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Negative Thinking

Negative Thinking

di Dan Hsu

Arte visuale Hobby

Stagione 1

Film Story: Reversal Film & Provia 100F

An episode about positives, on a show called Negative Thinking. Today I open a brand new drawer: our first Film Story, the biography of a material instead of a machine. And I'm starting with the film closest to my heart, the one with no negative at all. With reversal film, the very piece of film that sat behind your shutter develops into the finished photograph. No master copy in a drawer. A negative is a source. A slide is a survivor. You're holding the moment's only living witness. That's why it shoots the way it does: about one stop of forgiveness, no fixing it later, because there is no later. Slide film is the sport played without a net. Its history is a whole century: Kodachrome, invented in 1935 by two classical musicians; National Geographic and family slide nights; the last roll developed at a small shop in Kansas at the end of 2010, part funeral, part pilgrimage. And the survivor in my bag today: Fujichrome Provia 100F, the honest one, fine-grained and faithful. My first film ever was positive film by pure chance. It was Nakahira's exhibition that turned the accident into a choice. The film with no negative demands the most negative thinking of all. Your move this week: make one frame with no net. Decide everything before you shoot, lock the exposure, take one single frame, and vow: no retake, no edit, no crop. What comes out is the photograph, forever. No camera? Ask someone a generation up about slide night, and what the projector sounded like. You'll watch a wall light up behind their eyes. Coming Saturday: I finally pay a debt from episode one. The roll every one of us shoots exactly once. The first one. I'm Dan. This has been Negative Thinking. New episodes Wednesday and Saturday. Follow wherever you listen. Film Enlarger — a home for your rolls. Free: filmenlarger.com

A Photograph: The Statue That Came Alive

In the last room of the exhibition, I mistook a photograph for a portrait of a living person. It was a small stone monk. It was stone the whole time. Today's single photograph is one I can put you inside of, because I was standing right there. Final room of the Nakahira exhibition in Tokyo, the late color work, and one frame stopped me cold: a small shrine statue that read, completely, as a living face. I stepped closer to catch the trick, and that's what undid me. There is no trick. Frontal, level, plain daylight. A thing, being a thing, and looking back. I have to be honest about something: I can't give you this photograph's title, because late Nakahira photographs mostly don't have individual titles. These frames come from his last lifetime show, Kirikae, Osaka, 2011. A photograph with no name, of a statue with no name. All it has is what it does to you. So the episode asks how stone comes alive with no trick anywhere in the frame, and lands on the arithmetic I can't shake: a photograph records the light that fell on the subject, and the attention that fell on it. Attention with no agenda reads as life. The whole row proves it, a toy lion mid-yawn, a Liberty replica that just heaved her torch, a chef statue mid-welcome. And my friend leaned over and gave me the name people use for the Nakahira of these years: the man who became a camera. Your move this week: the resurrection frame. Find a still thing with a face on your daily route and photograph it as a portrait: frontal, level, daylight, wait for its expression, one frame. No camera? Give the stillest thing with a face one uninterrupted minute. Coming Wednesday: the film with no negative and no second chance, the film this man led me to love. Our first Film Story. I'm Dan. This has been Negative Thinking. New episodes Wednesday and Saturday. Follow wherever you listen. Film Enlarger — a home for your rolls. Free: filmenlarger.com

Photographer: Nakahira Takuma

Every photographer has an origin story, and mine has a name on it. This is the man who is the reason I hold a camera. In Tokyo, at the National Museum of Modern Art, I walked into an exhibition whose title was two ideas standing side by side: fire, and flood. Inside was Nakahira Takuma. He co-founded Provoke, the three-issue journal that bent Japanese photography, and helped invent its famous look, rough, blurred, out of focus. Then, at the height of that style's fame, he killed it, argued photography should be as plain as an illustrated botanical dictionary, and said he burned most of his own negatives. Fire, twice. In 1977 a collapse took his memory and his writing. What it didn't take was the photography: for nearly forty years he photographed his Yokohama neighborhood every single day, in color, as proof that he existed. A diary, written in color, and the entries don't read as loss. They read as gratitude. I'll be honest about the early rooms: they didn't reach me, until one photograph of a car, shot from above and behind, suddenly read as pure cyberpunk and unlocked everything. And in the last room, one photograph stopped me cold: I glanced at it and filed it as a portrait of a living person. It was not a person. That's all I'm telling you today. It's getting its own episode. He's also my personal debt. I happened to start film on positive film, but it was Nakahira's exhibition that made slide film make sense to me, and he's why I imitate the masters to this day. I want a perfect fake Nakahira. I haven't managed it yet. It's a small goal I keep. Your move this week: photograph one ordinary thing the way a botanical dictionary would: frontal, level, daylight, no mood. No camera? Describe one everyday thing to yourself like a dictionary entry, plainly, for one minute, and see what the plainness hands back. Coming Saturday: the photograph that fooled me, one frame, one episode. My favorite thing he ever made. I'm Dan. This has been Negative Thinking. New episodes Wednesday and Saturday. Follow wherever you listen. Film Enlarger — a home for your rolls. Free: filmenlarger.com

