Back in the 1980’s when I first started to seriously practice photography, it was all chemical. Digital was still a few years off. Any serious photographer back then worked in black and white and developed their own film. And any serious photographer printed their negatives in their own darkroom (if they were lucky) or in a rental darkroom. Before I had my own darkroom I would either use the Hunter College darkrooms where I was studying or the darkrooms of the 92nd Street Y.
It was in the darkroom where I really began getting an appreciation for the beauty of the negative. It was a piece of art unto itself. I didn’t think it really needed to be printed. I was not the only one to think so. I remember a book that came out sometime in the 1990’s called Celebrating the Negative. If I remember correctly the author, John Loengard, himself an accomplished photographer for LIFE magazine, went around and photographed the negatives of famous photographs. He would usually have the photographer or curator hold the negative over a lightbox. It was a great book and I owned it once upon a time.
All this to say that I always had an appreciation for the “negative” and when I got the inspiration for the color switch series (aka When Yellow Becomes Blue) it just felt right. It is interesting to compare both the negative and positive image to see just how different they are. Below is the positive image of the “Psychedelic Star Factory”.
It’s a very slightly interesting image of the echinacea flowers somewhere in my suburban New Jersey neighborhood. It could be a postcard. But reverse the colors and tones and its something out of this world. The sunlight on the back fence become blue galaxies in the reverse image and the flowers themselves become stars being born in the vacuum of space.
The image becomes otherworldly but does not break that “spring tight line” between reality and what the photograph depicts.
Force Of Seeing 