I made this photograph on Sunday, 17th August 2025, around 5pm. It’s made of light sensitive emulsion, gelatin, paper, plastics and photons. Photons are possibly the most magical thing I can think of as light from the sun is energy cause by the nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium that releases energy as photons which are the things that illuminate the world around us. The photons that were trapped in this piece of paper travelled from the core of our star to its surface, a journey that could have taken millions of years, and then sped for about 8 minutes to the lens and then the paper in my camera. If you don’t think that’s cool, then the rest of this piece is going to be a chore.
Black-and-white and colour printing work because they use paper that is coated with silver halide crystals which are sensitive to light suspended in gelatin. When a photon strikes a crystal, the process of oxidization frees an electron, which attaches to a nearby silver ion (Ag⁺), reducing it to metallic silver (Ag⁰). To see this effect the emulsion needs to be developed with chemicals that react with the silver. In black and white printing, it is the metallic silver itself forms the image. In colour, the silver acts as a trigger that reacts with the oxidized developer and dyes in three separate layers, the final part of the process bleaches out the silver and leaves the dyes that make the colour print.
Generally people print from negatives, which is basically shining a light through a negative on to a piece of paper that has light sensitive chemicals on it. This is the same process, whereas the first pass created a negative by flipping the light to dark and dark to light, the second pass flips the dark back to light and the light back to dark.
The image on the left is a record of the photons hitting the paper through the lens on the camera. The image on the right is the affect of more photons being shone through the paper negative on to exactly the same kind of paper. Everything is reversed including the positioning of the sitter.
This is not the only way a print can be made. It is possible to use more light and chemistry to turn a negative into a positive. This process had the added benefit of rendering the print completely unique as the light and the negative were now indivisible from the original print. This appealed to me because I thought it meant that the light that had been present when I clicked the shutter would remain fixed in the paper. This kept ticking away at the back of my mind and is the reason I own a large format camera. I thought I could start getting all lyrical about a photon being born in the sun, clawing it’s way out from the core and slipping 8 minutes across the solar system where it crash landed on the paper in the back of the aforementioned camera. Furthermore, as the reversal part of the production of the print is done in the light, there is a huge preformative bonus of having the print in developer for all to see as it flips from foggy bleary greyish to full blown colour, see below.
However, more digging has taught me that although the sliver is in the print up to the point the image is developed, the rest of the process removes the silver, effectively destroying my elegant metaphor about the presence of ancient things in the now and the new.
So where does that leave me?
Well, the photograph is still a negativeless positive. It still has the ghostly remnants of the photons that hit the paper and ghostly remnants are pretty much my reason for making art. The reasons why I wanted to make a reversal and therefore have spent years trying, failing, trying again and failing harder are all connected with exploring what a photograph actually means and how that can be used to tell other kinds of stories. In the process I’ve built up a lot of useful knowledge about light and chemistry and meaning in photographs and how one of the most important pillars of meaning is so frequently overlooked. Granted, it is disappointing to discover my idea is not quite as joined up as I thought it was. So this photograph of the apple tree is a print that contained its own negative, it held the original light and the light that made it fog, but unlike with black and white reversal, the silver was removed and now, not least because this paper is metallic, it is bouncing all these different photon collision events at the viewer.
My relationship with photographs is complicated. I grew up in a house full of photographs of people I’m related to through the legal process of adoption, but people I have absolutely nothing in common with genetically and if there is one thing I have learned, you can’t hear your genes telling you that you belong, you can only hear the words people say to and about you. Most most of the humans gazing, smiling, pouting, grinning and just looking out of those frames are now dead. I knew some of them, but most of them are just strangers whose stories are all about when they were photographed, by their clothes and cars and gardens, but nothing about the people that they were. They are much the same as the people in the packet of negatives given to me my my brother in law that I printed on to ancient oyster shells that I had mudlarked from the Thames.
I started making these images because I found so many shells close to St Paul’s Cathedral in London. I know enough about oysters and the water this far up the estuary to be sure that it was not possible for those oysters to have actually grown there. And the shells themselves are much smaller than the ones we find now in places like the Isle of Sheppy or Whitstable. Some discussions with the Museum of London made me realise that the shells were most likely between 400 and 600 years old and they were evidence of a trade route into the capital and a culture where oysters were cheap and plentiful. What isn’t there is the names of the people who picked, carried, sold, prepared and threw the empty shells into the river. This made the oysters similar to the people in the negatives. Lost in the past, but still managing to persist. I only printed these in the first place as a test to see if I could get the emulsion to stick. I was surprised by what emerged from the abstraction of reversed light on film to the suddenly familiar, that pulled on the threads that connect me to my family photo albums. Once they were printed on the shells, I realized that they could fit snugly in the palm of the hand and this gesture could make another human peer closely at the faces and draw connections between the people they saw and the people they had known.
Until I made that work, I saw a negative as merely a conduit to a print instead of having its own significance. Since then I’ve thought a lot more about the things that make a negative and what it is possible to do with one, hence the sciency stuff at the start of this post. I suppose the academic word for it is indexacality, or the direct physical trace of the object that was photographed and in this case printed on.
What I was trying to do was combine both the light from the original capture; this is possible with black and white processing, but it is not with colour, unless I remove the bleaching step, and that is a whole new set of experiments into bleach bypass, which is what I’m going to do, because why be happy when you can be flummoxed?
Ultimately, a photograph is mostly an index, the sliver halide grains are literally the photons that hit them, but that’s not how we treat or consume photographs, they are mostly representations of something entirely different. Mostly we look through a photograph as if it were a window. And that presents me with a whole new set of conundrums to solve as I want to make photographs that engage and involve the viewer.
Oyster Shell Ghosts can be seen on this website: https://tinarowe.co.uk/selected-work/oyster-shell-ghosts