Black Crop

Black crop is a visual search based on the geometry of the human body, opposition between positive and negative and how it affects our perception of an image. In analog black and white photography you have to cast your imagination in the result you aim to obtain. It is an exercice that is combined with technical steps that leads you to your final positive image. All along the process you must act just as if the result was guaranteed by the thorough observation of the technical requirements of the medium you use, even if sometimes a mistake can make beauty occur. The last step is the inversion of the negative that constitute the “real” original of the picture and it ends the photographic journey , leaving you with a copy of what you captured. Just before that, there is a special step that I call the “promise of the negative”. When you see your image from the tank still dripping of hyposulfite and you try to figure out what will be the final result. For me this step is always very exciting, negatives are often beautiful, rich, strange, intriguing like an abstraction of your final image. I have to say that I rarely find this feeling on the positive image, like the brutal end of a dream. I wanted to create visual images that would be able to preserve a bit of the “promise of the negative” by cropping negative areas in the final image, the geometry figures the rationality, placing this experience into strict boundaries. Final images will be produced in large lenticular flip images allowing to travel from the negative to the positive and chose the side of the promise you want to stand in.