Negative Musings

A photographic negative is a powerful artifact. It carries a magic more than it’s small size and thin aspect would suggest.

It seems crazy that I’ve only been shooting film for about a year. It feels like a lifetime already. It’s been even less that I’ve been doing my own developing, and this far I’ve been just keeping my negatives in pages on a shelf. But, they’re getting up there so it was time to start putting them into binders.

Collecting all my negatives into one collection is a powerful experience. There is something so visceral, so magical, and so humbling about an image on a piece of film. All the information about a moment of time is recorded there without ones and zeroes, but with chemical compounds frozen in place. Just to think about how it was created, light bounced off a subject, through a lens to hit a small piece of plastic with chemicals on it. Then the plastic was put in more chemicals so that the area that light hit would fog up in a certain way. Everything that affected the scene is recorded in the way the chemistry reacted – including the information about how the film was developed.

And, each negative is unique. Unlike a binary file, the negative can not be perfectly duplicated. In the entire universe, there can be no exact copy of it. Even the Bible can be theoretically transcribed more exactly than a tiny thirty-five millimeter negative.

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One Response

1. norbs says:

   28 July, 2009 at 2:03 am

   Ripper post Mick. Expect some linkage from my blog later.

   Reply