88 pages of pure film!
december
cover by Jim Hair
.06
le negatif is free and self sponsored, without ads, banners and other nasty stuff, the only way to keep it up and running and to make this a better magazine, is to donate. any amount is welcome, and will help our cause.
eXpose your photos! www.lenegatif.com
.06
Ivi Topp
Chairman Publisher
Jola.Ll
december
Why? Where? What? Who?
editor-in-cheaf
We are a group of artists/ photographers
We feature each month a selection of the best contemporary photography still made on film
We are based on Toulouse, France. You can contact use via different forms, please check the contact info below.
Because we love Film photography, and we want to showcase the bautiful works photographers shoot around the world on Film. We belive in film, and we want to connect film photographers around the world, sharing experiences and giving them exposure to a broad audience.
How to get in touch with us:
http://www.lenegatif.com
http://www.flickr.com/groups/lenegatif/
http://twitter.com/lenegatif
http://lenegatif.deviantart.com/
ivitopp@gmail.com
The contest The prizes First prize 4 packs of px600 silver shade film plus great exposure on le negatif mag, with 8 pages dedicated to the winners photography.
second and third prize 2 packs of px600 silver shade film
plus 4 pages dedicated to the second and third classified, with links back to their portfolio.
The theme: “my concerns“ Photograph something that concerns you, something that makes you sick, something that worries you, something that is stopping you from reaching happiness. photograph something that you think is stopping the whole world from progressing. Try to capture an unjust or unfair act, a tort. Something that is making you feel bad, What you think is wrong with the world today? You can be very concrete, or you can be very conceptual and surrealist. What you chose to photograph is up to you, think before shooting, all entries must be accompanied by a writing, that describes the idea, the concept and your concerns. it can be an essay, or in a form of a note.
All entries must be uploaded at www.lenegatif.com under the contest tab
The rules 1. All submissions must have been done using analogic cameras [slr’s, tlr’s, polaroid, holga’s, ect.] if you submit digital photography works, you will be disqualified. 2. You can develop your film in a lab, or at home. [Regarding digital processing, you are allowed only to scan, and adjust brightness/contrast, small crop if you want to remove sprocket holes for example, no heavy colour adjustments, crops, or montages.] 3. The work submitted must have been created specifically for this contest. 4. All submitted works need to have a note, small essay, describing the idea, situation, concept. 5. You can submit a maximum of 3 photos, only in .jpg files, all photos must be no larger than 3 mb each.
the contest starts 20-11-10 and ends 15-02-11
The contest Votation the winners will be judged on these 5 main fields: Pertinence to the theme, Composition, Lightning, Colour/or contrast for bw entries, power to transmit an idea through photography.
this contest is hosted by le negatif and is sponsored by: the impossible project
Daring the Impossible
Saving analog instant photography from extinction In a world where everything, even our daily lifes, are heading towards digital it may either seem a.) stupid and naive b.) crazy and freaky or c.) helplessly nostalgic to risk all you have for some traditional, analog tool. But it's neither because of a.), b.) or c.) that the people of Impossible started their initially seemingly Impossible project. In late 2008 Impossible saved the last, intact original Polaroid production plant in Enschede (NL) with one great ambition: to save analog instant photography by inventing a new formula and carrying production of instant film for old Polaroid cameras into the 21st century. Not only were the founders of Impossible personally deeply in love with the magical characteristics of Polaroid photography, but also were many of their artist and photographer friends who mourned the end of instant film when Polaroid stopped its production in 2008. Beyond there is the impressing number of 300 million Polaroid cameras that Polaroid sold in its best years. Millions of those cameras are still perfectly functioning and out there, but film for all those cameras became harder and harder to get.
Impossible didn't want to accept such an end for Polaroid photography. With a small team of former Polaroid employees they started inventing a new instant film at the factory in Enschede. Since early 2010 they are producing various film types for Polaroid 600, SX 70 and Image/Spectra camera models - completely independent from the new Polaroid management and the Lady Gaga fuss. With their films Impossible is dissolving the limits of traditional analog instant photography. Other than the highly standardized Polaroid film, Impossible films are an invitation to creativity and experiments, to passionate productions, unique artworks and splendid surprises. So Beppe Bolchi, an Italian artist and photographer, says: "Impossible films are the best test bench to demonstrate your own photographic ability." It's true. Impossible keeps variety, tangibility and creativity alive and thus changes the contemporary world of photography.
