Cancellations (brown) — Lew's View
Photograph
Cancellations (brown) — Lew's View
From Cancellations
1974
Gelatin silver print
23.4 x 34.3 cm (9 3/16 x 13 1/2 in.)
Purchase with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts
1975.0156.0003
Inscriptions recto-(in ink) "from the series Cancellations (brown) - Lou's View"
(signed) "thomas f. barrow [sic] /74"
(signed) "thomas f. barrow [sic] /74"
TextThomas Barrow’s series Cancellations takes its name from the X that dominates the images. Professional photographers in the pre-digital era scratched that mark into the emulsion of negatives they did not want editors to use. Barrow, on the other hand, applied the X to the negatives he intended to print. The resulting photographs started out as ordinary, even banal, landscapes, but with the X, they become assertions of the objecthood of photographic prints and the negatives that produced them—a show of resistance to late twentieth-century society’s tendency to conflate photographic images with reality.
