Negative/Positive

A History of Photography

Geoffrey Batchen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000224764
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

As its title suggests, Negative/Positive begins with the negative, a foundational element of analog photography that is nonetheless usually ignored, and uses this to tell a representative, rather than comprehensive, history of the medium.

The fact that a photograph is split between negative and positive manifestations means that its identity is always simultaneously divided and multiplied. The interaction of these two components was often spread out over time and space and could involve more than one person, giving photography the capacity to produce multiple copies of a given image and for that image to have many different looks, sizes and makers. This book traces these complications for canonical images by such figures as William Henry Fox Talbot, Kusakabe Kimbei, Dorothea Lange, Man Ray, Seydou Keïta, Richard Avedon, and Andreas Gursky. But it also considers a number of related issues crucial to any understanding of photography, from the business practices of professional photographers to the repetition of pose and setting that is so central to certain familiar photographic genres. Ranging from the daguerreotype to the digital image, the end result is a kind of little history of photography, partial and episodic, but no less significant a rendition of the photographic experience for being so.

This book represents a summation of Batchen's work to date, making it be essential reading for students and scholars of photography and for all those interested in the history of the medium

1

Negatives and positives

A photographer glances down at his watch; time is on his mind. In his right hand, held high, is a glass negative in a wooden frame. The gesture conveniently reveals that he has previously captured two people posing for a portrait, a standing man and a seated woman. Visible only in negative, their tones have been reversed, as if they had been x-rayed rather than photographed. Behind that negative, unseen by us, is a piece of light-sensitive photographic paper. For this photographer is shown at work in his darkroom, printing a photograph by pressing a negative tightly against the paper in the frame and exposing both to artificial illumination. Beside him, on a table, is a still life of implements important to his work: another negative propped up in a drying rack, a glowing kerosene lamp, a funnel, and what appears to be a sheet of cardboard propped against a wall [Figure. 1.1]. We are, it seems, witnessing a key moment in the coming into being of a photograph, the dramatic moment of that photograph’s birth.

FIGURE 1.1 Lennart Nilsson (Sweden), Mayola Amici at Work, near Stanleyville, Belgian Congo, 1948 gelatin silver photograph

The year is 1948 and the man holding the negative is Mayola Amici, a photographer working in a town near Stanleyville in the Belgian Congo. He has been photographed by Lennart Nilsson, a Swedish photojournalist. The picture is one of a series of scenes designed to illustrate each step in Amici’s work, from negotiating with a client, to taking her photograph, processing negatives, and, finally, displaying finished prints to attract future clients. Each shot has been carefully orchestrated, a collaboration between Amici and Nilsson in the interests of promoting the idea of a modern Africa for the readers of Life magazine, where these pictures eventually appeared.¹ Fifteen years later, on April 30, 1965, Nilsson was to become world famous for another series in Life, also devoted to the “Drama of Life before Birth.” That drama was signalled on the magazine’s cover by one of his photographs of an 18-week-old human foetus.²

It’s always difficult to know where to begin any history of photography, but the darkroom, site of this particular primal scene, seems as good a place as any. This is where negative and positive used to be brought together under a red glow to consummate the photographic act, recreating in a careful orchestration of light and dark an inverted version of the relationship that had already taken place outside, in the back of a camera. Throughout the age of analogue photography, the photographer had to move inside another such camera to discover how faithful a repetition of its subject the exposure had achieved, to see what differences between world and picture, negative and positive, photography had wrought. Already then, a dynamic interplay of repetition and difference is very much in evidence.

We are reminded that the process of creating an analogue photograph has always consisted of the skilful manipulation of disparate parts—the objects or light that the photograph recorded, the negative produced by the initial exposure, the various prints made from that negative—with each in some way reproducing and transforming the other part. The interaction of these parts was often spread out over time and space and could involve more than one person, giving photography the capacity to produce multiple copies of a given image and for that image to have many different looks, sizes, and makers. As even an arbitrary survey makes plain, this creates all sorts of complications in any story that might be told about photography and photographs.

The negative is an indexical trace of light, with any tonal variations a chemical, and thus directly physical, response to that light. Photographic prints are one step removed from this tracing; they are an indexical impression of the negative rather than of the subject they portray. These prints are made when light is allowed to travel through the negative and fall onto a piece of light-sensitive paper, thereby re-reversing the tones created in the initial exposure.

As a consequence, when we see an analogue photograph, we know that almost certainly a negative and the print we are looking at were once literally parallel to each other. They were either directly touching, as in Amici’s contact printing, or held an exact distance apart, with the negative placed in an enlarger and the paper positioned directly below, to be bathed in a light shone through one onto the other. However, this kind of parallel existence is an aspect of photographic life that is seldom, if ever, made visible in published histories of photography. Indeed, negatives have rarely been reproduced or discussed by scholars at any length.³

For example, the 776 pages of Michel Frizot’s otherwise impressive A New History of Photography, published in 1994, includes only nine reproductions of negatives among its over 1,000 illustrations, almost all of them from photography’s earliest years. No negative is shown in conjunction with a positive imprint. This book, still one of the most comprehensive survey histories available, also never reproduces the same image more than once, thus suppressing altogether the functioning of the negative.⁴ A similar observation could be made of Mary Warner Marien’s more recent Photography: A Cultural History, another voluminous survey text notable for its eclectic range of photographic images. It contains just 7 reproductions of negatives among its 600 illustrations.⁵ In these (and most other) histories, negatives are truly the repressed, dark side of photography.

