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What do we mean when we say the images on the Shroud of Turin are negative?
In 1898, an amateur photographer, Secondo Pia, took a picture of the Shroud with a large wooden box camera. Back in his darkroom, he examined the glass-plate negative by holding it up to the light. He was so startled by what he saw that he almost dropped to negative, which would certainly have shattered thus losing one of the greatest pictures ever taken. What Pia saw was a positive, realistic looking picture of a man. Pia's negative was a positive and the Shroud, or so it seemed, was a negative.
The ghostlike picture on the left show how the picture of Jesus appears on the Shroud. When photographed with a film camera something quite startling emerges. If we look at negative before making a print we see a realistic picture of a man.
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© 2004 Daniel R. Porter, Bronxville, New York
