Double Negative

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Saul Auerbach, the great fictional photographer at the heart of Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative, is more meticulous than most. The unhurried processes and careful results of his photography, taken on the streets and in the homes of the people of Johannesburg, provide the calm pulse of the novel. Photography is a fast art now, except for those who are too old-fashioned to shoot digital. But for most of the art’s history — until about fifteen years ago — most photographers had no choice but to be slow. Film had to be loaded into a camera, the shot had to be taken with some awareness of the cost of materials, the negative had to be developed and the print had to be enlarged. A certain meticulousness was necessary for photographs; a certain irreducible calmness.

The narrator of Double Negative is Neville Lister, ‘Nev’ to his friends and family, a smart young college dropout when we first meet him. He is anything but calm. Nev’s life, detailed in a discontinuous narrative from his youth to his middle age, is the main material of the novel, but it unfurls to the steady rhythm of Auerbach’s photographs: Nev anticipating the photographs, witnessing the places and persons involved in their making, remembering the images years later, and remembering them years later still. Like every worthwhile first-person narrator, Nev has a suggestive and imprecise identification with his author. Meanwhile, the fictional Saul Auerbach has a real-life cognate in David Goldblatt, the celebrated photographer of ordinary life in South Africa for the last fifty years. The temptation is to think that Nev and Auerbach are a pair of photographic positives printed from Vladislavić and his sometime collaborator Goldblatt.

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