Negatives are equally elided in what we might call photography theory. Roland Barthes, for example, says in Camera Lucida that, when he looks at a photograph, a “sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze.”⁶ But, to write this book, he primarily looked at photomechanical reproductions of photographs in books and magazines, or at personal snapshots—not at negatives. In other words, in order to conjure the peculiar psychological, even carnal, character of photography’s indexicality, Barthes presumed to look through the magazine image to the photograph at its source, and then through that again to the negative from which that photograph was printed. That’s a very long umbilical cord.

But such elisions of the negative are common in many texts anxious to insist on the indexicality of the photograph. Rosalind Krauss, for example, posited this influential description of photography in 1981:

For photography is an imprint or transfer off the real; it is a photo-chemically processed trace causally connected to that thing in the world to which it refers in a manner parallel to that of fingerprints or footprints or the rings of water that cold glasses leave on a table.⁷

Once again, Krauss’s discussion of “photography” simply leaves out the negative. By never mentioning negatives in the rest of her essay, she implies a direct indexical connection between “the world” and a positive print, a connection in which a negative has no role except as a non-mediating conduit between one and the other.

In contrast, William Henry Fox Talbot described photography in terms of a relationship of negative and positive images as early as 1835, making it central to his conception of the medium and to his own practice: “If the paper is transparent the first drawing may serve as an object to produce a second drawing, in which the lights would be reversed.”⁸ Already, then, Talbot flags many of those issues that complicate any study of the role of the negative within photography. The negative (along with positive, the word was first proposed by John Herschel in February 1840) is a transparent object that is subject to reversal.⁹ Once reversed, each piece of paper becomes the other of its mate. Thus, the interactive, interdependent relationship of negative and positive ensures that photography has a distinctively binary identity, with all the complexities this brings in its wake.

One of those complexities is that some photographs are negatives, even when they aren’t. As photo-historian Larry Schaaf has pointed out,

an important point that must be kept in mind is that, from a physical-chemical point of view, there is no essential difference between a negative and a positive in Talbot’s work; the latter is merely a negative of a negative.¹⁰

Herschel’s naming of the negative as a separate entity, however, insists on dividing photography into two, insists on an “essential difference” between one of these things and its mate, even when they are physically identical. And the very language used to make that division, negative and positive, is rhetorically infused with prejudice. The distinction between them therefore comes with a disparity in value; it represents a political as well as a technical hierarchy.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, for example, recognises this difference in strikingly pejorative terms in his 1859 essay “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” describing a collodion glass negative as “perverse and totally depraved … as if some magic and diabolic power had wrenched all things from their properties.” In such a negative, Holmes says, “everything is just as wrong as it can be, except that the relations of each wrong to the other wrongs are like the relations of the corresponding rights to each other in the original natural image.”¹¹ In short, he describes the interaction of nature and negative, and then positive and negative, as a kind of othering. And he also makes clear that this type of relationship has moral, metaphysical, and perhaps even theological implications. In other words, he proposes that there is a lot more at stake in the relationship between negatives and positives than a mere transfer of images. One is reminded of a proposition about the photograph put by Barthes in Camera Lucida:

The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape, and why not: Good and Evil, desire and its object: dualities we can conceive but not perceive.¹²

Even on a practical level, we do tend to treat negatives differently than we do photographic prints. We look at negatives, hold them (to the light, in order to see them the better), and then use them to make something else. We look at them only in order to imagine how their positive version will appear; as Holmes has suggested, they invite an inversion of our usual way of looking. They exist in the present as utilitarian tools, redolent with potential, remaining incomplete entities until and unless their tones are reversed through a process of printing [Figure 1.2]. By contrast, photographic prints are assumed to be entirely whole and complete, an end product in and of themselves. We treat those prints as images rather than objects. Against all logic, we look through them, with the light behind us, as if they offer a window onto some past moment, into some other world. Negatives are transparent (or, more accurately, translucent). And yet, by appearing to be opaque, they tend to be regarded as things in the world rather than as pictures of something else, whereas positive prints, although in fact not able to be seen through, offer an illusion of transparency, as if they themselves are not there.

FIGURE 1.2 Wayne Miller (USA), Photographer Robert Frank Looking at Negatives in the Home of Wayne Miller while Shooting for his book The Americans, California, USA, 1956 gelatin silver photograph

As we’ve seen, the naming of a negative as a distinctive entity divides photography into two. But this duality is almost always but a prelude to a devolution into one plus many. For negatives are (usually) unique, whereas photo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Negatives and positives
• 2 Inventing negatives
• 3 Photogenic drawings
• 4 More of the same
• 5 Control methods
• 6 Created worlds
• 7 Hiding in plain sight
• 8 The cult of the negative
• 9 Electricity made visible
• 10 Authorship and ownership
• 11 Refashioning a past
• 12 Return of the repressed
• 13 Proper names
• 14 Does size matter?
• 15 Ordering things
• 16 Poses and settings
• 17 Hidden mothers
• 18 Collecting things
• 19 Still life
• 20 Repetition and difference
• 21 Negative/positive
• Index