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| Larry Wolf, two copy negatives as positives (2025) from HGFA - 29 neg (2), University of Illinois Archive RS 31/13/5 Box 6 Negatives |
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| Larry Wolf, two copy negatives as positives (2025) from HGHS - 17 neg (2), University of Illinois Archive RS 31/13/5 Box 6 Negatives |
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| Larry Wolf, two copy negatives as positives (2025) from HGMTL - 26 neg, University of Illinois Archive RS 31/13/5 Box 6 Negatives |
Reading Rosalind Kraus, "Photography in the Service of Surrealism", for Kristie Kahn's Photography Study Club at Filter Photo, brought me back to these images created from copy negatives at the Allerton Archives of the University of Illinois. The large negatives were created from the original photographs.
Layers of doubles:
each negative is a copy of the original print (itself a copy from a source negative)
two seemingly identical negatives in the sleeve in the archives
my decision to leave the negatives on top of each other when I made a digital photographic copy
the digital raw file, itself with inverted blacks and whites, was the source for multiple jpg files, some of which are posted here, with the tonalities again reversed
this page is a double of one posted last year, 23 November 2025
That last, unconscious, doubling seems perfectly in keeping with Kraus' discussion of duplication as a strategy to disrupt the assumed representational truth of the photograph. As much as I become immersed in archives as singular source material, they are often full of duplicates, a constant reminder of the distance between myself and the subject of my searching, my research.
... nothing creates this sense of the linguistic hold on the real more than the photographic strategy of doubling. For it is doubling that produces the formal rhythm of spacing - the two-step that banishes simultaneity. And it is doubling that elicits the notion that to an original has been added its copy. The double is the simulacrum, the second, the representative of the original. It comes after the first, and it is in this following it can only exist as figure, or image. But in being seen in conjunction with the original, the double destroys the pur singularity of the first. Through duplication, it opens the original to the effect of difference, of deferral, of one-thing-after-another.
... But doubling does something else besides transmute presence into succession. It also marks the first in the chain as a signifying element - which is to say, doubling transform raw matter into the conventional shape of the signifier. Linguistics describes this effect of doubling in terms of an infant's progress from babbling to speech. For babbling produces phonemic elements as mere noise as opposed to what happens when one phoneme is doubled by another. Papa is a word rather than only a random repetition of the sound pa because "The reduplication indicates intent on the part of the speaker; it endows the second syllable with a function different from that which would have been performed by the first separately, or in the form of a potentially limitless series of identical sounds / papapapa / produced by mere babbling. Therefore the second /pa/ is not a repetition of the first, nor has it the same signification, it is a sign that, like itself, the first /pa/ too was a sign, and that as a pair they fall into the category of signifiers, not of things signified.' [Claude Levi-Straus, The Raw and the Cooked, trans. J and D Weightman (New York, Harper & Row, 1970). pp. 339-40]
Rosalind Kraus, "Photography in the Service of Surrealism"
Just for fun, here are these negatives as negatives.
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| Larry Wolf, two copy negatives as negatives (2025) from HGFA - 29 neg (2), University of Illinois Archive RS 31/13/5 Box 6 Negatives |
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| Larry Wolf, two copy negatives as negatives (2025) from HGHS - 17 neg (2), University of Illinois Archive RS 31/13/5 Box 6 Negatives |
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I was so taken with the pairs of negatives within a single sleeve, of the double pop of the two sandwiched together, that there are no digital copies of the single negative.
