For most analog photographers negatives are sacred objects, a precious commodity which must be handled with reverence and care lest they get damaged or destroyed. Josh Lee, however, views his negatives as a canvas, a surface on which he can experiment and manipulate the contained image with paint, bleach, and dye.

Entirely self-taught, he first came to photography in 2016 but was dissatisfied with the digital experience; the images were too crisp, too clean for his tastes and the overwhelming options in digital processing would stress him out. A fortuitous gift the following year sent him on a new path into the world of film photography.

“My friend's dad gave me a huge duffle bag of all his old camera gear from the 70s and 80s. I started playing around and really fell in love with it. I loved the texture, the grain. I loved not knowing. You kind of know what the shot is going to be but it's also a surprise every time, which is really exciting to me. It relieves a lot of my anxiety because it's out of your hands after you take the shot and develop it, you just have to accept that. And there's something about doing things with your hands that is really rewarding, too. I find that very fulfilling.”

Initially he focused on color film and began to experiment with multiple exposures where he would interpose landscapes with female figures, taking his film at one of the few places in his neighborhood which still offered processing. “When I would first get my film developed there was this tiny mom-and pop cell phone and passport place that somehow still developed film for really cheap. They were like, 'You still do this? That's so weird.'”

When Covid lockdowns hit he began to go through old negatives and play around with soaking them in different substance just to see what happens when chemicals interact with the emulsion and the image. With most New York businesses shut down he was inspired to try his own black and white developing. Combing through old blog posts and online tutorials he discovered the caffenol process. Making developer out of instant coffee and washing soda might sound odd at first, but for Josh it held two main attractions: it was inexpensive and it was less toxic than traditional developers, an important consideration when home developing in his small Brooklyn apartment.

“That really opened a whole new world for me, it really saved my life in a way because I could do it at home with natural chemicals. It's a lot less expensive, which is a big deal, especially with the prices of everything going up so dramatically, without it I don't think I could do film. It really is a game-changer. I've lost so many rolls of film from contaminated chemicals, and caffenol is single use and it's just pennies to produce. With the prices of film and film-related products skyrocketing, I wonder how many people would benefit from trying caffenol.”

It was in the combing of these two separate chemical experiments that Josh stumbled upon his current work where he physically manipulates his black and white negatives to impart a new otherworldly element to the final image. Adding color with food coloring, creating shadows by bleaching away the image, imparting texture and depth by varying the application methods, the final product takes the the straightforward image and adds a layer of unreality. Applying acrylic paint to the negative creates opaque areas of white, and in searching for a way to doo the opposite, it was the bottle of bleach he found abandoned in the bread aisle during the initial frenzy of lockdown panic which held the answer. Through lots of trail and error he bean to master these tools.

“I've gone through five rolls of film, shooting almost the exact same thing, and trying over and over again for weeks until I finally get it the way I want. Sometimes it takes a long time till I finally like, this is it. And once you put the materials to the negative, that's it, it's done.”

When these manipulation techniques are combined with portraiture, in particular, they create a psychological response, as if we're seeing a hidden element of personality or emotion made visible. They call to mind the spiritualist photography of the 19th century which claimed to capture ghosts and auras and ectoplasm, attempting to make visible that of the human experience which is unknown and unseeable. But that is my interpretation, processed through the filters of my personal experiences and emotional response. And that's partially what Josh enjoys about this work, that it's open to interpretation by the viewer.

“I don't want to explain things too much. I think I put a lot of emphasis on the process of it because I want other people to make their own story. I think for me, I'm definitely into things that are a bit darker, I like to say that I like things that are somewhere between a dream and a nightmare. It's probably a subconscious thing, as well. I grew up as that weird punk-goth kid and I think that was my way of saying that I feel different but I don't know how.”

With art that comes from an authentic place of self-expression we can end up creating work that is a subconscious reflection of our personal journey and find a way of working through our emotions, our childhoods, our traumas, our growth. And for a military brat who grew up constantly on the move while trying to find his place in the world, Josh does see his journey to understand his core self expressed in this work.

 “With portraits I do tend to skew the faces a lot. I've thought about why I do that and I think it's that when I grew up there wasn't a lot of representation for me, I didn't really see people that looked like me. We had Lucy Liu, thank god for Lucy Liu. Asain-Americans didn't have a lot of representation so I think a lot of us grew up thinking that we weren’t desirable. I feel like I always wanted to hide my face, which led to hiding, or maybe embellishing, the faces in the portraits that I take. It was hard to connect with people, and I think that's common for children who grew up in the military families. You move every year, or every three years, and sometimes you wake up in a whole different country. On the military bases it was pretty diverse but you go out and all the advertisements, and all the media coming from the states, it was very homogenous. 

I don't think I even knew what being gay was until we had lived in the states again. I was probably like 15 and I started to think, ohhh I think that could be me, and I just never really knew the word or the concept of it until that time. I tend to mostly photograph queer people, because I think I feel safe with them. There's something about being judged in different aspects of your life, and being judged for your art and putting it out there in the world to be judged, and I think that I feel safe finding models who are also queer, because at least you've got that connection and solidarity to begin with.

Thankfully things are changing now, it's amazing to see. Even things from my childhood are being reimagined with people of color and queerness.”  

Connect with Josh Lee on Twitter and Instagram

GALLERY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Niniane Kelley is a fine art photographer living and working in San Francisco and Lake County, California. A native of the Bay Area, she has a BFA in Photography from San Jose State University.

Drawn to photography for both the immediacy of the image making process and the intrinsic alchemy of the darkroom ritual, she crafts the majority of her imagery using traditional 19th century processes which give each piece its own unique character.

She has previously worked in fine art photography galleries and was a photographer and manager at the San Francisco tintype studio Photobooth. She teaches photography workshops in the Bay Area and surrounding environs.

Connect with Niniane Kelley on her Website, Twitter, and Instagram!

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