Toxic Playground

This is a two stage photo manipulation. Originally, I had taken a straightforward shot of a rundown industrial area in Copperhill, Tennessee in the '80s. The first step of the transformation was at the photo lab where I worked, I used the normal print to make a contact print in the darkroom. This resulted in a negative, reversed image that was a little murky and slightly color shifted from exposing the paper through a print. If the resultant print was neg-flipped in a computer, you'd have seen a bad copy of the original; fuzzy, grainy, and with a cyan cast. Jump forward to 2004. Finding the scan I had made some years ago of the negative print, I decided to play with it in Paint Shop Pro. In seconds, with just a shift of hue and big boost to the saturation I had this toxic playground with its brightly colored radioactive glow.