I open the folder of photos I received in January of that year. There are no previews, so I have to open them one by one. The first is photo zero: blurred, glimmering sand. Half the frame is burned out. Then there she is, shielding her face from the sun. The beach in the background and her out of focus. December in Malvarrosa. I took the photos years ago and hadn’t seen this one. I mean, I saw it at some point, but I didn’t remember it. Back then I received the photos in my email and selected the best ones. I discarded this one and didn’t look at it again until today. I had forgotten it so completely that the scene felt unfamiliar: it didn’t seem like I had taken it. That shot probably slipped by me, leaving pastel tones from the excess light. Now it has a certain charm, though I understand why I didn’t choose it at the time. That’s how some memories look. I was glad to find it. It was like recovering a fragment of that day.
When you develop film, you have the negative of everything you shot, but the photograph is consummated only once you have the positive, whether in black and white or color. Therefore, the negative is like an abstraction: a guide toward the final image. Ansel Adams used to say it was the score and the print was the performance.
There is the term “latent image” to refer to photos on a roll that hasn’t been developed. Latent—images that could be , because two steps are still missing before they become visible: development and printing. Hidden, concealed, apparently inactive. They are a possibility.
When we select our photos, we are organizing a personal narrative. We usually choose the images that seem most flattering and worth showing or preserving. We curate a gallery of endearing milliseconds. Our story as we want to tell it to ourselves and to others. But what happens to the photos that remain in the negative or that, once printed, we disregard?
When I photograph, I make real-time decisions based on my intuition about what might become a good photo. Among those decisions, images are captured that may not be the best or the prettiest, but that are part of the moment. Sometimes gestures reveal our unguarded nature.
Photographers and editors used contact sheets to choose the best shots for their purposes. The contact sheet contains all the photos in miniature. Henri Cartier-Bresson considered it a sketch of trial and error; a way of tracing decisions chronologically and comparing them.
Curator Marta Sollima, granddaughter of Italian photographer Letizia Battaglia (1935–2022), recounts that, while preparing a retrospective of her grandmother, Battaglia asked her that when she found her negatives and contact sheets, she simply hand them over without looking at them. She would then isolate herself with the material to reconsider some shots from the past and circle in red the photographs she wanted to show.
Letizia felt a certain modesty toward her archive—decisions discarded throughout her career. Her granddaughter recalls: “She didn’t like the idea that someone could see and evaluate her unpublished works, the shots she hadn’t selected until then”.
In the negatives and contact sheets I keep the deliberate shots, the spontaneous ones, and the mistakes. Which is the valuable image? The unsuccessful photos fill the crevices of memory. On the contact sheet there is no dissected narrative; all the raw decisions are there. When I rediscover those discarded images, the visual stimuli activate storage areas in my mind, dusted over by time and disuse. New memories are recreated—ones that had been resting unattended; the overall image I had built from only the “good” photos becomes more complete.
Document, archive. Consolation for nostalgia; novelty that revitalizes stories long finished.
When she left, I asked her to send three rolls to a lab in San Clemente. The process was paid for, and she would receive the negatives and digital files. Those rolls contain the only color photos from our trip. We never saw them. The rolls are lost somewhere in California, beating near San Francisco.
Photography by Isaac Castillo Soto
