Religion
In reply to the discussion: Shroud of Turin [View all]okasha
(11,573 posts)I've been shooting, developing and printing black and white film for sixteen years, now, so I'm satisfied that I know a photographic negative when I see one. If this is in fact the image that was presented as the burial cloth of Jesus in the mid-fourteenth century, then there is a very natural contemporary means by which that image could have been made: exposing a sensitized material--in this case a length of linen cloth--in a darkened chamber with a very small opening to a brightly lit original object outside the chamber. Testing the image areas of the cloth for silver salts and sulphides would be the easiest way to determine whether such a procedure was used. There seems to be a consensus that the image has faded over time, which would be in keeping with the character of a photo negative that wasn't archivally preserved.
What I would be most curious about now is whether the maker of the negative managed to print it to obtain a positive image, and if so, what happened to the positive, which would be easily recognizable to us as a normal black and white photograph.
I suggest that we simply ignore the ruder skeptics and go right on talking about what interests us.