Rediscovering Past-Neglected Negatives: 50,000 Negatives Came Marching Through

The beauty of the wet darkroom, and what I miss the most, is the tactile approach to printing and developing -  the delicate feeding of the film from spool to spool, the careful removal of the photographic paper from its light-sealed boxes and placing it correctly beneath the enlarger, the silent counting of the appropriate seconds, the slow dropping of the paper into the dishes before gently reclaiming them carefully so as not to get any chemicals on your hands. The process of delivering the print from tray to tray until finally, it's washed and ready for inspection. All this with nothing but a red light to guide you.

But that was the past, and the present is very different. Over a thousand images per memory card thrown in and out of the camera with hardly a glance, downloading the files into a folder while checking your emails, delete, delete, no need to keep!  Then, a full-screen vision of your saved images, nothing negative there, all very positive! And to tell you the truth, I wouldn't go back. The past is the past, but still, my darkroom days have a special place in my very own memory. But somewhere, between the past and the present, live 50,000 negatives - lost between the analogue age and the digital world - sitting on shelves waiting to be rediscovered, remastered and put through the digital mill.

In 2006, when dedicated black & white ink jet printing finally closed my darkroom doors and the last of the chemicals were poured down the darkroom drain, there was a bridge to be built between the negative and the print, a way of crossing my analogue work into the digital world. Thus began the intensive scanning of each negative into a high-quality digital file. After much research, I purchased a Hasselblad Flextight Scanner and immediately started scanning all the gallery favourites. The results were perfect, but the process was very slow as we could only scan one negative at a time. I knew I had the best scanner available, and speed was the price I had to pay.

Once all the important scanning had been done, and the Hasselblad put to rest, thousands upon thousands of negatives had been left behind.  Unwanted and inferior beings, only their mother could love, were sent to celluloid purgatory with no chance of release. But their mother did love them,  and while they gathered dust in the shadow of their digital replacements, I waited and I waited.  I believed in them and I knew there would be beauty to be found, if reborn into the new world.

But still I waited, numbed by the numbers that needed saving! As I worked at my desk, I could feel them behind me, up on the shelves, orphans trapped in the folders of time, calling out to me - “We are here, we are here, you can not neglect us forever”.  And then it happened, FREEDOM or should I say EPSON?  The all-new Epson Perfection V850 Pro flatbed scanner was launched, and with it, the ability to scan and transform 18 negatives into perfect digital files and all at one time!  Where once there was only one escapee at a time, the doors to the past were now thrown open, and 50,000 negatives were marching through. 

So this is my life now, re-acquainting myself with my forgotten negatives. Every day I go to my desk, turn on my scanner and open its doors so that all my old photographs can now come home, from analogue to digital, from the past to the present, 18 at a time!  Reborn into a world of new possibilities, new and refined methods. Unbounded by the limitations of the analogue darkroom, they are now part of my new photographic life, my digital life, where a screen has replaced my enlarger and a printer has replaced 3 dishes in a darkroom. A place where lost detail can be rediscovered, where skies can be darkened, lightened, sharpened, where exposure is a button and contrast is at your fingertips, where blacks are blacker and whites are whiter. Where scratches are repaired and dust spots deleted, and dodging and burning is no longer guessing.

 “Not right”, I hear the purists say, “has real photography lost its way?!“