Andrea Baldi - One Negative, Many Images
Andrea Baldi - One Negative, Many Images
A photograph can outlive its maker, lose its original purpose, and sometimes even the names of those it depicts. It survives in family albums, in boxes left behind by old photographic studios, on glass negatives, and in archives, where it may remain undisturbed for decades before being rediscovered. Such images have long attracted artists concerned with memory, history, and authorship. Finding an old photograph can open the way to a new story, while placing it in a different context may reveal meanings its original maker could never have anticipated. The international significance of these practices was evident in Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, an exhibition curated by Okwui Enwezor at the International Center of Photography in New York in 2008. It explored the many ways in which archival material, anonymous photographs, and found images could become part of contemporary artistic practice.¹
In Polish photographic history, an important contribution to this way of thinking came from Jerzy Lewczyński, who developed the concept of photographic archaeology. Its central concern was the recovery, investigation, and interpretation of photography's past, together with the return of forgotten images to collective memory. Jerzy Lewczyński recognised the significance of family photographs, anonymous portraits, damaged prints, and abandoned negatives. Yet his interest extended beyond collecting them. He sought to reconstruct their histories, identify the people they depicted, establish the circumstances of their creation, and incorporate them into new artistic arrangements. For him, a photograph remained evidence of the past while also offering possibilities for contemporary interpretation.²
Photographic archaeology, then, need not be confined to archival research or the faithful reconstruction of an earlier image. Its creative possibilities also emerge when a found photograph is reworked or presented in a new context. A different mode of display, a fresh juxtaposition, or a newly made print may bring previously overlooked qualities into view. None of these interventions, however, erases the authorship of the original photograph or the circumstances in which it was made. The relationship between preserving a trace of the past and creating something in the present is one of the most compelling questions raised by photographic archaeology.³
Part of the Italian photographer Andrea Baldi's practice can be understood within this framework. His interest in alternative photographic processes began with a fascination for the qualities of historical prints, but working with old glass negatives, including those from his family archive, became an important stage in his development. He recalls the emotion of making prints that revealed people and events from a past he had never witnessed. Over time, he began returning to the same photographs, printing them through different processes and discovering how varied the results could be. The image recorded on the negative remained unchanged, while its tonality, surface, visual character, and the way it was perceived could all be transformed.⁴ This approach developed further through his involvement with the Archivio Pietro Rigali in Barga, Italy. Andrea produced contemporary prints from historical glass negatives using processes including cyanotype, Ziatype, and Van Dyke brown. The photographs were presented in an exhibition exploring the history of the local community, accompanied by workshops devoted to historical photographic printing methods.⁵ Particularly revealing is a group of three prints, shared by the artist, made from a historical portrait of a woman seated beside a table. Although each depicts the same scene, differences in tone and treatment give the image a distinct visual character. Seen together, the prints shift the viewer's attention from the subject of the photograph to the decisions involved in its contemporary interpretation. An image originally connected to a particular person and moment becomes a starting point for reflecting on the possibilities of photographic representation.⁶
It is in this sense that Andrea Baldi's work can be situated within photographic archaeology. This does not suggest that he was influenced by Jerzy Lewczyński or consciously set out to develop the Polish photographer's ideas. The connection lies in the practices themselves: recovering historical images, returning them to public view, respecting the material evidence of the past, and giving photographs new contexts. Andrea approaches these concerns as a photographer for whom the physical print holds particular significance. His work raises a question about authorship: what remains the achievement of the original photographer, and what becomes the contribution of the person who gives an old image a new material form?
Andrea's path towards alternative processes began with prints whose qualities went beyond anything he had previously encountered in the conventional darkroom. While studying at the Ettore Rolli School of Photography in Rome, he attended classes taught by the French photographer Dominique Bollinger. Among his teacher's works were palladium prints whose subtle tonal gradations and relationship with the surface of cotton paper left a lasting impression. His curiosity began with the experience of looking at finished prints and only later developed into a desire to understand how they were made. Initially, Andrea worked with glass negatives from his family collection and plates belonging to his friend Mario. Gradually, he came to recognise that different printing methods could offer different interpretations of the same image.⁷
The story of Mario's negatives reveals a more personal dimension of these early experiences. Andrea recalls making several Ziatype prints from his friend's family glass negatives and giving them to him as a gift. Mario was delighted with the results and subsequently entrusted the plates to Andrea's care, recognising his ability to give the images a second life. More recently, the photographer returned to the same collection, producing new prints using the FerroBlend process.⁸ What had begun as an opportunity to learn historical printing methods gradually became a responsibility towards photographs belonging to someone else's history. Andrea stresses that he handles the glass plates with great care so that they can survive and be used by future photographers. The negative remains a historical document, while successive prints can offer different interpretations of the image it preserves. Mario's decision gives this approach a personal significance. The freedom to experiment rests on trust and is accompanied by a responsibility to protect the original, leaving open the possibility of further work with the same photographs.
