Negative Dark Chamber 02

A Light of Day Film 2026

By Yanni Florence

Negative Dark Chamber 02 was produced for NotFair 2026 as part of the exhibition Lust for Life, conceived in homage to Ashley Crawford and his enduring contribution to photographic discourse. The work extends my ongoing Camera Obscura installation, in which architectural space is transformed into a functioning Camera Obscura | Dark Chamber.

For this iteration, I hand-painted the exhibition title Lust for Life in reverse at monumental scale and installed it directly onto the street. This intervention was captured through a large-scale negative paper exposure composed of fifty sheets of photographic paper, assembled into a single image measuring 6.2 x 2.55 metres. The exposure process required two hours of sustained labour to methodically install and secure each sheet thren a full Darkroom day to develop all the 50 sheets, embedding the duration of making into the temporal structure of the work itself.

The resulting image is characterised by soft focus and iridescent luminosity, situating it within a dreamlike visual register. Suspended between presence and absence, legibility and inversion, the work occupies a liminal space where text becomes image and public gesture becomes private reflection. The camera obscura’s translation of three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional projection destabilises conventional perception, rendering the familiar environment simultaneously recognisable and estranged.

Orientation and observation are central to the work. By collapsing distinctions between observer and participant, documentation and event, the piece foregrounds photography not as passive recording but as embodied experience. Through inversion, scale, and duration, Negative Dark Chamber 02 invites viewers to reconsider the act of seeing as a temporal and physical encounter with light, language, and space.

Negative Dark Chamber 02 selected as a Finnalist for the National Works On Paper at Mornington Peninsular Regional Gallery 2026