Cut Negatives

My experience as a photographer includes hand-processing negative film in all formats up to 8x10” in both black and white and color, and countless all day printing sessions. Working with analog material can be cumbersome and unforgiving, but it gets easier with practice.

Though I fully adopted digital tools for my commercial assignments, I’m still drawn to analog for personal work. I like that every stage is manually hackable. In other words, once you learn the right way to do things you can intentionally do the opposite at any part of the process, creating surprising new ways to look at the world.

With this in mind I started making multiple exposures of my subjects (sometimes after seconds had elapsed and the scene had changed) and then cut and reassembled the negatives on a piece of glass for printing. The cuts ruined the film for traditional printmaking, creating a new “decisive moment” in the darkroom—one that couldn’t be repeated once the negative pieces were removed from the glass.

Half Deserted Street

Negative pieces taped in place

Evening

Split Cadillac

Anvil

Seagirl

Cautious and Meticulous

Pillow

Each to Each

Fool

Footman