The three prints of the historical portrait offer a way of examining what this approach means for the image itself. Differences in tonality and the rendering of detail give each version a slightly different presence. Viewed together, they reveal qualities of the print that might otherwise go unnoticed. The comparison raises a question about the identity of a photograph: does it reside primarily in the image recorded on the negative, or in the individual print, with its particular surface, colour, and tonal range? All three versions share the same source, yet each exists as a separate physical object. A change of process does not, of course, automatically produce a new work of art. Such differences become artistically meaningful when they contribute to a particular interpretation or open up new ways of understanding the photograph. Without knowing the portrait's original purpose, it is difficult to determine how far its meaning has changed. What can be said is that its contemporary presentation gives it a new function: it remains a document of the past while becoming an object through which different approaches to photographic representation can be compared.
Research into photographic materiality has shown that an image's meaning also depends on its support, production, storage, and display. In her study of Jerzy Lewczyński's work, Weronika Kobylińska-Bunsch examined the significance of the photograph as a physical object and its relationship with history and memory.⁹ Andrea's practice allows similar questions to be approached through the act of printing. The historical record remains intact, but its material expression can be deliberately shaped, influencing how a contemporary viewer encounters the image.
An important experience in this respect was the photographer's participation in a project associated with the Archivio Pietro Rigali. His prints were included in L'arte della luce. Storia della fotografia a Barga: viaggio nell'Archivio Pietro Rigali, presented at the Fondazione Ricci from 10 May to 29 June 2025. Drawing on the extensive holdings of a historic photographic studio, the exhibition told the story of the local community. Andrea contributed contemporary prints made from a selection of archival photographs.¹⁰ A project of this kind requires the documentary value of an image to be reconciled with the possibilities of reinterpretation. The choice of paper, tonality, and treatment of detail influences how a photograph is perceived, and the printer must find a balance between personal sensibility and the character of the historical material. The quality of a print cannot therefore be assessed solely in technical terms. What also matters is its ability to communicate the content of the image without allowing a particular aesthetic effect to obscure its historical significance.
Andrea Baldi does not claim authorship of the historical photographs he prints. In his written responses for this research, he explains that his contribution lies in choosing the process, support, and manner in which an image is interpreted through printing. He also emphasises that much depends on the nature of the project. A coherent collection may call for consistency of technique, while an individual photograph may allow for a more personal approach.¹¹ This distinction avoids a simplistic division between the photographer as author and the printer as a purely technical intermediary. Sometimes the aim is to reproduce an existing image as faithfully as possible; at other times, decisions made during printing may lead to a substantial reinterpretation. The artist recognises the authorship of the original photograph while accepting responsibility for the way it is presented to contemporary viewers.
A similar way of thinking informs his work with his own photographs. Andrea often has an initial sense of which process would best suit a particular image, but the first print does not always confirm that intuition. Instead, it may become the beginning of further experiments, as he observes the results and gradually approaches what he hopes to achieve. Prints that initially seem unsuccessful can provide an opportunity to test additional layers or combine different methods. On one occasion, a Ziatype print lacked the contrast he wanted. He decided to strengthen the image with a layer of cyanotype. What had first seemed an unsatisfactory result became one of his favourite prints and the starting point for further experimentation.¹² This experience reveals an important feature of his method. The process does not always follow the original intention, but the photographer remains attentive to unexpected possibilities. Chance does not replace artistic judgement; it offers an opportunity that must be recognised, assessed, and deliberately developed.
Another dimension of his interest in materiality emerges in photographs made during a journey to Kenya. Andrea decided to incorporate red earth collected there into some of his prints. He ground it into a fine pigment and introduced it into the photographic printing process. His intention was for the image to contain something of the actual substance of the landscape it represented.¹³ The earth serves a purpose beyond providing colour. Its origin establishes a further connection between the photograph and the place to which it refers. The print does more than visually represent a landscape; it also contains a fragment of its physical reality. In his comments on the essay, the artist revealed a detail that gives this relationship particular significance. When showing these prints to others, he encourages them to touch the surface so that they can physically feel the earth used to make the image. The viewer encounters the photograph through touch as well as sight. Something that might otherwise remain an invisible aspect of the process becomes accessible through direct contact with the material. This gesture changes the experience of the print: looking at a representation of the landscape is accompanied by an encounter with its actual substance. There is a connection here with Andrea's work on historical negatives, although the two situations are fundamentally different. A glass plate is an object preserved from the past, whereas the earth from Kenya is deliberately introduced into a new image. In the first case, the photographer protects an existing trace; in the second, he creates a material link between the print and its subject.