http://www.the-impossible-project.com/
on this issue:
P28
P42
The Contest
P4
SOME PHOTOGRAPHS OF THAT DAY:
Discovering Jamie Livingston
by Chris Higgins
Project Review
BATTLEFIELD
by Steven Monteau
P60
AD Time Machine
Writing photography: Discover photography through quotes
P11
“
4
0
1
Stephen Leslie
http://www.flickr.com/photos/deepstoat/
Denis Allbertovich
contrib
Kirill Arsenjev http://www.arsenjev.com/
Nicolas Borenstein
http://cargocollective.com/inthemiddle
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicolas_borenstein/
Konstantin Sergeyev
Matthew Strong
http://www.konstphoto.com/
Don Servillas
http://www.donfotografia.com/
Pamela Klaffke http://www.pamelaklaffke.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mr_strong
Christian Pitschl
http://christianpitschl.com/
Andreev Vitaly
http://pr13s7.500px.com/
Patrick joust
Silke Seybold
Wolf189
Alessandro Minciotti
Sasha Nikitin
Attila Miletics
Eric Harvieux
Takuya Imatoh
Fabian Podeszwa
Ania Kulasek
Alexey Alexeev
James La Mantia
http://www.flickr.com/people/patrickjoust/
http://wolf189.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/18385895@N00/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/codefreez/
http://www.flickr.com/people/46285307@N04/
http://www.ambrotype.ru/
Scott Speck
http://www.scottspeck.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/silkeseybold/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/14206443@N05/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/8416752@N07/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/8229371@N05/
http://analiza.carbonmade.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lamantiaphotography
Miguel Mesones Arce
http://www.flickr.com/photos/11327416@N06/
Doug Richards
http://dougnz.deviantart.com/
André Guérette
http://www.flickr.com/photos/33947050@N02/
Cosmin Munteanu http://www.fotomozaic.ro
Dennis
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pateffon/
Aleksandra Patova
http://alexandrapatova.daportfolio.com/
Marcin Kaniewski http://www.marcinkaniewski.com/
Leo Berne
http://www.flickr.com/photos/leolebug/
Covery by: Jim Hair -
http:// www.richmondartworks.com
butors:
If you find errors in your name or site please contact us and we will correct it as soon as possible
Editorial
H
Le negatif team wishes you Merry Christmass and a happy new year!
ello film lovers, It has been a very kind year for le negatif. we have come to the sixth edition, considering le negatif is as indipendet as a magazine can get, this is a nice little sucess. each month we have tried to select the best film photography, to showcase the most interesting projects and interviewing some very interesting film photographers around the world. soon we will start “le negatif camera around the world“ we will send out cameras around the world, for you to shoot with. each partecipant will have a maximum of 1
month to put a film inside, shoot, and send it to the next person on the list. all the photos will be published on this magazine and our site. for more info please subscribe to our newsletter and recieve the lattest news. Also coming up is a special issue of le negatif dedicated only to polaroid photography. We are also looking for stable contributors. if you shoot film photography on a regular basis, you can be featured in different issues of le negatif. You can also write for le negatif. contact us for more info
See you next year... Ivi Topp
“” “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” Dorthea Lange “Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people – to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual”. Nickolas Muray
“Seeing, looking at what others cannot bear to see is what my life is all about”. Don McCullin
Stephen
Leslie
Denis Allbertovich
konstantin sergeyev
Don Servillas
Patrick joust
pamela klaffke
Patrick joust
wolf
f189
sasha n
nikitin
Eric Harvieux
Fabian Podeszwa
Alexey Alexeev
scott speck
SOME PHOTOGRAPHS OF THAT DAY:
M
Di
ay 21, 2008 was a day like any other.
