Table of Contents
List of figures x
Acknowledgements xxi
1 Negatives and positives 1
As an introduction to my book's concerns, I examine a photograph of a Congolese photographer taken in 1948 and Noire et Blanche, a famous 1926 photograph by Man Ray. I also describe the themes of the book and the complexity of photography's identity, a complexity continually reproduced through the interdependent relationship of negative and positive.
2 Inventing negatives 21
This segment traces the invention of the negative and the various ways in which negatives have subsequently been used by photographers, focusing in particular on how negatives have been manipulated to enhance the appearance of the prints generated from them.
3 Photogenic drawings 35
Inspired by a photograph by the Australian artist Justine Varga, a cameraless photograph that controversially won a portrait prize in 2017, this vignette looks at the history of hand-made negatives or clichés verre.
4 More of the same 46
The history of Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother is examined in some detail. This iconic photograph, based on a negative exposed in 1936, was printed in multiple copies and various ways for many decades afterwards.
5 Control methods 59
Photographs change both morphologies and meanings over time, an argument pursued through a study of the fate of two Australian photographs exposed in the 1930s, Sunbaker by Max Dupain and Harold Cazneaux's The Spirit of Endurance.
6 Created worlds 69
This section returns to the complexities that attend the manipulated negative, looking in particular at various examples of combination printing: a French daguerreotype and a Japanese albumen print; work by Gustave Le Gray, Oscar Rejlander, Henry Peach Robinson, Peter Henry Emerson, and Camille Silvy; and large-scale photographs by Frank Hurley and Andreas Gursky.
7 Hiding in plain sight 93
My account turns to those peculiar negatives that pose as a positive photograph, namely daguerreotypes, tintypes, and ambrotypes. The discussion ranges from daguerreotypes made in the 1840s and 1850s to American tintypes of the 1860s and Japanese ambrotypes from the 1.880s, along with, works using these same processes by contemporary antipodean artists James Tylor and Ben Cauchi.
8 The cult of the negative 107
The story shifts into the twentieth century with the invention of celluloid film negatives and thus contact sheets and roll film. I examine examples of contact sheets by Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, and Cindy Sherman, and then move on to consider the attitude to the negative adopted by Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, among others.
9 Electricity made visible 115
This section looks at the invention of an electronic matrix and the development of telephotography, introduced in the late nineteenth century but powerfully employed in the space race of the 1960s to send pictures of the moon back to Earth.
10 Authorship and ownership 128
The division of negative from positive often involves a division of labour, and this has all sorts of consequences for the authorship and ownership of photographs. I look at examples of photographs taken by William Henry Fox Talbot but printed by others, sometimes with disastrous results.
11 Refashioning a past 138
It is not unusual for there to be a 120-year gap between the exposure of the negative and the making of prints from it. This commentary considers the ethics and historical consequences of this sort of practice.
12 Return of the repressed 147
This section offers a detailed analysis of the printing practices of Richard Avedon and Robert Capa, practices that have ramifications for the way we understand photographs to this day.
13 Proper names 159
Photography comprises a collaboration of nature and culture, but many photographs also enjoy a collaborative production that involves two or more makers. What does this mean for the meaning and value of such photographs?
14 Does size matter? 164
Few histories of photography address the issues of enlargement and reduction, capacities facilitated by the role of negatives. Enlargements of the work of Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, and Cindy Sherman are discussed, along with a consideration of the effects on the viewing experience of the size of prints by Andreas Gursky and Seydou Keita.
15 Ordering things 175
This segment engages the repetition of certain types of photograph, and indeed with the popularity of typology as a mode of photographic practice. The work of Bernd and Hilla Becher is discussed at length in this context, along with that of Karl Blossfeldt, August Sander, Hans Haacke, and Martha Rosier, and the taxonomic collecting of vernacular examples by Artur Walther.
16 Poses and settings 188
Any discussion of photography and reproduction must at some point acknowledge that the vast majority of photographs features a banal repetition of certain stock poses and settings. This segment looks at an ordinary American daguerreotype portrait and at the proliferation of standardised carte-de-visite portraits during the nineteenth century.
17 Hidden mothers 213
Why are certain poses and genres of pose repeated over and over again in photographs? What is the nature of their appeal? What does the dissemination of any particular configuration of bodies and things mean for the culture at large, and for the objects being so configured? I pursue these questions through an examination of the work of contemporary artist Linda Fregni Nagler.
18 Collecting things 221
The work of New Zealand-born artist Patrick Pound transforms collecting into a creative activity in itself. This segment considers whether such collecting is capable of a critical reflection on its own economy of being.
19 Still life 230
Cabinet cards made to commemorate a deceased person all look much the same. But their predictable banality disguises their role as time machines that deny the fact of death through the promise of an eternal afterlife. Of course, life is always stilled in a photograph, as in street photography, a practice where people are captured while walking outside. A discussion of street photographs taken during the Holocaust raises issues about interpretation and post-memory.
20 Repetition and difference 244
In this segment, I reflect on the snapshot as a genre of photograph, looking at the history of such photographs, the function of the photographer's shadow found in many of them, the metaphoric implications of Japanese snapshots ruined in the 2011 tsunami, the massification of photographs enabled by social media sites, and the excavation of such sites by the German artist Joachim Schmid.
21 Negative/positive 258
My concluding pages reflect on the schizophrenic turmoil hidden beneath the placid surface of most photographs, arguing that historians must both acknowledge this state of being and consider its consequences without fear or favour.
Index 261
