Interpreting Old Film Negatives Through a Modern Lens

Photo by Kristina Feliciano.

There’s a correct way to process film negatives, but I don’t have the tools here in my apartment to do it. And I’m not necessarily interested in being correct when it comes to making imagery.

Recently, I recovered my things from a storage space where they’d been languishing for a year. Amongst the boxes and bins of art supplies, cameras, books, and personal ephemera were negatives from countless photographic journeys before my iPhone became an appendage. (For the past few years, I’ve used a digital Leica to capture “real” photos, and it’s started to feel insufficient, disconnected.)

At some point, I had labeled the negatives, but without prints to ground the words I couldn’t grasp what these slippery coils of celluloid contained. I held them up to the too-bright overhead light of my NYC apartment. I placed them against the screen of my desktop computer. All of it clumsy. Still, I photographed the backlit negatives. And then I inverted those images in Photoshop.

The results were imperfect and messy. Even the most prosaic shots seemed to hold meaning. I loved them.

Photo by Kristina Feliciano.

Photo by Kristina Feliciano.

Photo by Kristina Feliciano.

Photo by Kristina Feliciano.

Photo by Kristina Feliciano.