About these pages
The following photographs were taken between the years of 1975 to 1987.
This is, a work in progress and will grow as time goes on.
These photos were taken during my later teen years, where my life took place, in Montreal Canada.
What is shown here was a learning process in photography, it is these years I learned to push film and processing chemicals to their limits, with a very limited budget.
In November of 1977 the apartment my family lived in suffered a major fire, which was stopped in the walls between our apartment and the ones beside us and below us, my photographs were not burned but the water and smoke caused a lot of damage to the negatives. They, like most negatives at the time were stored in paper negative sleeves.
I kept them, hoping one day I would be able to repair and clean them.
Over the following 25 years those negatives were mixed up and just not kept well.
The cleaning process was started in 2005, each negative was washed with anti-bacterial soap in Luke-warm water, each negative strip was carefully rubbed by hand to remove paper that had imbedded itself into the emulsion of the negatives, then they were dried over night. Each strip was then treated to a thin coat of Vaseline on both sides to fill in scratches prior to being scanned with a negative scanner. After being scanned they were washed again in a warm bath of soapy water, and then washed in clear water for about an hour, they were dried and filled away in plastic sleeves, where they sit today.
this is a sample of what each and almost all the negatives taken prior to november 1977 looked like after the fire. and the results of the cleaning process.
