Deb Stoner
Most of Carleton Watkins' wet plate negatives on glass were destroyed by fire in 1906: we know his work because of prints saved by collectors. Eadweard Muybridge's glass negatives were scraped and reused, ultimately recycled for use in building greenhouses because the glass was valuable. Frank Hurley, the ship photographer on the 1914 Antarctic expedition led by Sir Ernest Shackleton, retrieved most of his glass plate negatives and camera equipment by diving for them as their ship, the Endurance, was sinking while being crushed by the ice.
I thought about these things this year as I was starting to clean out my long-saved trove of negatives and my vast treasure of Kodachrome slides. I paid attention to fellow photographers using pandemic time to digitize their archives. But it was a line in a blog post that halted me with this question: who will care, or even have the equipment, to retrieve those digital resources after you're gone? So began this year's commitment to actually print what is important to me.
For this NW Drawers project, I set about thinking about the utter confusion of learning how to read a negative when I first started printing black and white photographs over forty years ago. And then one day, I was able to "see" the negative without effort, and I thought they were beautiful. So it came to be that this work, created by finding good compositions within my much larger still life photographs, became a way for me to explore the literal positive and negative images and the shapes created by combining the opposite images. The colored line framing each image is a reminder to the viewer that this is a print made from digital resources, so that in case someone in the future does find this box of prints, they might have one more clue about why they look the way they look.