Negative Image

Images with light and dark reversed, as on a photographic negative, used for clarity, strangeness or formal play.

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About

In film photography the negative is an intermediate step: bright parts of a scene turn dark on the developed film and are reversed again in printing. Some images stop at that first step. William Henry Fox Talbot's paper negative of a latticed window at Lacock Abbey (1835) is among the earliest, and Anna Atkins's cyanotype plates of algae from the 1840s show pale specimens on a deep blue ground.

Reversal makes familiar things strange. Man Ray printed a negative version of Noire et Blanche (1926), turning the pale face dark and the dark mask pale. X-rays share the look, and Nick Veasey uses them to show the insides of everyday objects. Vera Lutter exposes paper directly in room-sized camera obscuras, so her cityscapes and factories survive as unique negatives with black skies. In colour negatives each hue turns into its opposite, so a blue sky turns orange.