35mm Negatives: Intro

On the heels of the release of Foloroids: Storyboards, comes another experiment in fragmentation.

This time the images come from scanned 35mm negative contact sheets from the summer of '09.  These contact sheets are cropped, and their colors altered, the result looking like a cross between an x-ray image and 19th century infrared daguerrotype.

So far, a majority of the material published on SWNTD has dealt in one way or another with the fragmentation of memory, whether its through the deconstruction of the image, prose, or a combination of both.

In Foloroids: Introduction I discussed the importance and power drawn from the parallel between the snapshot and memory.  But what happens to these images as memory fades.  Over time our memory of events and moments begin to distort; details fade and warp.  Once clear memories become striped down, ethereal remnants of their former self.  

This ghostly aura is the aesthetic I hope to capture with my 35mm Negative project.  My stripping down of photo to its original form, in the process destroying composition and processing, I hoped to parallel the deconstruction of a dream over time.

The other feature of these images that fascinates me is the relationships validated by the juxtaposition of the different negative images in the strip.  The viewer knows that at the very least these images chronologically related; no other photo could have been taken with the camera in between the two connected negatives.  This brings narrative into the analysis, a theme SWNTD has featured several times before.

I will let y'all stew on that for a minute.