On that day I woke up, I walked to work, and I posted a blog entry just before a meeting. I had been working on it the night before, but hadn’t posted it yet -- I had to pick some photos for it first. The post was about the Polaroid photography of Jamie Livingston, a man I did not know (he died more than a decade before I wrote about him), and a man whose life I could only guess at by looking at the anonymous photographs he took of his life, as seen online. The website was simply called “Some Photographs of That Day,” and contained 6,697 Polaroids arranged by date. His name was not listed on the site. When I wrote about Livingston, I first assumed that his work was well-known and that it was just new to me. How else could nearly 7,000 photos be posted online? Surely this was some famous project that I just hadn’t heard of. But as I searched for references to the project online, I began to realize that his 05-28-80 project wasn’t famous, indeed it seemed completely unknown, except for an exhibition at Bard College in 2007. How could I discover such a huge project before anyone design blog we used to share interesting images as inspiraelse? Like most things, it was pure luck -- my colleague tion for our work. (He had found the photo via the webJustin Couch had posted one of the photos on an internal site StumbleUpon, by clicking a “random image” button. I don’t know how the image made its way onto that website, though I assume it must have been posted somewhere by Hugh Crawford or Betsy Reid, who rephotographed all the Polaroids and made the “Some Photographs of That Day” website and exhibition. So, with a vague awareness that this might be a big deal, I looked through the photos until I could identify the photographer. I searched for his name online, and found that he was a filmmaker, but there were very few references to him: I recall that a Google search for “Jamie Livingston” returned only a few dozen results that day -- today it returns over 13,000. By the time you read this, there will surely be more. But on that day, I picked some photos that I thought told Livingston’s story, wrote brief captions based on what I saw in the photos, and published the blog post. Then I went into a meeting at my office, where I was writing children’s books for museum gift shops. I recall that it was a lunch meeting, and we sat around our Eames conference table eating sandwiches 10-15-79 and discussing our work. It was a day like any other.
iscovering Jamie Livingston by Chris Higgins
D
uring the meeting, I noticed my phone dinging as emails came in -- so I put it on vibrate mode. And before an hour was up, the vibration was near-constant -something strange was going on. The story hit the top of the Digg homepage, and was picked up by news outlets around the world. Within a day, Livingston was added to Wikipedia, I made contact with Hugh Crawford and Betsy Reid, and the traffic to this single post had nearly brought down the mentalfloss.com servers. Crawford’s “Some Photographs of That Day” server was taken offline due to the crushing traffic, and he worked through the night to get it back up. People all over the world took notice. Within days the story had made news on every news outlet I can think of, including The New York Times, The Guardian, you name it. Within weeks I was sitting in a radio booth talking to a CBC radio host about the experience; Crawford and Reid were interviewed as well. I had unwittingly discovered and publicized the 05-26-80 work of a previously unknown photographer (or at least, known only to his friends and to visitors to the exhibit at Bard). It wasn’t supposed to happen that way -- the site was not supposed to be public yet, but my little blog ston’s photographs. But why did people care? What was post brought sudden international attention to Living- it about his photographs, or my blog post about them, that hit people so hard, and spread so quickly? Why is the post still so popular today, routinely causing traffic spikes as it gets passed around Facebook and Twitter? I have had more than two years to think about this, and I have some answers. Now that more than two million people have read the original article (making it the most-read piece of writing I’ve ever done), I have come to these conclusions: 1. The headline tells a story, and raises major questions. The headline was: “He Took a Polaroid Every Day, Until the Day He Died.” We know some critical information from these eleven words: a man took a lot of photographs, one per day, for a long period of time, and he is now dead. The headline also raises critical questions: who is he? Why did he take photos every day? What are the photos of ? Why are they Polaroids? When did he take them? How did he die? When did he die? Perhaps most frightening: what is shown in the photograph taken on the day he died? Because of all these questions, the reader simply has to click through 08-11-80 and find out.