A Photograph: Breakfast, Trail's End

On August 10, 1973, in a small Utah town, a man ordered pancakes. He never ate them warm. Fifty years later, that breakfast hangs in MoMA. This week I sit with one single photograph: Breakfast, Trail's End Restaurant, Kanab, Utah, August 10, 1973. A short stack of pancakes, half a cantaloupe, a glass of milk, seen straight down from above, before the first bite. No people. No event. And yet you can look at it for a very long time and it doesn't run out. The story behind it is the episode. Shore came back to a restaurant he'd shot the year before with a pocket camera, but this time he was carrying a 4x5 view camera. He stood on a chair, aimed a machine the size of a suitcase at his own untouched breakfast, and by the time he took the picture the food was cold. Everyone else in that room got a warm breakfast. He got a photograph. Which leads to the idea I can't forget: the photograph never shows you what it cost. And one more quiet trick, the angle. Straight down is not an artist's angle, it's the eater's angle. The picture doesn't show you his seat. It gives you his seat. Your move this week: make one diary frame. One photograph of something completely ordinary, seen from above, titled the way Shore titles: place and date, a record, not a caption. No camera? At one meal this week, before you eat, name every object on your table silently and say the date to yourself. That morning will stick. The other ten thousand won't. Coming Wednesday: the photographer who matters more to me than anyone we've covered. He helped invent Japan's most famous photographic style, killed it at its peak, burned his own negatives, lost his memory, and answered by photographing every day for forty years. Nakahira Takuma. He's the reason I hold a camera. I'm Dan. This has been Negative Thinking. New episodes Wednesday and Saturday. Follow wherever you listen. Film Enlarger — a home for your rolls. Free: filmenlarger.com

Photographer: Stephen Shore

He sold prints to MoMA at fourteen. He shot Warhol's Factory at seventeen. He hung at the Met at twenty-three. Then he drove into the flattest, most ordinary corners of America. Most photographers would ride that arc for fifty years. Stephen Shore looked around and thought: I have no idea what this country looks like. So in 1972 he drove into the America between the cities with a pocket camera chosen for looking amateurish, photographed every meal, every bed, every gas station, developed the film like anyone's holiday snaps, and taped around 220 drugstore prints to the wall of New York's Light Gallery: pancakes and motel bedspreads, at eye level, in an art gallery. He hung up America's junk drawer and said, calmly: this is what our life actually looks like. Somebody should take it seriously. Then he went the other way: an 8×10 view camera the size of a suitcase, every sheet expensive, every setup slow, a man publicly taking a parking lot seriously. He traded convenience for attention, and the photographs got quieter and deeper. That's Uncommon Places. He left us the idea I keep close: a photographer solves a picture, more than composes one. Composing sounds like decorating. Solving sounds like listening. And at Bard, this happily-digital master still makes every student start on film, because film makes the decisions physical. That is what we mean when we call film photography a sport. Your move this week: pose yourself one small problem. One street corner all week, only white things, twenty minutes without moving your feet. No camera? Find the structure in one boring view out one window. The rule sounds like a game. The game is the training. Coming Saturday: the movement in motion. Somewhere out there, a fourteen-year-old is deciding to take something seriously. It might as well be you. I'm Dan. This has been Negative Thinking. New episodes Wednesday and Saturday. Follow wherever you listen. Film Enlarger — a home for your rolls. Free: filmenlarger.com

