GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE

Some more negative paper prints

“Ghosts are a metaphor for memory and remembrance and metaphorically connect our world to the world we cannot know about.”

Leslie What

In a previous post on negative paper prints I described the process as an extension of the original calotype process, where a negative print was made, a chemically treated paper was placed over that and exposed. Sean Foley at the Afghan BoxCamera Project pointed out another method still used in Afghanistan. The negative paper print is made in the camera then replaced in the camera with another treated sheet and the negative re-photographed. In Afghanistan, where supplies of film are in short supply (when they are available at all) photographers have adapted and done away with them altogether. They also build their own filmless cameras by cannibalizing parts from others. This is interesting enough but more so when you realize that in the 1940s and 50s it was common practice across West Asia, from India and Afghanistan through Iran and Iraq to Turkey. In small towns and villages, the photographers had limited access to materials and the way to make prints affordable was to cut down on them. These strange and ethereal negative prints are the cast offs from the most practical form of their trade.  

Building your own camera wasn’t as hard as it might sound. All you needed was an old bellows camera like an early Kodak and a lightproof box, which could be constructed from the panels off fruit crates. Remove the back of the camera and fit the bellows and lens to the box. A few experiments would tell you where to set the focus and what the exposure time should be and once they were sorted there was no need to make another adjustment. Maybe the hardest part was making sure everything was lightproof. Even a gap a fraction of a millimetre would be enough to spoil the print. Once the machine was in working order it was low maintenance and most repairs could be carried out with glue or tape. Sometimes these cameras turn up in second hand shops around Istanbul. If the lens mechanism still works the whole apparatus should. Unfortunately, they are big and can look impressive and because the shop owners regard them as antiques (well, some of them are) they attach a price more applicable to a factory built machine.  

A history of West Asia’s itinerant village photographers deserves to be written but it probably can’t. The businesses were often ephemeral, just one in several other services on offer unregistered and they didn’t keep records. All we have are a few of their photographs and maybe some villagers’ memories of the days when the photographer turned up. Maybe history is the wrong word. What we really want to describe is an entrepreneurial spirit in the face of adversity, human ingenuity and the vast and scattered records of others’ existence these people left behind. The photo above is the only one in the collection that shows the studio’s name. ‘Foto Ṣen’ translates as ‘the cheerful photo studio’. The camera might have been brightly painted and dressed with ornaments and amulets and the photographer’s shop was too small to have a studio.

There are a couple of ways to identify the positive prints. The white borders are often irregular because the print didn’t fit neatly into the bracket. The focus is aberrant because the original negative or the paper used for the positive print was slightly warped. The positive prints are often a muddy brown or splotchy because the developing was quick and slipshod, the idea being to get a print out for the customer as quickly as possible. Quite a few of the prints have the sitters’ faces tinted red. This was because the positive print, being itself a negative image, recorded the face as a neutral grey so if the exposure on the background was out, the face could still be printed with reasonably accurate tones. 

A ghost is defined as the apparition of a dead person and in that sense a lot of photographs are ghosts but especially negative prints. They aren’t portraits. They don’t reveal anything about their subject, rather the opposite, abstracting them to a ghostly reflection. They become anti-photographs, only hinting at the image we are supposed to see. And they can elevate the image into strange places. This postcard comes from Bulgaria and was probably taken in the 1940s or 50s. The positive print would be a utilitarian photo of a group of soldiers without much aesthetic interest but the negative is spectral, unearthly and much more compelling.

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GHOSTS

NEGATIVE SIDE EFFECTS

Paper Negative Prints from the 1930s

“We’re changing the world with technology.”

Bill Gates

When William Fox Talbot took his photograph of a window at Laycock Abbey in 1835 (officially the earliest photograph in existence) he kept his process secret, which could have undone him. Four years later, when Louis Daguerre presented his daguerreotype, he made sure all the information became public knowledge, ensuring he would not only usurp the claim to be the inventor of photography but guarantee his process would dominate for the next ten years. A few cottoned on to Talbot’s secret; French photographers in particular admired the delicate tones of the Talbotype, or Calotype as it was better known and it had one advantage over the daguerreotype in that that an original negative on paper was made from which prints could be produced but economically it was no competition. The market for Calotypes was refined. Then at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851 Frederick Scott Archer formally unveiled his wet collodion process. The advantages negatives on glass had over paper were so many that the Calotype should have effectively become extinct. That didn’t happen. The images in this post are evidence of that. 

The photographs here are negative paper prints taken in the 1930s. They use paper as the film stock and with a few variations the process for creating the final positive print closely follows Talbot’s to a degree they can be regarded as direct descendents. Sensitized paper replaced celluloid in the plate holder, the image was exposed then taken to a darkroom for development. As it was being washed another sheet of unexposed paper was added to the tray, improving its translucency. Both sheets were removed, sandwiched together under glass and exposed to a light source. A positive contact print could now be developed. People did this because it was cheap and fast since there was no need buy film or wait for the negative to dry. Not surprisingly perhaps the process was stock in trade for photographers who needed to work quickly and weren’t too bothered with quality, the type for example who worked in fairgrounds and could knock up a print for the customer in a few minutes. 

That being the case, the Calotype may have survived but its place in photography as a fast cheap alternative seems a diminishment, a bit like a once great singer performing in an empty nightclub or an old fighter returning to the small, shabby arenas he started out in. Not so. Around fifteen years ago, at the moment just before digitalization changed photography, there was sudden revival in old processes, linked you have to think, to an unconscious awareness everything was about to change. Photographers like Sally Mann discovered the joys of the collodion process and some photographers went even further back, to the most basic camera possible; the pinhole. Today pinhole photography is established as an alternative process and among its practitioners there is a general feeling that if the camera is going to be a primitive construction, literally a cardboard box, then the film stock should likewise be basic. The paper negative survives. It is more popular now than it ever has been.

Technologies are superceded by others that are more efficient but they don’t die. Polaroid and Kodachrome films are no longer being manufactured but so long as the knowledge on how to make them is available devoted aesthetes will continue to try to produce them. In the same way the very ease of digital photography has created a nostalgia for standard film. There are people too who see the switch to digital as a betrayal of everything sacred about photography. They will continue using film and if that becomes no longer possible they will turn to the paper negative.

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NEGATIVES