 8 square miles.

His AHC location, Bridgewater, lies to the west in Somerset County, next to the county seat of Somerville, which is why the headquarters address on the blank carries a Somerville ZIP. American Hoechst developed the headquarters property between Route 202-206 and Interstate 287; the site later passed to Sanofi, the company that finally absorbed Hoechst.

📷 The Photograph

On a 35mm camera, a 50mm lens is the "normal" lens. Its view is close to what the eye sees, with no wide-angle stretch and no telephoto squeeze, and for decades it was the lens that came on the camera. Frank's numbers, 1/60 of a second at f/5.6, are a working exposure: quick enough to hold the shapes of the flames, stopped down enough to keep the edges of the logs and the fire defined.

Fire is an odd choice for a still life, because nothing in it is still. Each flame shape lasts a fraction of a second and never comes back. Frank came in close, let the fire fill the frame from the burning logs to the flame tips, and let the dark around it hold all the color. Then he filed it under Still Life, which is its own small joke if you look at it long enough. He was in good company, too. When photographers took up the still life they inherited it from centuries of painters: the Dutch masters of the 1600s, who could give a whole canvas to a pewter jug, a glass and a tablecloth; Chardin in 18th-century France, with his kitchen utensils and fruit; and Cézanne with his apples and oranges, a painter who looked to Chardin's still lifes at the Louvre for the rest of his career. Even the English name is borrowed from the Dutch word stilleven. The pewter-jug painters, Heda and Pieter Claesz among them, kept their colors low and let the light do the work, and I think they would have understood a fire burning against near-black. 📷

🔎 Condition

The color photograph is bright, with strong reds, oranges and yellows in the flames. The gold finish on the frame shows wear along its edges consistent with its age. The entry blank is intact and legible, held to the backing with two strips of tape. It arrives ready to hang.