A BIT OF HISTORY
My archive of film negatives begins with my first beach picture taken in 1994 with my 8×10 camera and goes to 2016 when I finally switched to a medium format digital camera.
Almost 5000 8×10 and 11×14 negatives taken in that period are now stored in my studio in Lucca, in numbered boxes kept in an old wooden wardrobe. In recent years I’ve become more and more concerned about the preservation of this archive, as many of those negative films have never been digitized or made public.
Only a small part of them have in fact been digitized, and only those intended for large format printing have been reversed from negative to positive and post-produced.
The relatively small number of negatives that I took –there are photographers who have shot 4000 pictures in a single day!!– made it possible to plan a digitization project that would allow the preservation of the entire archive.
So the grant we recently won –funded by the European Union Next generation Eu and promoted by the Italian Ministry of Culture– will allow us to complete this ambitious project started a few years ago.
The project will take place over a period of 18 months and will consist of digitizing all the negatives not yet digitized, reversing them from negative to positive, and finally uploading them on my website – Stay tuned for upcoming updates!
Take a look here at how colorist Andrea Dalle Luche – once negatives are scanned – is working to bring them to life.
We are discovering so many interesting details from the first boxes of 11×14 negatives taken in discos in the 1990s. It is incredible to see how everything has changed – or hasn’t!
