I've been scratching up my negatives for a long time. It drove some of my photo teachers and classmates crazy. Some of them didn't really consider it photography, in the "pure" sense at least. Others couldn't believe why anyone would do that to their negatives. I can kind of understand the first point, although I don't see how it matters at all. On the second point... I guess I don't see how that matters either. If an image is good enough to print as it is, great. I won't mess with it if there's no reason to. But when some images just don't do it for me, I try to come up with a way to make them work. Scratching up the negatives is one way I've done that over the years.
Eventually I found that photos of buildings were really conducive to this method. I'd take two building negatives and scrape the emulsion off each of them in such a way that I could fit them together like a jigsaw puzzle, like in the examples above.
When I first started doing these building pieces, it was all about the process. I never had an idea about what they were supposed to mean or anything like that. I just enjoyed the act of working on them and creating weird combined landscapes.
As I printed more and more of these, they started being about the passing of time. And the destruction of old things and build up of new things. They made me think about density and population, and how nothing stays the same or lasts forever. It's super deep and stuff.
Usually the first response I get from people is that these are really scary, and I've been asked if I love destruction and if I'm looking forward to the apocalypse. No, I'm not, just so you know. I'll post more scary stuff tomorrow. IF THERE IS A TOMORROW.
Here's an example of two different stages of one of these pieces (Sorry, I can't figure out how to put images side-by-side on this stupid thing):
1 comment:
Some people might fuck up their negatives scratching them. You don't though. These are some of the most interesting patterns and textures I've seen in photographs, and they have an organic and physical flow to them that wouldnt come across through photoshop or computer editing.
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