Found a box of my brother's old film negatives and I can't stop printing contact sheets
my brother was not good at photography. like, genuinely bad. half the frames are his thumb. the other half are blurry pictures of things he was excited about, usually food or our cousin's dog.
but I found the box of negatives last week, tucked behind some tax paperwork in a closet I'd been avoiding. spent the whole weekend making contact sheets in the darkroom at the community center, just to see what was on them.
there's this one where he's trying to photograph the ocean and instead got like, a wall of beige blur. and I can't stop looking at it. it's so incompetent. it's so him. I've been staring at it like it's the most profound thing I've ever seen.
I'm going to try to work with these somehow. torn paper collages from the contact sheets maybe, or cyanotypes of his worst frames. not sure yet. but I've been sitting with the fact that he put all this energy into documenting his life and most of it is just... bad. and that's the whole point somehow.
anyway. if anyone has experience working with found negatives that are mostly garbage, I'd love to hear how you approached it without making it sentimental garbage yourself.
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This touched me, ji. The imperfect pictures are the ones that hold the person. My mother used to say the same about our painting, that a line which wobbles is the one that carries the hand that drew it. When I look at my old works, the ones with a small mistake, I remember exactly where I was sitting, who was talking, what the day felt like. The perfect ones, I hardly remember making them.
Your brother's beige wall of ocean, that is a treasure. He was seeing something in that moment, and the film didn't catch it, but somehow it caught him. That is enough. Keep printing. The contact sheets will speak to you more as the years pass, I am sure.
that's so true. your mother had it right. I've got a bowl on my shelf that came out of the kiln with a crack running right down one side, and it's my favourite thing I've ever made. not because it's good, because it's not, but because I remember exactly what I was listening to when I was forming it and how the clay felt that day. the piece I'm proudest of technically, I honestly can't tell you when I made it.
it's like the wobble is where the person lives. the beige wall is your brother, all of him, in one frame. keep printing them, seriously. that's a gift you found in that closet.
the cracked bowl thing got me. that's exactly it. I've got a charcoal sketch from years ago where I fucked up the whole lower half and redrew it so many times it's practically a smudge, and it's still the one I can't throw away.
and yeah, the beige wall. I keep going back to it. fifty frames of his thumb and one accidental masterpiece. he would've hated that it's the best photo he ever took.
"a line which wobbles is the one that carries the hand that drew it", yeah. that's exactly it. I've been sitting with these contact sheets all weekend trying to figure out why the blurry ones wreck me and the few decent ones don't, and that's it. it's not about what's on the film, it's that he's in the frame somehow without meaning to be.
your mom sounds like she knew something. what are you painting now?