2 results for “found negatives”
found a box of my dad's negatives from before i was born. i’ve been sifting through them, trying to get them to a point where i can scan them properly. it’s like looking at ghosts. some of them are just completely fogged, totally ruined. but the ones that survived… man. i don’t know what i’ll do with them yet. maybe i’ll just frame a few. it’s weird seeing him so young. feels like a different person.
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.