The Lost Student Negative Box (1)

This anonymous photograph comes from an on-going archive of some 4,000 lost student negatives, exhumed by Greg Lucas (at regular intervals since 1988), from the ‘Lost Student Negative Box’ (a depository, created and managed by the darkroom technician), situated in the vicinity of the darkrooms at De Montfort University, Leicester.

The images were all made by students studying Photography – as a response to Photography briefs, then, abandoned (after a satisfactory print had been achieved, or as failures?) in the darkroom  – left in the enlarger, found on the floor. At the end of each term, Lucas (a lecturer in the department) exhumed the abandoned negatives  – the skeletons of prints – from their coffin-like box.