Moravian Gallery Bulletin 78/2018

Annotation: The text deals with the problem of the degradation and destruction of the photographic negative as an accepted or intentionally conceived component part of the final work. Taking works by Ondřej Němec, Jan Záveský and Zhou Junsheng as an example it illustrates the possible approaches to interpreting photographs using various types of damage of the negative.
The basic perspective is the metaphor of photography as artifi- cial memory, damage to the negative is then perceived as
a kind of forgetting or memory loss. Thanks to its destruction the “inhuman” memory of a photograph may seem more human. As a result of intentional and unintentional destruction of its negative the final photograph attains significant new qualities.