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.