ABSTRACT
Talbot’s first exhibition of photographs, in the library of the Royal Institution in London on January 25, 1839, consisted of nothing but negatives, some made in the back of a camera obscura but most made as contact prints. Despite the aesthetic potential of the Le Gray method, English photographer Benjamin Brecknell Turner preferred Talbot’s calotype procedure, and he has left the reader over 250 paper negatives made using it. The English photographer John Murray produced hundreds of paper negatives, most exposed in the 1850s while he was stationed in India. Throughout the twentieth century, professional photographers continued to add pigment to or otherwise embellish their negatives if they thought it would improve the eventual print. In the mid-1950s, the Japanese artist Shigeru Onishi made a similar claim. According to one commentator, “Hadjithomas and Joreige transform Abdallah’s original postcards from clichéd tourist souvenirs into dreamscapes, pseudo-ravaged by iridescent bubbles of melted color and glowing ruptures.”.
