The disappearance of the dark. (via MetaFilter)
This project, shot on 4″x5″ film, documents London’s remaining professional darkrooms. It is based on my nostalgia for a dying craft (there are no young printers). It is in these rooms that printers have worked their magic, distilling the works of photographers such as David Bailey, Anton Corbijn and Nick Knight into a recognisable ‘look’.
Specific darkroom memories I cherish:
- My teacher gazing at one of my early prints made with a glass negative carrier, shaking his head, and saying “I don’t know what kind of war you’re going to have to fight against dust, but you’d better get started.”
- Emptying a burst of compressed air into the thrice-cursed glass negative carrier every time I adjusted the negative strip, changed the negative strip, looked at the negative strip wrong, or took a breath.
- The scent of chemicals in the air.
- Mild chemical burns from the stop bath.
- The manifestation of magic as prints entered the developer.
- Leaving the darkroom at midnight to find my car under 2 feet of snow.
- Listening to This American Life while printing pictures of abandoned places and people I miss.
- Hearing the ticking of light timers in the semi-dark.
- Reaching into the paper safe and wondering if this would be the best print ever.
Anyone else?
Comments
Nothing but full-of-hate for darkrooms for me. ^.^ That nasty, cancerous smell, the fact that no matter what I did my prints look like shat.
Of course, this was all electron microscope photography… spend all hour working on at-most two negatives on instruments that are so old you have to learn which settings are proper because the exposure equipment is so old it doesn’t work quite right anymore. I spent weeks on prints that I had already done better in digital than our film equipment could possibly manage because it “had to be on film” – 3 weeks after that assignment was done (late) and all my time for other projects had been wasted (get an hour of microscope time a week), we dumped film altogether, FOREVER.
I feel so cheated. I should have turned the assignment into “why processing film on ancient equipment that hasn’t been kept up is an utterly worthless waste of time when the digital portion of THE SAME equipment is not only a huge time and money saver (yeah, I spent 80 bucks on film and a film holder (4×5) to produce one useful print for the semester) but also produces better results.
And if exposure values and all that are at issue, HDR baby!
I can understand the labor of love, the ‘lost art’ and all that – but I’m sure you had people feeling the exact same way when we went from daguerreotype to glass film, from glass to celluloid etc. Heck, for the longest time most EM stuff ran on polaroids because film was such a pain in the ass to process.
And for most of the assignments, people just scanned and printed negatives anyway. Except for this one, the bane of my semester and the primary mover for my C (well, that and the fact I wasted excess time on it when I should have just f’ing faked it. My teacher had no idea the first prints I showed him were digital, he said “oh they’re fine” then I was like “oh, they’re digital” and then he was like “oh they suck do film.”
That 80 bucks should have gone into holding for my damned 5d
I really do miss the idea of the ‘Dying Craft’. It always fascinated me, I just never got into it. I did know a girl who was going to college for photography who had to process her film that way. She seemed to like it, and her pictures were always beautiful. I always bother Kate about it, telling her she should try it out once or twice to see.
I think she prefers the digital though.
I love the idea of turning the closet into a mini darkroom of my own—I just don’t have funds.
My mom found out the hard way that running a home darkroom just costs endless money. It cost so much she had to sell everything before she could even start. ^.^
@saint – I won’t — ever — deny that the digital workflow is cleaner, less frustrating, and more immediately satisfying. Still, I’m glad to have experienced darkroom work. If nothing else, it does teach patience and attention to detail — there’s probably no darkroom in the world with anything approaching “nice” equipment or adequate ventilation.
That’s part of the old school experience, right?
Darkroom startup costs must be ridiculously low these days. The chemicals and paper are probably the only real expense… and if you purchase them in bulk, it’s not a lot of money at all. That’s a big advantage to fine artists and enthusiasts who love the craftsmanship involved in the analog workflow.
Keep in mind, too, that there are probably a lot of community darkrooms sitting idle these days — which would alleviate the cost of purchasing a lot of equipment.
I kind of wonder if Ilford will begin offering really high-end paper as demand falls? That may get them enough buyers to survive for some time (there’s something truly mind-blowing about a good large format silver print).
I’ll bet this method still provides a very healthy return when it comes to art prints. You can click off a 16×20 print without investing a lot of time, effort, or money and sell it for the same — or more — than a digital print due to the archival nature and size.
I just hope it doesn’t melt away as the Polaroid is doing right now… it’s like losing a little bit of history.
Oh, agreed!
The Impossible Project recently emerged as an effort to restart the production of Polaroid film packs. Let’s hope they succeed. There’s a nice aesthetic to that process, too.