ABSTRACT
A photographer glances down at his watch; time is on his mind. In his right hand, held high, is a glass negative in a wooden frame. Photographic prints are one step removed from this tracing; they are an indexical impression of the negative rather than of the subject they portray. Negatives are equally elided in what the people might call photography theory. The negative (along with positive, the word was first proposed by John Herschel in February 1840) is a transparent object that is subject to reversal. And the very language used to make that division, negative and positive, is rhetorically infused with prejudice. A photographer usually begins the process of making a photographic print by putting the negative into a carrier, and then into an enlarger, before making a series of test strips. An equally disquieting effect could be achieved by briefly exposing a negative or print to light during its development in the darkroom.
