Celebrating the Negative

by John Loengard

Every photograph - whether family snapshot or museum masterpiece - comes to life out of the silver shadows in the negative. Yet the value and intrinsic beauty of the photographic negative have been woefully underappreciated. Auction houses disdain negatives of even the most celebrated photographs, insurance companies routinely underestimate their worth, and the general public never gets to see them. Only archivists, dealers and photographers themselves understand how priceless, unique and visually stunning negatives truly are.
Celebrating the Negative rectifies matters in glorious fashion. John Loengard has tracked down and photographed the negatives of some of the most famous images ever Alexander Gardner's legendary portrait of Abraham Lincoln and Walker Evans' haunting portrait of Bud Fields and his family; Ansel Adams' serene Moonrise, Hernandez, N. Mex. and Robert Capa's D-day beachhead. Loengard's work literally and figuratively illuminates these negatives, revealing how the photographer has manipulated the image to produce the final print by choosing what to crop or enlarge, what to darken or lighten. The mastery of Man Ray, Yousuf Karsh, Alfred Stieglitz, Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Andre Kertesz and Edward Weston, to name but some of the many photographers represented here, shows up in their negative capability.

112 pages, Hardcover

First published October 26, 1994

About the author

John Loengard is a veteran LIFE photographer and an archivist of LIFE's illustrious history. He received the Henry Luce Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004 from TIme Inc.

Reviews

[Brian Page · Rating 4 out of 5]

Celebrating the Negative by noted Life photographer & photo editor John Loengard is a real joy. With a title that sounds like it might be a rather bizarre self-help book, it is, instead, a paean to the photographic negative. Loengard photographed famous negatives of famous photographs each held before a light box and he accompanies each with a discussion about the image, the negative, and the photographer. This bare description hardly does justice to the book. But if you’re well-steeped in the history of the craft, you’ll find this to be a can’t-put-it-down treat. Here’s just a small sample of the photographers: Halsman, Capa, Karsh, HCB, Brassai, Evans, Rosenthal, Lange, Weegee, Strand, Bourke-White, Avedon, Eisie, and Ray. You’ll get to see Philippe Halsman’s original shot of his famous Dali image and learn that it took 26 tries, throwing cats and buckets of water – and then having Dali paint a picture on the blank easel in the final print. The negative itself was never again needed. Margaret Bourke-White’s incredible, disturbing, and unforgettable, iconic photo of Buchenwald from 1945 was nearly the last shot of the 11 roles of 120 film she exposed and, amazingly, was not used by Life until 1960. Eisenstaedt’s famous skating waiter was shot on glass plate instead of film and was later cracked just above where the image is usually printed. Speaking of cropping, check out Arnold Newman’s photograph of Stravinsky, commissioned by Harper’s Bazaar but then rejected by the magazine – or how about Yousuf Karsh’s uncropped image of Winston Churchill. Karsh, incidentally, considers his portrait of George Bernard Shaw to be one of his finest negatives. And or course, you’ve got to see Weegee’s original 1946, “The Critic.” Finally, a close look at Gene Smith’s Schweitzer negatives shows how he significantly modified the published photo and lied about how it came to pass. All-in-all, Celebrating the Negative makes me feel as though I’m present at the creation.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love this book. It was my favorite gift for my birthday a while back.

I would like it if there were an image, even a thumbnail, of the positive version of the negative.

So many of these negatives surprise me with what size they are, or the tonal values of the original negative as compared to the original image.

My only real problem with this book is that I wish there were more of it. I'd like more narrative to go with each image, and more images. I'd like to see maybe a thousand-page version of this book.

The story in the introduction is quite sad, that insurance companies regard negatives as nearly valueless.