Destroying Negatives, Progress Update

26/04/2017:

• I have now collected all of the water from the different locations and they are in the buckets.
• Getting the sample from the desalination plant proved more difficult than I expected because there was no way to get in without breaking the law. But I managed to get the water sample by asking one of the workers to get the sample instead, he was very nice about this and helped me.
• Last night I submerged all of the negatives in their respective buckets of water and left them all overnight except for one.
• The water from my friend’s swimming pool I kept my eye on because this was the one where I was not sure about the potential result. After 30 minutes I checked the tester piece and it had changed colour. It went from the dark brown of the negatives to a very light brown. I decided to check back in another 30 minutes and when I did the test sheet was a very pale white colour. When I saw this I pulled out the real negatives and hung them up to dry off, I did this because I did not want the images to be completely destroyed which is what I expected would have happened if I had left them overnight.

27/04/2017:

• I moved the buckets into my shed to keep them out of the rain, and hopefully to keep them a little warmer to help any fungus to grow.

 30/04/2017:

• I removed the negatives that were dipped in the two saltwater solutions because the images were starting to deteriorate. The top yellow layer began to fall off and was no longer attached to the other layers. I tried to make sure that it didn’t just come completely off and for the most part this worked well, after this I kept the negatives flat to make sure that the layers did not completely remove themselves while they dried. One of them had a lot of sand on it so I washed this off from the undamaged end.
• In total only three images were damaged by this process, so I’m going to put the other ends of the strips into the water to see if I can get the same effect to happen again.

03/05/2017

• This morning I checked on the negatives that were till in the water and I got a bit of a shock. The tap water negatives were almost completely destroyed in the submerged part. The damage to it is far beyond what I had expected. I tried to remove the negative as carefully as possible from the water but unfortunately almost all of the of the gelatine layer on the third image from the right was removed and the other images were also very heavily ruined. This has really surprised me because the tap water was the one that I thought would damage the negatives the least but it has done easily the most damage the the physical gelatin layers.
• At this point I also removed all of the other remaining negatives and have left them to dry before being scanned and printed. The negatives in the saltwater buckets seemed to have had the same kind of separation of the layers that they did before but to a lesser degree.

04/05/2017

• I got all of my negatives, print and scans back from the shop today and I am really pleased with the results. I did not expect the images to turn out as well as they have. I will not post them all here because I am going to do their own blog post for them but I will post a few of the more abstract ones.
• Now that the process of making the images is complete I will move on to displaying them.