Damaged Negatives

Glen Luchford's Damaged Negatives turns an archival disaster into the substance of the book itself, presenting fashion and portrait photographs that were left to rot in a flooded storage unit for months before anyone noticed.

Luchford shot for Vogue, The Face and Arena through the 1990s, building a reputation for clean, narrative-driven fashion photography. The negatives collected here, including images of a young Kate Moss, were never meant to survive in this state: standing water, humidity and mold left oxidation blooms, burn-like marks and cigarette-hole patterns across the frames, obscuring faces and grounds alike. Rather than discard the ruined archive, Luchford and Dashwood Books published it as found, reproduced in duotone across sixty unpaginated pages in a softcover first edition of 1,000 copies.

The result sits apart from Luchford's commercial work, closer to the damaged-material tradition explored by photographers who treat chemical accident as authorship. Damaged Negatives was published in 2013 by Dashwood Books, New York, with design and creative direction by DJA.