In the darkroom

Northern lights in northern Ontario, circa 1974

Last week, my treasured print drier was fondly dispatched to the dumpster at the electronic recycle. It hadn't been touched for twenty years and I could not invent an alternative purpose. Back in the day, wet, washed prints were squeegeed onto one of its two shiny, curved, stainless steel surfaces. Then the canvas cover was stretched across to sandwich the photos in place as they were grilled to dryness by the heating elements within. This was supposed to give the print a glossy surface but it was never quite as perfect as the results from real labs. If there was dust or little spots of rust on the platen, if you didn't squeegee the paper perfectly, there would be pock marks, dust or amoeba-shaped dull areas. If you dried the print too long or not long enough, it would curl into a tight cylinder that required reflattening in a heavy book.

I got interested in photography in high school, but never joined a club. It was an expensive hobby if the drug store did all the developing and printing. But the astrophotography I was doing at the time did not lend itself well to commercial processing. The automatic machines and the humans that ran them assumed there must be something wrong with a photo that was almost entirely black. No one could possibly want those little specks and clouds of light to be printed. My father had a talent for satisfying my material whims through the classified ads in the local newspaper. He bought a portable enlarger that disassembled into parts that fit into the small suitcase that was also the base for the stand. A fellow science nerd initiated me into the darkroom arts, the chemistry of developing film and the optics of making black and white prints. It was in theory much cheaper than paying for professional developing, but there was so much waste because of over-exposures and under-exposures and experiments with filters and different papers.  The mixing of solutions in narrow plastic cylinders marked like measuring cups, calculating concentrations, pouring liquids into trays or tanks where they would work their reactions, nourished the incipient chemist in me. 

Exposed film had to be handled in complete darkness. My father and I chose his workshop, covered the windows with heavy blankets and stuffed towels under the door. We worked only at night, but there was always some faint glow. Sometimes I retreated into a closet. Hiding in the darkest possible corner, I pried open the film with a can opener and pulled out the roll, hoping not to drop it onto the floor. Film had to be wound onto the developer spool following the generally imprecise clues provided by fingers and imagination. I cut off the end of the film and tried to feed it into the outer slot, then pushed it through the spiral track towards the centre of the spool. If you messed up, loops of film would stick to each other, the chemicals wouldn't penetrate evenly, and the film would be spoiled. 

At the university residence, there was a well equipped darkroom beside the auditorium. The dorm was my first opportunity to interact with girls away from the judgmental eyes of my parents and older sisters. Girls were terrifying and I had no idea how to talk to them. I practiced imaginary conversations, but real conversations somehow never went as they were supposed to. A few girls were intrigued enough by the process of DIY photography to enter the darkroom alone with a tutor and watch a demonstration. Perhaps they misunderstood the meaning of the term 'safe light', the bulb that lit up the room with a wavelength invisible to print paper. It allowed us to see what we were doing in a flattened, red tinged black and white sort of way, as we made our prints. My room mate had the charm to pull off, "Let's go into the darkroom and see what develops," without causing offence. He also had a telephoto lens on his camera, which he used to take photos of girls in bikinis on the beach in the summer. For me, it was stumbled and mumbled invitations to equally shy girls and avoidance of any eye contact. At least I didn't have to think much about what to talk about and under the red light no one could tell I was blushing. "This is the developer," I would say, as I slid the sheet of paper exposed in the enlarger into the first bath. And then we would share the wonder as the image emerged, like a ghost coalescing from the liquid and solidifying on the paper. Poetic words were unnecessary. The magic was in front of us. And then the print went into the stop bath with its urine colour and vinegar smell.

At my first lab job, there was a professional darkroom connected to the electron microscope centre. It took some persuasion to be allowed to use it, but I was writing my first scientific paper and had a plate of black and white photographs to prepare. The electron microscopy technician supervised, a tall man with owlish glasses, who seldom said anything. We made the prints and began the finicky process of cutting them into perfectly squared pieces of exact sizes. To assemble the plate, the five individual pictures were attached, one at a time, to a piece of double sided waxed paper using an iron, so that the white spaces between each photo were perfectly even. It took forever and luckily we had lots of duplicates of each picture. I thanked the technician profusely for his help. "I'm an alcoholic," he told me. "Every day is a struggle." Then he demanded an acknowledgement in my paper because it was important for his job security. 

