Seeing In Darkness
In the digital age the darkroom is a peculiar place to be. Despite the burgeoning popularity of film, even the newest of darkroom technology has a nostalgia cast upon it that will make the most modern-looking darkroom feel anachronistic to younger generations. It can be easy to dismiss traditional processes as little more than historical curiosities, something to be observed with a distanced, purely technical regard. It might be argued that, from such a perspective, gelatin on acetate is seen with little difference to collodion on glass, or to albumen on paper.
The presence of timers, thermometers and bottles of chemicals is similarly confounding; in the eyes of the modern youth this curious combination of laboratory equipment - conjoined with the association of times gone by - leads towards an association with the precise, the scientific over those of a place of creation and expression. There is little of the flair of dramatic, arching brushstrokes of paint on canvas, or the physical intensity of bow on string reflected in the image of measuring chemicals, taking notes on exposure times, and in the gentle agitation of developer. As a medium it is far more distanced, far less romanticised in our culture.
These mechanical or procedural components have long been a source of artistic contention; certainly the photographic practice may be taken to be as creatively bloodless when placed next to mediums often regarded with a mystical and romantic “expressiveness”. This, perhaps, is due to the fact that the mechanical component to these other mediums is not so readily revealed to the spectator - for whom the machinery behind the stage is hidden behind cultural baggage and a more human apparatus. Many have experience with the camera; comparatively few know the technical nuances of the cello, or of oil painting. And compared to digital technology, chemical printing and developing has no generalised “auto” button. Cold discipline is conducive to quality prints.
The standard operating procedure – shoot, develop, (scan), print, frame – is all very well, and there is much talk of the printmaking process and its perceived virtues. Praised are the rigorous attendance to direction and structure and the ethos that “good things come to those who wait”. Likewise, there is much talk of the technical benefits and specialities of different films. But an oft-neglected middle stage in all of this is the development of the film itself - something often relegated to mail-order photolabs and those little Paterson tube-tanks. A little garden of Eden may, however, lay in a particular kind of development: deep-tank.
The setup is relatively simple. Placed within an industrial sink unit are three open-top tanks filled with chemicals, and a fourth fitted to a hose for washing. In darkness one loads their sheets of film into clips, which are then inserted into a metal cage. Once temperatures are taken and times are ascertained, one stands before the tanks and agitates the film; mechanically lifting the cage in and out of each tank according to the instructed times. The physicality is indeed enjoyable. However unlike the archetypal darkroom, where one might meet other practitioners, put on music and speak under a deep red cast, developing in total darkness allows one time alone, and a rest from “active vision”. That is, as my peers have humorously observed, that photographers often make for terrible drivers - they are eternally framing their world and getting distracted by it. An escape from this can be pleasant. This is the “specialness” to the process that breaks through dull, rote process, and moves into a matter of experience.
The pleasure isn’t out of a lack of sight, but rather a different kind of it. After all, one who can see can never literally see nothing, as the eye still functions. As one stands before the tanks, rhythmically raising and lowering the cage, tiny light sources begin to materialise as vision adjusts. A dab of luminescent paint on the hand of a timer is unobtrusive in the day-to-day, but in darkness it will flare and glare in the corner of the eye. The lingering heat signature from a lightbulb will offer the faintest of red glows, and gaps in blackout material will gradually fade into being in the darkness.
Before these pinpricks of light the eyes will adjust and adapt in a way not dissimilar to how one might recover from exposure to firing flash head - patterns of white nothing swirling around in the vision like ripples in murky water. And though you cannot see yourself, waving your arms about will give a definite impression of movement. Objects likewise become fleeting shapes that are barely differentiable from nothingness - as likely to be real as they are not. This a known phenomenon: eigengrau - “own grey” - more recently coined as “background adaptation”. It is - in simple terms - the result of the ISO of the eye reaching its threshold and producing various random visual events - and noise - as a result of its struggle for detail. As an experience it is at once highly meditative, and thoroughly engaging; a pleasure in its own right not exclusive to film photography, but certainly one that one is more likely to come across through home-development.
Whether photography is an art - whatever that supposedly is - is one thing; indeed, making a print is not the same as making an image. A good picture need not be technically perfect. In that, there is certainly a leap away from pure craft. However, too much fuss about a matter of status might get away from appreciating what it is that can make photography special for photographers in the first place. The craft of photography is, for all its laboratory aesthetic, an experiential goldmine, albeit one that only the maker has access to. In interviews photographers often reference the first time they handled a camera; they speak of being captivated, as though through this experience their very understanding of the world had changed, and they were moved to further study. This, perhaps, is because that too is a new kind of seeing, and one that only the camera and photograph can facilitate, something you only know once it is experienced first-hand. This darkroom process can be a wonderful inversion of that.
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