The origin of the material, however, is not always equally important in Andrea's work. In a photograph of the Dune du Pilat in France, his choice of processes was guided primarily by a desire to recreate his personal experience of the landscape. Having photographed the dune, sea, and sky in black and white, he first produced a cyanotype. Its characteristic blue suited the sky and water, but not the sand. He therefore added layers of gum bichromate using an earth-toned pigment, before selectively removing it from certain areas of the print.¹⁴ The resulting photograph attempts to translate a memory of colour into a physical image. The black-and-white negative contained no record of the landscape's colours, so their presence in the finished print is the result of a later interpretation. Rather than render the entire scene in cyanotype blue, the photographer retained that quality where it served his intention and supplemented it with another process elsewhere. Successive layers brought the image closer to the landscape as he remembered it. This approach also demonstrates the limitations of equating technical perfection with artistic value. Andrea discusses the possibility of printing the same portrait in palladium Ziatype and in the oil print process, or oleotypy. The former can produce delicate tonal gradations, while the latter may yield a more assertive, simplified image with stronger contrasts and less fine detail. He observes that the second approach can sometimes be better suited to the subject.¹⁵ The choice of process therefore depends on what it can contribute to a particular image, rather than on technical refinement as an end in itself.
The range of Andrea's interests was reflected in Fotografia Alchemica, an exhibition held at Spazio Musa in Turin in 2024. The artist recalls exhibiting sixteen works, including another group of three prints made from a single image using different processes.¹⁶ The exhibition brought together photographers working with a variety of historical techniques, including cyanotype, Ziatype, gum bichromate, and Van Dyke brown. Andrea remembers it as an opportunity to present his work and to meet others whose practical experience differed from his own. The presence of another three-print comparison also suggests that returning to a single image and exploring its possibilities through different methods is a recurring feature of his practice. The comparison itself becomes a means of investigating photography, revealing how much of an image's character may depend on decisions made long after the original exposure.
Roberto Lagrasta played an important part in Andrea Baldi's early work with gum bichromate. The two photographers remain in contact and continue to collaborate, including through the Gruppo Rodolfo Namias community.¹⁷ Such relationships are particularly valuable in processes that require extensive practical knowledge. Historical manuals and contemporary publications provide important guidance, but learning to judge the behaviour of paper, pigments, and successive layers often depends on hands-on experience and the direct exchange of observations.
One example of the group's activities is its participation in ColornoPhotoLife in 2026. The exhibition Viaggio nel passato del parco della Reggia di Colorno, devoted to the history of the park surrounding the Reggia di Colorno, presents photographs produced from historical glass negatives associated with Glauco Lombardi. The original plates, held in museum and private collections, were digitised, and members of the group then made new prints using historical processes.¹⁸ The project demonstrates how the recovery of old photographs can become a collective undertaking, bringing together archival preservation, contemporary printing, and public engagement with local history. The available documentation does not establish Andrea's individual contribution to the prints, but the exhibition provides further context for understanding the photographic community in which he works.
Andrea has also shared his own knowledge through the workshop Stampe artigianali per riscoprire le immagini del passato, held in May 2025 in connection with the Pietro Rigali archive exhibition. Participants were introduced to historical printing processes and their practical application.¹⁹ Archival photographs thus became a starting point for exploring the history of photography and the contemporary possibilities of working with old negatives. The workshop complemented the artist's archival activities and demonstrated how the survival of traditional photographic methods also depends on passing practical skills from one person to another.
What connects these experiences is Andrea Baldi's approach to making photographs. He returns to the same images, compares results, tests the possibilities of materials, and applies what he has learned to subsequent decisions. His practice has a distinctly investigative character, although it does not follow a formal programme of scientific research. Knowledge emerges through making prints, which are then assessed for both their technical qualities and their artistic potential. To describe Andrea as a photographer-researcher would therefore be neither a professional designation nor an attempt to lend scientific authority to his art. It would describe an approach in which experimentation becomes a way of understanding the image. He is not searching for a single process that might define his entire body of work. What interests him is the range of possibilities offered by different methods, the relationships between them, and the varied results that can emerge from one negative. At the same time, he understands that not every experiment leads to a discovery, and that an interesting technical effect does not necessarily justify an artistic decision. The most compelling aspect of this practice emerges when experimentation grows out of the character of the image and the chosen material makes a meaningful contribution to its interpretation. A historical portrait raises questions about authorship; Kenyan earth connects a print to the place it depicts; and layers of gum bichromate help recover the remembered colours of the Dune du Pilat. These different experiences lead towards a common question: how can an image already recorded on a negative acquire new meanings through the decisions made when it is printed?
