Posted 1 year ago
Sylvester22
(79 items)
Hello, went to a garage sale, there was a lot of camera stuff and numerous pictures and negatives of photos in various sizes. I don’t collect this type of stuff, but I saw this large negative 8 1/4 x 9 3/4. Soon as I saw it I thought of Janis Joplin, it’s not marked or labeled anywhere. Only thing other then the image in lower right corner is the number 5171. The first three images I posted are the front of negative the last is the reverse. Would be cool to confirm if it’s her and even better to find a picture of her performing that matches image. Thanks for looking.
Sylvester22, Very cool. :-)
FYI, I downloaded copies of your first and fourth images, and then uploaded them to this website:
https://www.imgonline.com.ua/eng/make-negative.php
The resulting images were B&W positives which I fed to Google Lens.
This one might be a twin (however, you should take a slightly better picture of your fourth picture [the reversed one] if you can for comparison purposes):
https://www.imago-images.com/st/0059958607
Hi Keramikos, thank you so much for writing me. Never heard of the Imago website, pretty awesome. I changed the last picture, my IPad sometimes doesn’t do that great. But I think this one is better. Looks like a spot on image of her , I just had my image reversed.
Sylvester22, It sure looks like a twin to me. :-)
There are just two things that I see that are different. The first one is the way the Imago image is cropped, which is of no real consequence.
The second is that mysterious white line at roughly waist level in the Imago image.
Imago might be able to give you more information:
https://www.imago-images.com/contact
Please report back on what they have to say if you contact them.
FYI, I don't want to pick on your photography, because I'm actually a fairly craptastic photographer myself, but I think your first picture has sharper focus than your fourth, so I cropped the first, and then I used this tool to flip it horozontally:
https://flip.imageonline.co/
Then I ran that through that IMGonline dot com site to get a positive image.
I'm only telling you this, because if Imago asks to see your negative, they might ask for a better copy.
Actually, what you should do is ask somebody who's good with photography like PhilDMorris for advice.
Sylvester22, wow! How exciting that you probably found an original negative of Janis. An amazing find. She was one of the greats.
keramikos, thanks for link to IMGonline. I have several mysterious negatives of family photos.
string-of-pearls, You're quite welcome.
I only found it myself today, because I looked for a website that would convert images from negative to positive. It was the same process for the website that will flip images horizontally or vertically.
Happy image flipping and converting. :-)
This photo of Janis Joplin was presumably made by Michael Ochs.
mp.kunst, Thank you very much for this important tidbit. :-)
Any idea on the venue?
*snip*
The Michael Ochs Archive began as a record collection but soon grew to include 3 million photographs and assorted music ephemera. Ochs ran the archive personally for many years before selling it to Getty Images in 2007. The material is stored in Los Angeles and continues to be catalogued by a team of dedicated archivists. ?
*snip*
https://gettyimagesgallery.com/collection/michael-ochs-archive/
Thanks everyone for the input and information. I haven’t posted on collectors weekly in a while. I forgot how much fun and generous everyone is with their knowledge to other collectors.
This type of photo is easy enough to identify. It is a contact negative which was printed "en masse" and the right hand # is a stock photo number. For instance when I was in NYC I went to some of these massive warehouses where they stored the photos, especially of movie stars and rock singers. You looked through a file folder in those days and picked the photo you wanted. Many had such a number printed so it was easier to find the image. I am not sure how they work now. The size of the negative would be easy enough to print even for a novice photographer who likes to work with negatives and would easily be turned into a positive by laying the negative on the photo paper since the negative is the size of a promo photo. The exposure would be for a 2 or 3 second photo and you would have a positive 8 by 10 size photo.
A lot of actors take one of their favourite photos or a directors ordered version to a printing place where they make a roughly 8X10 negative and then the person can have 500 or however many photos made. A lot of stars get their photo mass printed for signing for fans.
Great post!