ABSTRACT
Making visible the abrasive political economy of difference: that is the challenge this book has chosen to take on. The fact that a relationship of negative and positive has animated photography for so much of its history reminds the reader that any identity is necessarily fractured by an inherent structural difference as much as it is by forces external to itself. Steeped in pejorative language and metaphysical prejudice, the negative is feared as the source of photography's reproducibility and, therefore, of its potential for promiscuity and impurity. A study of the negative is an engagement with multiplicity and complexity, with the potency of otherness, and with photography as a mode of work and commerce. The least a photo-historian can do is critically analyze those aspects of photography declared to be off-limits or not proper, those aspects considered to be at or beyond the boundaries of the discipline; this study of the negative is just such an effort.