SOME PHOTOGRAPHS OF THAT DAY:
T
Di
he story that I managed to piece together from the photos is devastating, but it answers most of these questions, and leaves the reader (I hope) with a sense of Livingston’s project as life-affirming. (An aside: I opted not to show the final photograph, because it seemed too upsetting. I did show the photo from the day before he died, as friends played music in his hospital room. I didn’t set out to write a perfectly crafted headline I had to get to a meeting, so I just typed something but in retrospect, I think that headline is why people read my article, and thus were exposed to Livingston’s work. It’s also critically important to point out that Livingston’s work lives up to that headline: there is extraordinary depth to his project, and many readers went on to examine that work atlength. 2. The photographs themselves are so ordinary that they become captivating. Livingston consciously chose to take photographs of typical subjects -- things and people in his daily life -- and that makes his work extremely approachable. Most eighteen01-01-90 year-long photography projects focus on a particular subject (for example, the photographer himself), or a type of photography (street photography, or nature photography). But for Livingston, this project was a record of his daily life. He could not have known the project would end with his own death, adding so much weight to these glimpses of his life. So it is a coincidence that Livingston’s subject (his day-to-day life) and the path of his life (steadily building his career, until a sudden and fatal cancer) coincide so powerfully. What might have seemed banal -- snapshots of day-today life -- becomes a poignant celebration of a life cut short. There is power to these incidental photographs, because viewers know their context, and whenever we see Livingston in his own photos, we know: this man is gone. He can never know how much we have been touched by his work, or how much it has meant to us. By his own absence, the photographs remind us: enjoy today. . Because each photograph carries a date (and ONLY a date), there is a natural inclination to look up significant dates and see what Livingston photographed. Readers visiting the online exhibit naturally look for their birthdays, anniversaries, or “today” twenty or even thirty years ago. In most photography exhibitions, you see a relatively small set 03-30-91 of curated photos, sometimes with captions. In Livingston’s, there’s an overwhelming body of work, in sequence, with
3
iscovering Jamie Livingston by Chris Higgins
no explanatory information except the date. This means the viewer engages with each photo in a personal way -- in my case, I wanted to know who Livingston was and how he died. For others, it may be interesting to see what daily American life was like in the 80’s and 90’s. For others, it may be technically interesting to see what you can do with a good Polaroid camera (Livingston used the Polaroid SX-70, which itself was the subject of an excellent Eames documentary). In the same way Livingston took a photo every day, I write a blog entry every day (or rather, every weekday). I’ve only been at it for three and a half years. At some point I plan to stop -- maybe at five years. At the end of that time, I will have an ephemeral record of years of my writing, but it will never go into a gallery or be collected for posterity. If I’m remembered for anything I wrote during this time, it will be this single blog post, typed in a hurry before a meeting. For all I know, maybe Livingston would have stopped his own project at some point (perhaps when Polaroid film was discontinued, for example). Perhaps what makes his project so touching is that he clearly saw the end coming, but proceeded with the project right to his death. (The very last photos are taken
01-30-80
by friends, while Livingston is incapacitated in a hospital bed.) He could have stopped; he could have thrown the camera aside and decided to spend that tiny moment each day with his friends or his wife. I think most of us would stop such a project in a moment of crisis. But I think Livingston saw the project as part of his life. I didn’t know him, but I can only assume he’d think: why stop now? That moment of taking the photo must have been a powerful part of his daily routine after so many years, perhaps a moment of reflection, and maybe those daily photographic moments became even more important as he was dying. We don’t get to choose the time of our deaths, but we do get to choose what we make. And for Jamie Livingston, it was some photographs of that day -- even on the day he died. He Took a Polaroid Every Day, Until the Day He Died
We would like to thank Chris Higgins who kindly wrote this article for le negatif, and Hough Crawford for giving us permision to publish these photos.
12-06-93
you can read the original article by chris higgins here: http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/15131 the full collection of jamie livingstin: http://photooftheday.hughcrawford.com/
On the following pages is a selection of the photos from the Jamie Livingston collectio
08-27-79
10-31-79
03-31-80
09-03-80
on.
01-12-81
01-23-81
08-09-81
12-29-81
01-01-82
03-07-82
01-17-82
03-30-82
03-31-84
04-08-84
01-03-90
01-15-90
06-26-90
11-29-90
07-09-90
12-28-90
03-30-91
08-15-93
11-09-94
11-24-95
01-16-96
05-04-97
05-02-97
05-12-97
06-02-97
07-29-97
08-11-97
08-31-97
09-11-97
10-05-97
09-21-97
10-07-97
10-20-97
10-22-97
10-24-97
10-25-97
A
Time M
AD
Machine
t
DOUG Richards
André Guérette
Ivi Topp - rolleiflex k4b portra 160vc
Ivi Topp - rolleiflex k4b portra 160vc
t
jola.Ll - mtl3
3 kodak tmax100
Cosmin Mu
unteanu
Dennis
Dennis
Aleksandra Patova
marcin kaniewski
leo berne
Kirill Arsenjev
Project Review
battlefield camera by steven monteau
This is a special series of project reviews. We will look in-depth on the process Steven uses to build his hand made cameras. From conception - to realization. First off, please tell us more about yourself. Well, i’m French, i live in Bordeaux, i’m a 24 years old professional photographer, but i don’t prospect enough for clients ! Therefore i’m so poor i need to build my cameras myself. When Did You Start shooting ? 5 or 6 years ago. I started making websites but i wasn’t liking the photos i needed to use.... One day i found a used digital SLR for sale and my dad offered me to buy it if i made his website for free !
