Negative positivity

People still shoot film. Astonishing, I know, but some people like the look it creates, the creative restrictions and challenge it applies, and the experience of not knowing how the image turned out until you have it developed. Film is the LP of photography — going through a resurgence because it has analogue qualities that make it pleasurable in a different way to digital.

And yet, those people still shooting film are making an idiotic mistake:

“They don’t pick up their negatives,” Cohen said of his customers, guessing that maybe 10 percent of them return for the rolls. Behind him, a colleague corrects him: “Five percent.” Another, laughing: “Zero percent.”
Across the world, the small cadre of commercial film lab developers describe similar conundrums: stacks of forgotten envelopes, limited storage space and warring impulses — to tidy the clutter, or preserve the creative souls of forgetful photographers. After all, it’s the strips of film, not the prints, that are legally the artist’s original work.

PetaPixel followed up the NYT piece quoted above by speaking to some other photo labs. Same result:

PetaPixel spoke to a film lab in Birmingham, England which is in the habit of mailing the negatives back to customers.
“We force them on people,” jokes David Shepherd of AG Photolab. “We have so many situations where people get in touch months after they’ve had the scans and say the hard drive’s gone or they’ve forgotten to download them. So we actually insist on sending them back.”

Negatives, if you ever shot them, are a really handy back-up, not just a disposable step on the way to the image.

The analogue back-up

Jack Baty pointed to an article about a photographer celebrating the fact he’s held on to his, and his family’s, negatives:

The negatives were in the envelope too but I wasn’t particularly interested in them. Later, at home when I had the little prints spread out on the kitchen table my father would invariably say, “save those negatives. You never know” or words to that effect. He had been an enthusiastic amateur photographer before WWII and it turns out he knew what he was talking about.

He’s switched his own photography to an analogue/digital hybrid, using a scanner to digitise the negatives:

Along with scanning and printing my new negatives I went back in time and started scanning and making “contact pages” of all of my old negatives going back to the early 1960’s. And, as if that wasn’t enough, the extended family decided that I should be the caretaker of my father’s negatives dating back to the mid 1930’s. I enjoy rescanning my older negatives and my father’s and making inkjet prints for the family and friends. And I have lots and lots of negatives to choose from.

Like the author, I’ve been busy scanning — or having scanned — photos from my own past (I’ve been a keen photographer for over 40 years), and my late parents’. Without that, I would never have come across photos like these of my mother:

I’d never seen that image before — the print(s) of it were long-lost. But the negatives ended up as an effective form of back-up. That image isn’t lost to me, my family and future generations because my parents kept their negatives. Alas, they didn’t keep them in any organised format, which is why I’m still dealing with them 16 years after my mother passed, but still…

The copyright consequences

If those photograph have more than sentiment worth, though, control over the negatives can be important. Back to PetaPixel:

While a photographer always owns the copyright to an image they shot, losing the ability to make photos from the original negative complicates things — especially if somebody else has them.
Professional photographer turned copyright lawyer David Deal tells The Times that “when those two things are detached from one another, then all hell breaks loose.”
Take Vivian Maier, for example, whose work was discovered in a box sold at an auction in Chicago. Maier’s subsequent posthumous rise to stardom has led to a legal battle over who owns the rights to her photos. John Maloof, the man who bought the box in a blind auction, owns the physical negatives and therefore controls Maier’s pictures which some believe is wrong.

As more sets of negatives or slides get abandoned, and then acquired, this sort of debate will keep coming up.

As Baty said:

I find it hard to believe that there is actually some debate around whether to keep photographic negatives once they've been scanned/printed. OF COURSE you should keep the negatives.