Diana turns the lights off in the darkroom. There’s a stir, a slight shift, from the 20 students in the class, but nobody says a word. We don’t know each other. We’ve only been in class for a few weeks and now our skin is pressed together in the dark. I can smell the student beside me — Axe deodorant spray, coffee. I spread my fingers in front of my face and see nothing, a vision from the blind.
Your eyes will adjust, don’t worry.
Diana explains out loud what she is doing as she starts to develop the roll of negatives. She pops the cap off the canister with a bottle opener, removes the spool of film and cuts two inches off the end of the film into a sharp edge.
Now comes the hard part.
She slides the sharp edge of the film into a plastic reel and lets the rest unravel to the floor.
You’ll feel the film slide into the reel’s ridges, and then you can twist the reel back and forth until it’s loaded.
It’s bizarre to learn in the dark. My mind creates an image of what’s happening; it feels like I’m teaching myself how to develop a roll of negatives. I’m disconnected, but my senses are heightened.
Diana drops the reel into the developing tank and snaps the lid shut. She flicks the switch on the wall and the room floods with light.
The darkroom in UVic’s writing department is currently being dismantled, with the remaining materials moving over to the visual arts building. The space will now be used for graduate student offices. Last fall was the final time Diana Nethercott, a freelance photographer and university professor, taught the photojournalism class with film. Now, the students are supplied with digital cameras and only have to connect a cord to a computer to see the images they’ve captured.
Nethercott was first involved in photography in grade eight. Her teacher, an amateur photographer, brought in copies of the local newspaper that printed several of his photos from a fire.
“I remember thinking how neat that was, and that he was paid $50!” she tells me.
Nethercott, who has been teaching photography at UVic for seven years now, says the newsroom was a much more panicked place when photographs had to be developed in the darkroom.
“I remember bringing damp photos out to the editor so they could be sized up quickly to make a deadline,” she says. “You always had to factor in how long it was going to take to develop the film, dry it, edit and then make the prints.”
Changing realities drove the closing of the darkroom, according to Nethercott.
“No newspapers that I know of have been using film for years and years now.”
I fell in love with darkroom last fall. I could focus for hours, just trying to get the right exposure. I couldn’t believe that a picture would appear after I submerged and 8 x10 piece of photo paper into the developing liquid.
Creating art alone in the dark may seem like a catalyst for depression or anti-social behaviour, but to me it was a surreal experience: an escape from light, sound and people — a way to focus on the craft and only the craft.
Thanks to the digital camera, the dark room and the art of developing photos is turning into something impractical and purely nostalgic, like a record player hauled out from the basement when the relatives come for Christmas dinner. The dark room will not disappear, but never again will it be used out of pure necessity.
The first permanent photograph is a picture of a barn. It was produced by a French inventor named Joseph Nicephore Niepce in 1827. He used a pewter plate, a petroleum derivative called bitumen, and exposed his image for eight hours in the bright sunshine. Niepce washed away the unhardened bitumen and polished the pewter plate to reveal a negative image. He outlined the picture in black ink and pressed it onto a piece of paper.
The darkroom we use today stretches back almost two centuries. In 1839, British inventor William Fox Talbot created what he called the talbotype: a photographic process that used a paper coated with silver iodide to create negative images. The same year, John Herschel, an English mathematician, astronomer and chemist, created the first fix solution from sodium thiosulfate (used to stop the image from developing with any further exposure to light). In the 1890s, developing chemicals and processing equipment became widely available. Photographers started taping black paper to their basement windows, pouring chemicals into large tubs and disappearing into their man-made caves for hours at a time.
There really isn’t much equipment involved in developing photos, and that’s probably why so many people have, or had, their own darkrooms at home. The enlarger looks like a bigger version of a high school microscope and is used to expose the image to light. It projects the image of the negative to the photo paper and controls the focus, amount and duration of light. A typical photograph is exposed for about five to 10 seconds.
The first tub of chemicals used is the developer, which turns the latent image to metallic silver and makes the picture appear. The longer an image is submerged in the developer, the darker it will become. The second tub is the stop. It’s usually a diluted solution of acetic acid and does exactly what its name suggests: stops the action of the developer. Finally, the photograph is left in the fix bath for about 30 seconds to make the image permanent and resistant to any further exposure from light.
The photographs are then rinsed under running water and left in a rack like a set of clean dinner plates.