So i had my work camera. Then i began to modify and build some lenses.... But i was frustrated by not being able to hack the camera itself. I choosed to use film to control everything in the process of taking a photo.
u
What do you like about film photography ? (vs digital) I don’t like the digital look of photos these days, and i don’t like neither the fact that everyone has to fake the film look. So i shoot film ! When it comes to art i need materiality : I need to impress an image on film, develop it myself, manipulate it, and so on.... It’s like asking a painter why he doesn’t use a graphics tablet nowadays ! (Yet i DO use a graphics tablet and a digital camera everyday ! They’re incredibly usefool tools for work but that’s it. Triumph without peril brings no glory !) What was the inspiration for the “battlefield” camera ? What was your experience with the camera ? I was searching for a fast way to test different kind of films and different processes for a given situation. I first drawn a cam’ with Well... I first drilled a shitty pinhole in a thick material, and the several pinholes and several film chambers, and the hugeness of the resulting plan made me remember i wanted to build a big 4x5” sheetfilm camera once. That’s when i got the idea to make a 4x5” camera with a single pinhole on it, but with 3 rolls of film travelling through the chamber instead of the classic 4x5” sheet of film (Oh, and i named it “The Battlefield” because of the numerous craters (i.e. sprocket holes) eating the composition ! ) Can you describe the building process ? I asked my banker if he had spare cardboard calendars and he gave me tons of them ^^ I first cut the main body, i made some film cassette slots, and i added the photographic chamber boundaries. Then, using some pens / plastic cards / caps / and so on, i created an “anti-rewind”-winding-mechanism preventing the film from loosing tension. I also added a rewind knob for each film roll, and resulting photos showed unacceptable vignetting ^^ (left sample) i finally drilled the actual pinhole in an aluminum foil. So i made a beautiful new hole, i sanded it, ... in order to properly cover the large 4x5” format. (right sample) Then i make a huge sliding shutter just for fun, but i could have used some gaffer tape to do the job ! To conclude, i cut a back lid (still in cardboard) and i applied a first coat of primer and a second coat of matte black paint on every thing... Oh, my bad, i also painted some stuff in chrome for the win.
steven’s official site: http://www.mmmphoto.com/
Project Review
battlefield camera by steven monteau
After these miscellaneous test shots, i though about a series that could really take advantage of the different film stripes design. I had taken b&w photos of an abandonned chemical plant in the past, and i wanted to point out the evolution of the decay by adding the color of the pollution in this b&w environment... I used two b&w films to locate the scene and show the 19th century architecture (Legacy Pro 100 pushed at 200 at the top, Rollei Retro 200 at the bottom) , and i tortured an unbranded color film in the middle to emphasize the invasion of the place by chemicals (I boiled it, scratched it, and soaked it in these various chemicals found on the spot)
Project Review
battlefield camera by steven monteau
The other side of the coin is no one can tell what strange colors came from the real world, and what weird colors came after the torture of the film ! But eh, i can sadly assure you there are plenty of real messed up colors over there.
Thank you steven for this special review, see you next month with the “Guillotine camera” Well thanks to you Thanks to Le Négatif Mag for being interested in my work, and, more widely, for helping promote analogue photography all over the world. The selection is top notch. See you next month, Get ready for some action... This time i promise you there will be human beings in my photos !
Nicolas Borenstein
Nicolas Borenstein
Kirill Ar
rsenjev
Matthew Strong
pamela klaffke
Christian
n Pitschl
Silke Seybold
Silke Seybold
Detroit - s
My work started with recovering and r Over time, it has turned into a larger proj The empty shell was left abandoned, sometimes the presents of the past items but the actual human element was missing. My self-p
Silke Seybold
silent places
retaining parts of Detroit’s past glory. ject of taking self-portraits in these ruins. occupants was still visible in left behind furniture, clothing and other portraits are part of self-discovery almost like a therapy.
Silke Seybold
wolf
f189
Andreev Vitaly
Alessandro Minciotti
Attila M
Miletics
Takuya Imatoh
Ania Kulasek
James La Mantia
Miguel Mesones Arce
upload your photos directly at our site, this is the most quick and secure way to go on the selection list. use this simple form to upload up to 3 photos per month. max size: 4mb, dimensions: minimun 950px on the widest side of the image, 72dpi, only .jpg files accepted.
Thank you for reading this magazine. feel free to contact us if you have questions or suggestions. le negatif is ads free and self sponsored, the only way to keep it up and running and to make this a better magazine, is to donate. any amount is welcome, and will help our cause. keep shooting film!
le negatif team, Ivi Topp, Jola.Ll