A centuries-old art that has been lost: photographers abandon their negatives

The New York Times / Ali Watkins
Silvio Cohen has done it for years. Soak, rinse, soak, dry, repeat. Thirty-five millimeters, medium format, old cameras, new film. Analog work in a digital age. “When I tell my friends that we keep revealing, they laugh,” Cohen says. “It’s a different feeling. The finish is different.”

Cohen works in 42nd Street Photoone of the few stores in NY that still reveal films. They’ve been doing that for a century, following the ups and downs of the medium, from film’s first nosedive in the 2000s, through its comeback in the early 2010s, to its rediscovery by another new generation of photographers in the 2020s. .

But in this latest renaissance – born of Covid-era closures – Cohen has realized that one of the most precious components of the craft has been lost. “They don’t pick up their negatives,” Cohen says of his clients, estimating that perhaps 10 percent of them come back for the rolls. Behind him, a colleague corrects him: “Five percent.” Another adds, laughing: “Zero percent.”

Throughout the world, the small group of workers in the commercial film developing laboratories describes similar problems: piles of forgotten envelopes, limited storage space, and conflicting impulses (whether they’re torn between sorting out the mess or preserving the creative souls of forgetful photographers). After all, it is the film strips, and not the copies, that legally constitute the artist’s original work.

“The most important legal issue is the difference between ownership of negatives and ownership of copyright,” he says. David Dealancient professional photographer who now practices as a lawyer specializing in copyright. “When those two things are separated, then all hell breaks loose.”

In short: whoever has the negatives has the mechanism to reproduce the work, but does not have the copyright to do so; The artist without negatives has the right, but not the means.

It is a concept that has been mistreated in the era of digital cameras and that was left for dead with the arrival of iPhone. Dinosaurs in photography, negative They are the original images that are recorded in frames when film loaded in an analog camera is exposed to light. They used to be the main product delivered when processing a roll of film.

In the digital agemost film shops scan the negatives into a computer and email the photos to their customers.

“Before, negatives were not forgotten, because people had to pick up the digital copy,” he explains. Richard Damerya developer who has been working for 15 years in Aperture Printingin London. “Now they can have it all when it is shipped to them. They forget about the negatives.”

It may be difficult for some to imagine (or remember) a time when taking a photograph involved more steps than the instant gratification of staring at a screen.

That is especially true for much of the Generation Z, the driving force behind the contemporary resurgence of film use. The industry has exploded in the years since the pandemic, and not just with luxury brands like Leica; the classics Fujifilm disposables are also back.

For many young photographers, the anticipation and delayed reward of film is a welcome balm to the 24/7 exposure of apps like instagram either tiktok.

It is not so much a surprise return but, rather, a new rise in a medium that has stubbornly refused to enter the digital night. Less than a decade after digital cameras took over the market in 2004, New York magazine predicted an “analog renaissance” in 2011. Time announced a “return” for film in 2017. In 2022, Axios pointed out that film prices were skyrocketing (the phenomenon was due to increased demand and shortages of supplies during the pandemic).

Neal Kumarthe owner of Bleeker Digital Solutions, in the New York neighborhood of NoLIta, instituted a new policy about 18 months ago asking its customers to say whether or not they need their negatives when they drop off film. He “kept them in the basement and then the basement started to fill up.” Now, he informs customers that he will keep the strips for 30 days, though he discreetly holds them back for 90, just in case.

Emmet Butler’s family runs Conns Cameras in Dublin for 50 years. They have also recently instituted a policy of asking customers if they are picking up their film. Even those who say they will, often never do. “I’m overwhelmed here,” she says. “We have a whole room full of negatives.”

Andreas Olesenprofessional photographer and co-owner of a laboratory in Copenhagen, says he still has a hard time throwing away people’s negatives even long after they’ve been abandoned. For him, they are the soul of the job. “The negative is the score, and the print is the performance,” he said, paraphrasing photographer Ansel Adams.