We work back from the negative.
Negatif Studio is a gallery for photographs that never touched a sensor. Expired stock, pushed two stops, printed wet in a darkroom in the 10th arrondissement of Paris.
The studio was founded in 2023 by Clement Nicolas, who shoots one roll per outing and keeps the whole roll, the misses included. Prints are made in short sessions, six or seven sheets at a time, so no two are perfectly identical. Editions are capped at twenty-five; once a run closes the negative is filed and never printed again.
Three steps, none of them undoable.
Expose
35mm only, handheld, in whatever light is already there. One roll per outing — thirty-six frames, no bracketing, no second attempt.
Most of the catalogue comes from stock bought long past its expiry date. It fogs, it shifts, and that drift is what gives each roll its own grey.
Develop
Developed by hand in small tanks, one roll at a time, pushed one or two stops to open the shadows and harden the contrast.
Negatives are dried in the room, dust and all, then read on a light table. Roughly four frames per roll make it to the darkroom.
Enlarged onto fibre-based baryta paper, selenium toned for depth, washed for an hour and air dried flat.
Six or seven sheets per session, signed and numbered on the verso. When the twenty-fifth print leaves the studio, the negative is filed for good.