I am in the darkroom on a Saturday afternoon in October. I am alone. I’ve just learned how to use all the equipment and I felt pulled from an afternoon in the real world to the sanctuary of the darkroom.
I’m developing a roll of film I took of the salmon run at a provincial park about 20 minutes from the city. Every autumn, millions of salmon forge their way up the river at Goldstream Provincial Park to spawn and die. There are dead salmon, seagulls and children everywhere.
There’s one picture from my negatives I want to develop. I used a low aperture setting, or f-stop, when I took the picture to allow more light to reach the film. The photograph is focused on a dead Chum salmon on the shore of the river, and in the distant background are two people — hand-made spears in one hand and giant hot dogs in the other.
I expose the photo paper to light for seven seconds. The ray of light disappears and I am again left in the dark. There are a few red safety lights hanging from the ceiling but they provide about as much light as a sliver of moon in an overcast sky.
I use a pair of tongs and submerge the paper into the developing tub. I wait for the second hand on the glow-in-the-dark clock to do a full circle. After five seconds, the image has appeared. Ten seconds, it’s getting darker. At 15 seconds, I realize I may have exposed it for too long. Thirty seconds, and it looks like the paper has turned completely black. I swish it around in the next two tubs of chemicals for a few seconds and dip it in the sink. The photograph is dripping water down my forearm when I spin through the revolving doors to the entranceway filled with light.
The photograph is nothing but a slick black finish. I throw it in the garbage.
I spend the next two hours trying to get the right exposure. It turns out too light, or too dark, or has white squiggly lines all over the image that look like tapeworms. I got so impatient that I forgot to dry my hands after rinsing one photo, and the next attempt was ruined with fat water droplet marks all over it.
I am shaken from my darkroom trance when I hear the spin of the revolving doors.
Hello, anybody in here? Can I turn on the lights?
It’s a male voice, one that I recognize from class. My answer is a croak. I think I’ve forgotten how to speak. He says he’s just here to pick up some of his photographs from the last assignment, and would be gone in a second. I can almost feel the weight of his tall frame moving through the space.
By the way, what are you doing in here? It’s a beautiful day outside and we don’t have a project due for a long time.
I mutter something about practice and trying to develop a picture of a dead salmon.
After he leaves the darkroom, I pour the chemicals into the waste bins, rinse out the graduated cylinder and escape back to the relief of daylight. Something about his presence jarred me from my darkroom trance; I felt almost embarrassed to have spent so much time alone, feeling my way around the dark, while the rest of the world went about its business.
For our final project in the photojournalism class, we use a digital camera. The assignment is to hand in four photographs that could act as a feature, or a stand-alone picture in a newspaper. Two of the pictures would be the originals, and the other two would be versions that we cropped, lightened and tightened by using Adobe Photoshop.
I borrow a digital camera from the university and bike to Willows beach on the first day of December. It is a foggy and dark blue morning, but there are still streams of dog walkers flowing down the shoreline. A friend of mine is trying to swim in the ocean at least once every month throughout the year. She is waiting on the sand in her bathing suit and toque when I get there.
I take over 30 pictures of her, and delete more than 20 of them.
The computer lab in the Fine Arts building has over 20 Mac computers, with every sort of video and picture editing program you can imagine. I sit down under the fluorescent lights of the lab at about eight o’clock the next evening. I plug the camera into the back of the Mac with a USB cord and the images start to file on the screen like cards at the end of an online solitaire game.
With the drag of the mouse I crop a picture in half. I adjusted the colour so the sky doesn’t look so overcast. I tweak my friend’s skin tone so it looks a bit lighter. I can’t think of anything else to fiddle with, so I drag the image into the class drop box, log off the computer and head to the campus pub for a pint of beer.
“I always maintained that everything you learn in the darkroom helps you understand Photoshop better,” said Nethercott.
Trisha Gieni, another student who took the last film photojournalism course, agrees.
“I love the tangibility of it all. I love leaving the darkroom smelling like chemicals,” she says. “Digital is useful in so many ways, but when it comes to learning the basics of photography, the darkroom is the best place to be.”
The darkroom has now turned into office space. The boxes of enlargers, developing tanks, metal tongs and chemicals are piled in storage.
The photojournalism class is taught using digital cameras and editing programs in the computer lab. Newspapers don’t use film cameras anymore and students need to learn the basics of the new technology.
But maybe the offices hold remnants of what was once there — an occasional waft of chemical to remind us of this sanctuary, a place to experiment and create without the distraction of light.