Shooting Like the Old Masters in a New Era

A 1936 photograph, made with less computing power than your doorbell, feels heavy. This morning's technically perfect phone picture weighs nothing. Where did the weight go? Start with Walker Evans, standing so long in front of a plain wooden storefront that the shopkeeper stops paying attention, then pressing the shutter once: closer to a signature on a document than a snapshot. Now your street corner this morning: before you've decided anything, the phone has decided everything, dozens of small corrections made by software that has never stood on a street corner and cared about it. Today is about that weight: where it went, and how you get it back. Not with a vintage costume, not with a filter named after a decade. By carrying the old soul. The honest answer isn't a better camera, and it isn't even film, necessarily, though film makes all of this easier, because film was built for it. It takes one recovery and three refusals. Recover the child's gaze: go looking for what you don't know about the things you've seen ten thousand times. Then refuse the algorithm: let the dark stay dark, let real light keep its weight. Refuse the spectacular: the old masters trusted the mundane absolutely, because fewer frames taught them to see the streets they had. And refuse perfection: the flaws were limits, and the limits made every frame a decision. The line I keep coming back to: the old-era shutter was pressed to build structure inside the ordinary; the modern shutter is pressed to lay a filter on top of it. Everything here is subtraction. The old soul isn't something you add to a photograph. It's what's left standing when you stop helping the photograph so much. Your move this week: once, just once, stop in front of something you've seen ten thousand times. Thirty seconds, no opinion. Find the one detail you never actually knew. Then, only if you want to, make one photograph of it: one, slowly, like a signature. The gaze is the sport. The frame is optional. Coming Wednesday, this whole idea gets a face and a name: a man who sold photographs to MoMA at fourteen, photographed Warhol's Factory at seventeen, and then drove into the flattest corners of America to photograph pancakes, motel beds, and gas stations, completely seriously. Stephen Shore. Film Enlarger — a home for your rolls. Free: filmenlarger.com

Camera Story: The Rolleiflex

A machine imagined so that a man would never have to show his face, which became the camera, of the whole twentieth century, that taught photographers to show theirs. The founding legend starts in the mud of the First World War, with a trench periscope: a tube and two mirrors that let you see without being seen. A German engineer named Reinhold Heidecke looked at that principle and thought: that should be a camera. His employer said no, so after the war he built it himself, and at the end of 1928 the world met the Rolleiflex. Today, for the first time on this show, not a photographer's story, a camera's story. (And yes, I can hear Eve Arnold objecting from two episodes ago. She's right, forever: no box ever made anyone an artist. But some tools change the person holding them, and this odd little box is the clearest example I know.) Full disclosure: I've never owned one. Never even shot one. I've wanted one for years. I think it's one of the most beautiful objects ever manufactured. What it does to you: a reversed image that makes you negotiate with the frame, one eternal square, twelve frames to a roll, a shutter that whispers. But the real magic is posture. Every other camera rises to your eye and replaces your face with a glass one; the Rolleiflex stays at your chest, and to focus it, you incline your head and look down. This is a camera that makes you bow to the person you photograph. Now you know why Eve Arnold's little Rolleicord, the budget twin, the little sister, mattered so much. And she's one hand among many: a secret nanny in Chicago named Vivian Maier, Diane Arbus ("terribly hyped on clarity"), Astrid Kirchherr and five scruffy young musicians from Liverpool, a bowing Queen, James Dean aiming a borrowed one back at his own teacher. And the companies that built it died three times: 1981, 2009, 2014. And the cameras didn't notice. Ninety-year-old Rolleiflexes are out there right now, quietly making twelve squares at a time, because the idea inside them never went out of date: see the world without walling yourself off from it. Your move this week: once, photograph from the bow. Camera or phone at your chest, screen tilted up, head inclined, face open: one photograph like that. And if you don't shoot at all, just watch what cameras do to people this week: the wall going up when a phone rises, and the rare, lovely opposite. Coming Saturday: everything these weeks have been circling, Eggleston's ordinary treasures, Arnold's honesty, this bowing little box, walked straight into the present. Your phone makes technically perfect pictures; a photograph from 1936 still feels heavier. Where the weight went, and how you get it back. Film Enlarger — a home for your rolls. Free: filmenlarger.com

