At first glance, the room looks haunted. The sky outside the window is dark and heavy. The windows glow bright white. The floor seems pale and shining, while the walls feel shadowy and deep. The furniture is in the right place, but the lighting feels wrong. It is familiar, yet strange. Then the truth becomes clear: it is not a haunted room at all. It is a photographic negative.
In spring 2026, two museum collection interns digitized and cataloged materials from the Robert C. Lautman Collection. Lautman was a well-known architectural photographer who documented buildings across the United States. He focused carefully on structure, balance, and light. His collection includes prints, negatives, transparencies, and slides. Each format shows the same spaces, but each one feels different.
At the beginning of training, the interns learned what makes a negative unique. A negative is a film image where the light and dark areas are reversed. Bright areas turn dark. Dark areas turn light. Colors also shift to their opposites. Before digital photography, negatives were necessary to create prints. In a darkroom, light would pass through the negative onto special paper. This would reverse the tones again and produce a normal image. When viewed by themselves, however, negatives can look dramatic and eerie.
Transparencies are very different. They are positive images, which means the colors and light look the way they did in real life. A blue sky appears blue. A white wall appears white. Transparencies are meant to be viewed with light shining through them, often on a light table.
Looking at one can feel like looking through a window. It shows exactly what Lautman saw at the moment he took the photograph.
The contrast between these two formats became clear in Lautman’s photographs of Sue McGowen’s Chicago apartment (1998). The space is modern and simple. Large windows line the left and back walls. The floors are dark wood. The walls are white and clean. A gray couch sits in the foreground with warm orange and red pillows. A bold circular artwork in bright colors hangs on the wall. Two green plants stand near the windows, and sunlight fills the room.
In the transparency, the apartment looks bright and welcoming. Sunlight pours through the windows. The white walls feel fresh and open. The dark floor grounds the space. The colors of the pillows and artwork appear vibrant. Everything looks balanced and calm.
In the negative, the same apartment feels different. The bright windows turn dark. The white walls become a dark gray. The dark floors turn pale and almost seem to glow. The colorful artwork shifts to strange tones. The green plants look purple and ghostly. Nothing has moved, yet the space feels different.
In the end, that “haunted” room was simply a negative. It was not spooky because of the building itself, but because the light and colors had been reversed. Negatives reveal hidden layers of architectural photography. They show how strongly light shapes the way we understand space.
The Lautman photographs offer more than just pictures. They show how light, color, and materials can tell a story. Negatives and transparencies each show the same space in a different way. Negatives can make familiar objects look spooky, while transparencies capture bright colors and small details. Working with these materials helped the two interns understand how Lautman photographed spaces and how the collection is preserved. It is a reminder that photographs are not just pictures. They are objects that can teach people new ways to see and understand the world.
This post was written by Krista Allen, a Spring 2026 National Building Museum collections intern. Krista graduated from the George Washington University in Spring 2026 with a Master of Museum Studies degree. To learn more about internships at the National Building Museum, click here.