SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 05, 2015 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Award-winning photojournalist Ron Haviv has turned more than 200 rolls of his own undeveloped analog film—unearthed in his New York studio earlier this year—into a new book just released, The Lost Rolls. His photography work spanning more than 20 years and covering a range of conflicts and political events is both a surprise look backward at these world events as well as a document to how we think about memory and photographs. Haviv chose to publish his project with Blurb, the creative self-publishing platform.
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/742344a8-c7f7-44d7-b764-d973ffafff6d
Nearly every photographer who worked during the analog age ended up at some point with stray rolls of film that were not developed due to time or expense or both. Haviv covered over 25 world conflicts and worked in more than 100 countries. He developed and scanned hundreds of the photos from these lost rolls. What he found were images of Northern Ireland riots, gangs in El Salvador, refugees and events in Kosovo, Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral, iconic advertising, Bill Clinton and his family on vacation, and Andre Agassi at the U.S. Open. He also found light leaks, dye pools, scratches, and the marks of time. After developing the first 163 lost rolls, Haviv found an additional 90 rolls in his studio. This set included 14 rolls of Kodachrome, the legendary color film from Kodak.
“I was both surprised and confused by what I found on these rolls as they rolled across my computer screen from the scanning lab,” Haviv says. “Some frames I remembered vividly, but others—people and places—I really had no recollection. Most people who made pictures during the long analog era, professionals and non-professionals alike, have their own lost rolls. Attics and drawers contain a treasure trove of human history, often times lost only temporarily, or until the door or cardboard box is pulled back.”
“The whole forms a kind of historical fever dream, brought to light and shared with a little help from digital technology,” says Blurb’s founder and CEO, Eileen Gittins. “There’s value in the things we overlook, the surprise of the undiscovered, the beauty of imperfections. This work was ‘lost’ because that technology moved on; but by curating these images into a printed book, the work will live independent of whatever technology comes next. Print requires no operating system, no battery, no power other than the hand turning the page.”
The Lost Rolls (#TheLostRolls on social channels) will be presented as both a magazine and a book, printed by Blurb, and in site-specific installations that incorporate sound and projections in New York and Paris later this month.
Haviv is an Emmy-nominated and award-winning photojournalist and co-founder of the photo agency VII, dedicated to documenting conflict and raising awareness about human rights issues around the globe. He has published three critically acclaimed collections of photography, and his work has been featured in numerous museums and galleries, including the Louvre, the United Nations, and the Council on Foreign Relations. Haviv’s photographs are in the collections at The Houston Museum of Fine Arts and George Eastman House amongst others as well as numerous private collections.
For more on “The Lost Rolls,” please visit http://www.thelostrolls.com.
About Blurb
Blurb® is an online publishing platform and creative community that enables individuals to design, publish, share, sell, and distribute photo books, trade books, and magazines in both print and digital formats across the globe using its free, innovative book creation and layout tools. Founded in 2005 by CEO Eileen Gittins, Blurb has more than 1.5 million independent book authors worldwide, resulting in 3.4 million unique book titles. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and can be found online at www.blurb.com.