A Photograph: Marilyn Reading Ulysses

Long Island, Labor Day weekend, 1955. While Eve Arnold loads a roll of film, the most looked-at woman on the planet takes a battered novel out of her car and starts to read. By the time the film was loaded, the picture already existed. Arnold just walked over, quietly, and collected it. Marilyn Monroe, alone on a playground carousel, bare feet tucked up, her whole body folded around Ulysses like a comma, not looking at the camera. For Marilyn in 1955, being looked at was the job; in this frame, she's off duty. We're not being performed for. We're overhearing. And for decades, people could not, would not, believe it. The dumb blonde of the century holding the Everest of modernist literature had to be a prop, a gag, image-laundering. It took until 1993 for a Joyce scholar, Richard Brown, to do the simplest possible thing: write to Arnold and ask. Her reply is on the record. Marilyn kept Ulysses in her car; she'd been reading it a long time; she read it aloud to make sense of it and found it hard going, dipping in and out. Do you know who else reads Ulysses that way? Everyone. The difficulty is the fingerprint of the truth. Which turns the question around: if she was really reading it, what does seventy years of disbelief say about us? We looked at evidence and called it a prop. The camera didn't lie. We did. The photograph was never on trial. We were. There are three unretouched layers stacked in this one frame: a book that gives a woman her interior voice, held by a woman the world refused to believe had one, photographed by a woman whose life's work was the unretouched woman. Some photographs are just smarter than everyone involved. They wait, and they collect meaning, like interest. Your move this week: go find the Ulysses in someone. Pick a person you think you already know, ask one real question about what they love, and then believe their answer. No knowing little smile. If you carry a camera: photograph someone absorbed in what they love, not looking at you. Coming Wednesday, something new: not a photographer's story, a camera's story. The little box you bow your head to look into, born (so the legend goes) in the trenches of the First World War, which outlived every company that ever built it. New here? Follow the show wherever you're listening. New episodes every Wednesday and Saturday. I'm Dan. This has been Negative Thinking. Film Enlarger — a home for your rolls. Free: filmenlarger.com

Photographer: Eve Arnold

She didn't own a camera until she was around thirty-four. That wasn't a deadline, it was her starting line: she became the photographer Marilyn Monroe trusted more than any other on earth. In 1952, a small, quiet photographer spent all night photographing Marlene Dietrich. No studio lights, no retouching. A young actress saw those pictures and said: if you could do that with her, just imagine what you could do with me. That was Marilyn Monroe. The photographer was Eve Arnold, William Eggleston's mirror: he was born with everything; she was a rabbi's daughter on a film-developing assembly line when someone gave her a Rolleicord. Her only training was six weeks of night classes, where the great man ridiculed her first attempt. Almost everyone goes home at that point. Eve Arnold went to Harlem. Her spine is the Joan Crawford story: bullied into photographing the star naked and drunk, she taught herself color developing that same night so no one else would ever see the frames, then handed the negatives back. I didn't think they would do me credit. I had in mind a long career. Compassion was the strategy, through everything: Marilyn's decade of trust, a year inside Malcolm X's rallies, China at sixty-seven, a last assignment in Cuba at eighty-five, gone at ninety-nine. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument. Your move this week: photograph someone who trusts you. First, tell them why. Out loud. Then one or two frames, no directing, no retouching. If you don't photograph at all: find an old photo of someone you love and tell them one true thing about it. The caring is the instrument. Coming Saturday: one photograph. A playground, 1955, and the most looked-at woman on the planet absorbed in one of the hardest novels in English. People have called it staged. A letter in Arnold's own hand settles it. Film Enlarger — a home for your rolls. Free: filmenlarger.com

A Photograph: The Red Ceiling

A small room in a small Mississippi town, 1973. A red ceiling, one bare bulb, three white cords — and almost nobody who sees it ever forgets it. Today, for the first time on this show, an entire episode about one single photograph: William Eggleston's The Red Ceiling. On paper it's the most Eggleston subject imaginable — it's nothing, the upper corner of a room, the place your eyes go when you can't sleep. So how does nothing become unforgettable? The answer comes in three parts: a color, a craft, and a friend. The color skips the reading line entirely and goes straight to the body. The craft is dye-transfer, advertising's ultimate print aimed at a ceiling until the red saturates — Eggleston says he's never once seen it reproduced to his satisfaction, and describes the real thing in words nobody will ever beat: when you look at the dye, it is like red blood that's wet on the wall. And the friend is why the critics keep reaching for the word "menace." The room belonged to T.C. Boring, the best friend Eggleston says he ever had — brilliant, chaotic, coming apart, a man who painted the inside of his house red and let one person photograph it, lying across his bed. In 1980 Boring was murdered in that house and the house was burned. No one was ever convicted. Which means the photograph changed jobs: in 1973 it was a picture of a ceiling; today it's the only place that room still exists. A photograph doesn't know it's a survivor. It finds out later. There's a record in this story too — Big Star put The Red Ceiling on the cover of Radio City in 1974. Memphis art on Memphis music. If you want a perfect Saturday afternoon, put that album on and think about what's hanging over it. Your move this week: follow one color. Pick a color that catches you on an ordinary morning and let it lead you for a single day — shop signs, tail lights, a jacket disappearing around a corner. Camera optional; the noticing is the game. By evening, that color will belong to you a little. Coming Wednesday: our second photographer story. She didn't own a camera until she was around thirty-four, and became the photographer Marilyn Monroe trusted more than any other on earth. Her name is Eve Arnold. Film Enlarger — a home for your rolls. Free: filmenlarger.com

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