Project 1, Part 1: Negative Exchange

          First of all, I really enjoyed the negative exchange portion of the project. I think it forced us to jump start the semester by thinking creatively and considering different approaches for how to treat a photograph and give it meaning even without any connection to the original negative or electronic file. I also thought that it allowed us to begin experimenting freely with different techniques and ambitions within both the wet and digital darkrooms.



          For my comparison of two prints (original and remix), I am most interested in Mimi's remix that she created from Jamie's original negative. I am incredibly drawn to Jamie's original print, which is a large black and white image showing a dream-like scene on a neighborhood street in which a boy wearing sunglasses sits cross-legged in the middle of the street. There are no other figures in the photograph, but there are two houses visible in the background. The shot was taken at an angle, and with a Holga camera (if I remember correctly), so there is a sense of movement and direction conveyed by the composition of the street edge and the blurry edges of the frame. The print shows a high level of contrast, which combined with the blurriness of the outer edges of the image, makes the figure in the center really stand out and seem almost ghost-like. I get a real sense of a dream, hallucination, or flash of a memory from this image.



          It seems that Mimi created her remixed image with a strikingly similar approach as Jamie. She created a smaller black and white print that has the same dream-like feel, but with an entirely different mood by using alternative processes in the darkroom to layer the image with a translucent swirl of hazy lines that appear throughout the frame. It seems like she also increased the contrast a bit, and perhaps printed the image slightly darker than Jamie's, which heightens this photograph's sense of a more negative mood (maybe a nightmare or bad omen). I'm really intruiged with how her processes in the darkroom layering something on top of the image affected the overall feel of the scene - it almost seems like there is a swirl of smoke surrounding the image. So I think that this whole remix of the original image really transformed its essence as a photograph, even though some of the changes were relatively subtle.