Nowadays, most lab darkrooms are used for transilluminators, with ultraviolet lamps to light up strands of DNA in gels, to be photographed by ultra-sensitive digital cameras. Most students have never used a darkroom for its original purpose. I love digital photography and the marvels of computerized editing, and don't miss gluing plates of photos together for publication. My enlarger-in-a-suitcase sits in the basement, along with brittle plastic graduated cylinders, oversized forceps, and expired bottles and sachets of chemicals. But I miss the chalky smell of fixative and the comfort of the reddish black shadows. Just as purists insist that digital music is inferior to vinyl, the dwindling population of darkroom enthusiasts prefers analog. But not me. The illumination that photography brings to our world no longer emerges from darkness, but from computer monitors. But the journey of the our imagination stays the same, as we snap images and shape them into visions that we share with the world.

The dissection kit

In second year, all biology students had to buy a dissection kit. It was sold at the campus book store, alongside the texts, notebooks and pens and cost about $25. Engineering students bought complex calculators or slide rules, chemistry students the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, but for us it was scissors, scalpels, blades, tweezers and plastic-handled needles. One enigma was the 'probe', a metal handle with a bend near the end, with a rounded or recessed tip. What was it for? The word 'probe' was so provocative.

We all carried our identical baby blue plastic cases full of identical tools, in a time when permanent laboratory markers were still imperfect. Students customized their boxes with unscientific magic markers and stickers. My sister, a veteran of the same course, sewed me a custom case of lurid red vinyl-like material, which rolled closed and was held together with strips of Velcro, and ensured that my tools would stay separate from everyone else's. There were abundant narrow slots for additional implements, so I could stock up if the opportunity arose. I don't remember permanently borrowing anything from anybody, but somehow the kit expanded with pins and clamps, holders and blades, simply because there were spaces for them.

This was the final year that premeds mingled with those who only wanted to be biologists. They shoved us aside in the teaching labs, eager to hone their tissue slicing skills while the rest of us tried to avoid opening the velvety bellies of white mice. We started with earth worms and frogs and graduated to cow's eyes, stiff, plank-like mink and eventually dog fish. Several companies sold preserved cadavers specially prepared for the classroom, with veins injected with rubberized blue paint and the arteries with red. Larger animals were preserved in formaldehyde, a stench that bonded to hair and clothes. Dissecting these elastic, oozing tissues was tricky despite the sharpness of the scalpels and the power of the scissors. There was only one time that we were required to handle warm tissue. Lab rats were 'sacrificed' in the name of science, so their livers could be harvested in a physiologically active state and we could isolate mitochondria. Teaching assistants did the deed in another room, away from our sensitive eyes; one TA admitted that he hated his job that day. I let my lab partner, a curly haired blond named Steve, remove the rat's liver with his own scalpels and scissors so that my own would remain innocent.

The end of the term featured the dreaded lab exam. We circulated from one bench to the next, allowed two or three minutes per station to answer a few questions about ducts or muscles indicated by coloured pins. The premeds sometimes slyly shifted the markers around so that no one after them would get the right answer. 

Although it did not often serve its intended purpose, my dissection kit has now followed me for 37 years, mutating as I've moved from lab to lab, adapting to what I really need it to do rather than what it was originally intended to do. The original scissors are now used to trim my finger and toe nails, cut paper, and prune plants. I guard them ferociously because they are fantastic and I would never be able to find a better pair. Like any good biological system, they have reproduced and there are now two pairs of scissors, one at home and one in the lab. I'm not sure where the second pair came from or which is the original. The forceps also multiplied, overflowing the original case into trays in the lab and racks in the workshop downstairs. Sometimes I use the scalpels and forceps on myself, sterilizing them with alcohol, taking advantage of the high quality microscope optics at my disposal to remove slivers from my fingers.

As students and post docs filter into my lab from different cities, provinces and countries, it is fascinating to to see what their dissection kits hold. The collections all start out the same, but evolve in symbiosis with the interests, needs and manual dexterity of their owners. One colleague mounted his own thick, oriental eyebrows in metal handles for handling fragile microscopic structures. One student donated special microscalpels used for retinal surgery to my own kit. 

The first paintbrush and colour pallette, the first violin, the first baseball mitt, these are all tools that take us from a world of dreams and possibility to a world of work and accomplishment. My dissection kit and its tools are extensions of my hands and my mind. May you find the same.