Andrea describes old glass negatives as points of reference to which he can return, bringing new experiences and skills to each encounter. Mario's family photographs offer a particularly telling example. Their history continues through successive prints, through the trust placed in the photographer who now cares for the plates, and through the possibility of approaching the same images again with different materials and techniques. A historical photograph need not be a closed chapter. Its original record remains unchanged, but each subsequent print may reveal different qualities, shaped by the process used and the sensibility of the person interpreting it.
Although photographic archaeology looks towards the past, it can also be understood as a practice open to the future. Andrea Baldi's work shows how preserving an old image can coexist with searching for new ways to present it. A glass negative that has survived for a hundred years remains available to future interpreters. Each print may reveal something of its history, but none need exhaust its possibilities.
Notes
International Center of Photography, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, exhibition curated by Okwui Enwezor, New York, 18 January - 4 May 2008, https://www.icp.org/exhibitions/archive-fever-uses-of-the-document-in-contemporary-art (accessed 14 October 2026).
Jerzy Lewczyński, ‘Archeologia fotografii’, in Jerzy Lewczyński. Archeologia fotografii. Prace z lat 1941-2005, ed. Krzysztof Jurecki and Ireneusz Zjeżdżałka (Września: Wydawnictwo Kropka, 2005), p. 7.
Kamil Myszkowski, ‘Problematyka archiwum a koncepcja “archeologii fotografii” Jerzego Lewczyńskiego’, Śląskie Studia Polonistyczne, vol. 19, no. 1 (2022), pp. 1-13, https://doi.org/10.31261/SSP.2022.19.01.
Andrea Baldi, written responses to the research questionnaire on the contemporary use of alternative photographic processes, answers to questions 1 and 7, October 2026, unpublished research material, author's archive.
Fondazione Ricci, L'arte della luce. Storia della fotografia a Barga: viaggio nell'Archivio Pietro Rigali, exhibition programme, Barga, 10 May - 29 June 2025; Archivio Rigali: stampe artigianali per riscoprire le immagini del passato, workshop programme, 17-18 May 2025, https://www.fondazionericci.info/appuntamenti2025.php (accessed 14 October 2026).
Andrea Baldi, photographic documentation of three prints made from a historical portrait, supplied as Trio.jpeg, October 2026, author's research archive.
Andrea Baldi, written responses to the research questionnaire, answer to question 1.
Andrea Baldi, annotations to the manuscript Andrea Baldi - One Negative, Many Images, October 2026, unpublished research material, author's archive; Raghavendra Udupa, ‘FerroBlend: A Blended Ferrocyanide Printing Process’, AlternativePhotography.com, 2026, https://www.alternativephotography.com/ferroblend-blended-ferrocyanide-process/ (accessed 14 October 2026).
Weronika Kobylińska-Bunsch, ‘Materialność świetlnego zapisu - o rzeczach w dorobku Jerzego Lewczyńskiego’, Artium Quaestiones, no. 29 (2018), pp. 161-185, https://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/aq/article/view/18797 (accessed 14 October 2026).
Fondazione Ricci, L'arte della luce, cited above; Andrea Baldi, written responses to the research questionnaire, answer to question 7.
Andrea Baldi, written responses to the research questionnaire, answer to question 8.
Ibid., answer to question 2.
Ibid., answer to question 3; Andrea Baldi, annotations to the manuscript Andrea Baldi - One Negative, Many Images, October 2026, unpublished research material, author's archive.
Andrea Baldi, written responses to the research questionnaire, answer to question 11.
Ibid., answer to question 12.
Andrea Baldi, annotations to the manuscript Andrea Baldi - One Negative, Many Images, October 2026, unpublished research material, author's archive; Fotografia Alchemica, preliminary exhibition documentation, Turin, 2024, p. 12, https://fotografiaalchemica.it/assets/images/Fotografia%20alchemica%20-%20mostra%20Copy.pdf; Michele Pero, ‘Fotografia Alchemica - a collective exhibition of alternative photography in Turin’, 1 September 2024, https://michelepero.it/fotografia-alchemica-a-collective-exhibition-of-alternative-photography-in-turin/ (accessed 14 October 2026).
Andrea Baldi, private correspondence with the author, October 2026, author's archive.
ColornoPhotoLife, Gruppo Fotografico Namias - Viaggio nel passato del parco della Reggia di Colorno, exhibition documentation, Colorno, 2026, https://www.colornophotolife.it/mostre-230-gruppo_fotografico_namias (accessed 14 October 2026); Andrea Baldi, annotations to the manuscript Andrea Baldi - One Negative, Many Images, October 2026, unpublished research material, author's archive.
Fondazione Ricci, Archivio Rigali: stampe artigianali per riscoprire le immagini del passato, workshop led by Andrea Baldi, Barga, 17-18 May 2025, https://www.fondazionericci.info/appuntamenti2025.php (accessed 14 October 2026).
