Destroying Negatives, Shoot Plan

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After doing some research into different was that people have of destroying negatives to create new artwork I have decided to do this for a shoot (I don’t think “shoot” is the right word but I’m going to use it). I’m going to start off by taking a roll of film and shooting all of the images on it of the coast and possibly reservoirs and other water sources (the images will more likely be of the sea because that is the main focus of my project), and then I plan on getting the roll of negatives developed before using water to destroy, corrode or otherwise alter the negatives. By using different water sources and looking at and comparing the different ways that the images are distorted I can show how water is not all the same.

I have two plans for how I am going to go about this. The first is going to be involving the negatives from the roll that I will have taken, the second is going to be done using printed images that I have already taken on my digital camera. I am going to collect the water from 6 different sources for the project (about a buckets worth for each), some of the locations will produce different types of water and others will produce similar types of water. Despite this I am still looking forward to seeing the different results, the locations that I am going to source the water from are listed below:

1. Queen’s Valley Reservoir
2. Sea water from long beach
3. La Rosière Desalination Plant
4. Stream in St. Catherine’s woods
5. Pool water
6. Tap water from my home

Once I have collected the water I am going to bring it back to my house, once here a small amount of each sample is going to be poured into a tray that I have borrowed from the school’s science department, these are what will hold the printed images, I will use some blue tack to hold the images under the water and I will be keeping an eye on them to determine how long they should be kept in there for. I am expecting the images to run but I am not sure on specifically what will happen, this again lends to the uncertainness and ideas of the unknown and random that I am looking for in my project.

The negatives are going to be done slightly different and will require more time and thought given to them. I have looked into the different ways to use water to edit negatives, and for the most part, simply submerging the negatives in the water will likely not do much due to the fact that negatives need water to be developed. The main cause of water damage to negatives is from fungus/mould that grows on the negatives and eats into the gelatin layer thereby destroying the image. This will make the process more involved because it will involve me removing the negatives from the water and drying them out before submerging them again. To involve the environment more I am going to also take pieces of the environment like sand or dirt, leaves and seaweed to keep in the buckets also.

To help me get the best out of this process I have been doing a lot of research online into water damaged film. Almost all of the results that came back were about how to recover film from water damage and cleaning them up afterwards. With this in mind however I will try and employ the opposite techniques to what they suggest, so this means that I will need to let the film dry to induce growth of fungus on the film and when they are drying I will not have them free floating, I will let them dry face down and curled up to induce distortion on the images. To try and understand a little more about the process of doing this I emailed someone who used to be a specialist in film restoration to see what he could tell me about this. the first thing Mick (I didn’t get his full name) told me was that:

“it’s not actually water that damages film, film is born and bred in water during processing, the issue is bacteria that will start to colonise the film once it is wet and remains wet for some time and these are responsible for the effect that is called water damage.”

He then suggested

“leaving some negatives (colour film may work better as the silver ions in B&W film are highly toxic to bacteria) in a bowl of pond water (no chlorine etc added that will impinge on the rate of growth) somewhere not too light (but it needn’t be dark) for a while.”

He could not give me specific time frames but he said anything from a few days to a week depending on where the images are stored. He also gave me one final piece of advice for possible health issues that I may encounter;

“careful, you are dealing with a potential biological hazard (known moulds on film include aspergillus fumigatus – Google it).”

Taking all of the information that I have gathered into account I have come up with a plan for how I am going to create this part of the project.

• The first step will be to take the exposures on an appropriate roll of film, as Mick suggested I will not be using black and white film, from here I have chosen to use a roll of Fuji Superia 200 that expired last year. I chose this roll over some of the others that I have have for the main reason that it was the cheapest, because it was a little expired I got it at half price and it is not that expired so the images will turn out fine I’m sure. And as long as it is bright when I decide to shoot then I can use that film.
• To take the exposures I will load up one of my cameras and will travel around the different waterways in Jersey (depending on time constraints I may have to just stick to photographs of the coast).
• Once I have taken all of the exposures I will need to get the film developed, get the negatives back and cut them up into 6 sets of 6 or individually divided into 6 groups.
• Then I need to collect the water from all of the different sources, bring them home, and submerge the negatives under the water.
• After about an hour I will take them out and suspend them just above the water, making sure to splash them every 12 hours or so to make sure that they don’t completely dry out.
• Other than this there is not much I can do except for handling the negatives roughly but while still wearing gloves and letting the gelatine surfaces stick to each other. Possibly touching the wet gelatine layers will distort the images but I’m not too sure.

To help me with this process I have got some negatives off a friend, these were almost all completely exposed and so are perfectly blank, this will allow me to see if there could be any changes that I might not be able to see on frames with images on them.