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Wednesday, December 11, 2024

Negative Found in My Backlane


 

As my daughter Hilary is helping me to sort through thousands of family photographs and others in two large plastic boxes, it has become overwhelmingly obvious that I have taken many photographs since I started with my Pentacon-F SLR in 1958. Because I worked mostly as a portrait photographer for magazines and newspapers portraits make up a lot of them.

But I did not always shoot portraits. Some years ago I had a show at the Pendulum Gallery in downtown Vancouver of very large photographs that I took of secret gardens (mostly in the roofs of tall buildings) in Vancouver.

Secret Gardens

We found a very large file of these photographs in an equally large courier envelope. I proceeded to throw most of them away. I put them in the garbage.

A few days ago as I was walking outside my duplex gate into the lane I spotted the negative that I have scanned here. I like the idea of the random saving of a negative I had thrown away. To me what makes the negative that much more interesting is that I used the now discontinued Kodak B+W Infrared Film.

I would like to point out here that having a good scanner is a good tool to immediately satisfy my doing what I am doing right now  which is to write about it.