Itek-Craig02
© 1991 Craig Ashby
Photograph
10″ x 10″

Here is the negative of the previous image of myself, Craig Ashby. I found these in a file a few years ago from a box I had in storage for a long time. After scanning them and bringing up the levels, I saw how fantastic they were on their own. I have tried to pair the positive and negative extant images in this series.

The purple has a texture you would spend hours trying to recreate in Photoshop. Although at the time I had never heard of Photoshop, I had worked extensively with an Amiga computer and programs like DigiPaint. I even used a security camera to scan live images digitally, even RGB images. Speaking of that, if anyone reading this has an Amiga and a way to get those images off to jpg format, please write me. I would love to see those old images I never made into slides.

The negatives of this series remind me of solarized photographs by Man Ray and the beautiful album covers of 23 Envelope. Childhood idols that I still draw from to this day. I hope the images I make are worthy of both those mentions.

Another great thing about the negative is that you can see exactly where the positive makes contact with the image. The chemical stain leaving a rectangle border that frames the image nicely.