Kent Oppenheimer was a commercial photographer, specializing in architectural photography. During the early 1950s he was an active member of the Beverly Hills Stereo Club, and won many awards in stereo photo competitions in that club, and also in the Photographic Society of America stereo competitions. During the height of the 1950s stereo photography boom he started a company called "Kentech" which made two products for the stereo photography market.

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First was a rewind crank for the Stereo Realist camera. The Stereo Realist camera has a rewind knob, and requires quite a lot of turning to rewind a 36 exposure roll of 35mm film back into its cassette. This simple device slips on to the camera's rewind knob, allowing for a very easy and efficient rewinding of the film. (Note: it will not fit on the oversized knob on the Realist Custom model).

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His second product was a slide bar, machined from a solid block of aluminum.

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This precision made device allowed for a four inch horizontal shift of whatever camera was mounted on top of the sliding plate.

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We think that a fairly large numbers of the rewind cranks were made, as they were very popular amongst the stereo photographers that we knew in the 1970s to the 1990s.

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In the early 1980s we managed to get Kent's address, and, through letter correspondence found that he still had a large quantity of "new old stock" of the rewind cranks. Without ever meeting him we came to an agreement to buy them all, and we sold them all through our company "Reel 3-D Enterprises, Inc.".

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The slide bars must have been made in much smaller quantities, and we have only seen a few of them come up for sale since we began this hobby in 1976.

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In spite of our business dealings with Kent, we did not physically meet him until around 2006. At that time he contacted us, saying that he had come across a bunch of (2D) 4"x5" black and white negatives that he had taken in the 1960s for David's architect father, Maxwell Starkman. We arranged to visit him in his Hollywood home to pick up the negatives.

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2010_01_08 Kent Oppenheimer with Susan Pinsky in his West Hollywood house by David Starkman_03

 

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(They have been scanned, and are now online at:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/68255235@N05/albums/72157627818575436

 
We have also scanned many of his photos that appeared in magazines, and they are online at:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/35865984@N00/albums/72157636837597796/

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Kent lived in an incredible custom built mid-century modern home that Kent had built in 1961. The architect was William M. Bray.

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Meeting him, he told us his life story, and we wished we had contacted him a lot sooner! Here is a brief synopsis.

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Kent was born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1919. He was raised there, and lived there until he was 19 years old. His family had a very successful business dealing in scrap fabric materials. This was successful enough that they had offices in several countries, including Switzerland and the USA. His family was Jewish, and, after all of the anti-Semitic hardships being put upon the German Jews, his family had the money and resources to get out of Germany, and work from their businesses in other countries.

 

Kent was chosen to take over operations in the USA, and moved to the East Coast in 1939.

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While working at that business he got involved with photography, and started doing professional photography using 4" x 5" format cameras, which he preferred for many years. In the late 1940s he moved to Los Angeles, to pursue his photography career full time.

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In the early 1950s he got the stereo photography bug, joined the Beverly Hills Stereo Photography club, and added 3-D photography to his portfolio. However, unlike Jack Laxer, who he became friends with, his 3-D photography was mainly devoted to personal and club competition photos. That being said, he was an excellent 3-D photographer, and was very active in the Beverly Hills club competions and assorted Photographic Stereo Slide competitions for many years, winning many ribbons and awards.

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Some time in the early 1950s he also started "Kentech", and made the products we mentioned earlier.

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We had several more opportunities to visit Kent before he passed away in 2010. During those visits we had the pleasure of looking at a lot of his stereo slides, which had been stored away in a special large fireproof vault he had built into the basement during the original house construction.

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Before he passed away he told his caretaker that he wanted all of his stereo slides to be given to us. He, and his late wife, Marjorie, had no children, and his niece, who had inherited everything, honored this wish.

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We are pleased to be able to share some background about him and show you some of his 3-D work here.

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Susan Pinsky and David Starkman
Culver City, CA
October 2021