Douglas D. Prince – Adel and the Lightning from Multi-Negative Silver Prints series (1972)

I’ve featured a .gif made from Prince’s photos of Francesca Woodman in her studio on here several years ago. (At the time, I did not know that it was his work.)

The photo above is from a series produced by way of compositing multiple frames into a single, seamless print–not unlike the M.O. of Jerry Uelsmann.

However, where Uelsmann works in a vein to create an immersive sci-fi/fantasy surreal vision, Prince is much more interested in creating work that is surreal only in it’s clarity, in it’s this-could-be-something-that-happened-in-the-world-under-exactly-these-circumstances-except-those-circumstances-weren’t-ready-to-hand-so-the-liberty-was-taken-of-creating-the-envisioned-scenario-via-photomontage. (In that way, Prince is actually closer to Minkkinen than Uelsmann.)

Also, there are at least two other famous photographs that seem to refer back to Prince’s multiple negative series. The lightning in the above is more than a little reminiscent of this photo by Mark Steinmetz. Also, another of the photos in the multiple negative series seems like a harbinger for Jeff Wall‘s The Flooded Grave.