Negative/Positive: A History of Photography

Abstract

As recounted by Batchen, in a paper on photographic chemistry published in the proceedings of the Royal Society of London on 20 February 1840, John Herschel attempted to ‘avoid much circumlocution’ in the description of photography by introducing ‘the terms positive and negative, to express respectively, pictures in which lights and shades are as in nature, or as in the original model, and in which they are the opposite, i.e. light representing shade, and shade light’ (17). The terminology contained an implicit hierarchy that has continued to haunt discussions about the medium. Negatives are seldom written about in detail by historians and are illustrated only rarely within the historiography of photography, a literature which reflexively prioritises the representational clarity of the positive print. Batchen’s latest book brings the negative into the frame and asks what shadow it might cast upon conventional narratives of the photographic image. Negative/Positive: A History of Photography opens with a brief analysis of Lennart Nilsson’s 1948 photograph for Lifemagazine showing a fellow photographer, Mayola Amici, at work in the darkroom of his studio in Stanleyville (Kisangani), part of what was then the Belgian colony of Congo. The Congolese photographer gazes intently at his wristwatch while a negative – a portrait – develops in his other hand. Dramatising the time of photographic production, the scene constitutes what W. J. T. Mitchell might term a ‘metapicture’, prompting viewers to reflect on the nature of images and image-making (Mitchell 2013). For Batchen, it exposes numerous aspects of photography that are too often obscured: the materiality and temporality of darkroom practices; the authorial interventions that are necessary to produce photographs; and the visual politics of the negative/positive process, historically conceived in terms of a racialised metaphysics of darkness and light (‘fair women are transformed into negresses’, as Herschel put it) (7). The rest of the book – a well-illustrated publication with 94 colour figures– is an attempt to illuminate this ‘repressed, dark side’ (3) of photographic history. There have recently been some scattered engagements in scholarship with the politics and aesthetics of the negative, in particular with regard to photography and race (Grigsby 2011; Campt 2012, 117–