Three years ago in December of 2023 my truck was broken into and a backpack full of negatives from my archive were stolen. I had taken the negatives to campus to give a printing demo and had chosen images from a motorcycle trip to Montana where I photographed the Garden of 10,000 Buddhas earlier that summer and some older negatives taken at Lake Louise back in 2016.
These negatives and prints were valuable to me but not the the thieves that stole them. I found my backpack on the side of the road with everything torn out and thrown on to the cold wet ground. It was a rainy day and everything was soaked. I gathered everything up and took it home to dry. Unfortunately everything was sticking together and I couldn’t get the negs out of the protective sleeves.
My father passed away shortly after and I lost track of these negatives until today. I finally had a day where I could putter in my home office and begin salvaging the negatives as I am building an archive for all my darkroom negatives and prints.
The negatives were severely damaged and I had to use scissors to cut the plastic sleeve material like an EMT cutting a pant leg at a car crash. With the light table illuminating the negatives I could see the abstract fractal patterns that had destroyed the negatives. But had they really? I have been studying abstract art and the emotional content of shapes and lines recently. I found these abstract images beautiful to look at and grabbed my cell phone to make these photos of the negative. I could find the faint remains of a Buddha statue at the end of a strip of negatives that had erased all the other images. It was a gift and a simple reminder that all things tend back towards chaos and that change is inevitable. I think these images are a gift to me from the cosmos.
I think this is the start of a new portfolio project. I will re-photograph these negatives back on to film using a macro lens and make darkroom prints. I will keep you posted on my progress.
Namaste,
