Negative Exchange

Jenny's original, Courtney's remix

This pair is a good example of how much process can affect the look and meaning of a photograph. Courtney used a very different process than Jenny to develop the picture, and this radically changed the content and meaning. When I first saw the pictures next to each other, I thought they were completely different photographs.

Jenny's original photograph looks like it could have been taken a hundred years ago. When I look at it, I am taken to a different time, place and feeling. The darkness and sepia coloring create a very quiet and mysterious mood. The flowers seem very still and they droop downward as if they were sad. The print is negative, which makes the flowers very dark and gloomy. They are not bright and open with the sunlight shining through them, like most pictures of flowers I have seen.

When I looked closer at the photographs, I saw the flower in the remix was from the original. Courtney has taken the flower from its context and transformed it. Her picture focuses on the form and beauty of this one flower. By making the positive of the original, she has made the flower more visible. It is now bright and open, and I can see the gently curving lines of the petals and how the light makes the flower glow. While the original is visually beautiful overall, the formal qualities of the flower were draped in darkness and mystery.

This project also shows how differently two people can see and interpret the same image. Jenny uses the contrast and darkness of the flowers to create a specific mood in her picture, and Courtney saw the potential of one flower's formal qualities to make an interesting photograph. No two people see something the exact same way and if we had distributed one negative to the whole class to interpret, we would have gotten 10 very different prints.