I spent a recent weekend in Houston working on ambrotypes with
friends of
mine and learned that my alma mater (the
San Francisco Art Institute) has all but shut down their color darkrooms. At Fotofest this year, I found out that the
Photographic Center Northwest is planning on or has already shut down their color darkroom as well. I think there's still a place in NYC that I can print but the issue of having a color darkroom of my own is suddenly much more pressing.
Time and again, people ask me why I don't just print digitally.... "it's so much easier," "you can't tell the difference," "you can scan your negatives and then print them digitally," "you wouldn't have to wait a year between printing sessions," etc. And I get it, I really do. It would be
so much easier for me to print digitally. I could ditch the Hasselblad and film all together, buy a digital camera and start zipping out prints. I wouldn't have to travel to print, I wouldn't have to spend hours away from my family, I wouldn't have to ship film back and forth for processing, and I wouldn't have to scan all my negatives in when I wanted to update my website.
But for me, I would have lost so much of what I
love about photography (the feel of the weight of the Hasselblad in my hand, that satisfying shutter click, the anticipation of seeing the negative, the time I get to spend alone, in the dark, headphones on turning nothing into something beautiful) that it almost wouldn't be worth it to continue. Though I suppose, if I'm forced to, I may print digitally one day but for now, I'm headed in the opposite direction - the direction of view cameras and collodion and glass.
My Houston collaborators took me to a fabulous little darkroom and I was reminded what exactly a darkroom is. It's small, it's gray, it's crowded, it's often jammed with beakers and trays and art and most of the time something is coming apart somewhere, but it feels like home. It made me stop and think about what it exactly I have been looking for in this color darkroom that I'm trying to build. For some reason, I've been trying to make it perfect - big enough to accommodate any potential future desires, roomy enough to not feel crowded and beautiful enough to be a part of my home. Really, I've never seen a darkroom like that and honestly, it's I'm not sure it actually exists. So I've revised my ambitions and I think that I can scale it down. I think I can jam stuff in corners and make my trays a little closer together and step around things and reach up high and occasionally find something coming apart somewhere - but at least I'll be printing.
The plan is this:
- Close off our carport and have that space be for 2 enlargers and a sink
- Close off our porch and use that space for the processor and chemical storage
Neither space is quite big enough to house 2 enlargers and a processor and with both spaces, it'll be a little roomy, although not big enough to add in other things, and I think it will work. It'll mean about five new walls, one door, some windows, two air conditioner units, some sort of ventilation and a lot of hard work. Curtains may actually offer an alternative to some interior walls. Regardless of the details, the point is, for the first time in a while I think this is doable - it's just a question of priorities.
I pulled both dark slides out and then marked up lines for making a hole in the septum. I had to drill the holes on the corners there so I had a place to get the coping saw started. The middle hole was just a test hole to see how hard it was to drill.
We used some clamps to hold it to a piece of wood to make the sawing easier. You can see that it isn't cut very straight. We used a file to smooth the metal edges.
These holes are for the silver wire that will hold the glass plate in place. It was impossible to find sterling silver wire locally and I ended up with some super thin stuff that didn't work. I've got to order some thicker gauge wire to make my corners here.
