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Way back, through the dim mists of deep time, when giant sauropods slouched down Monroe Avenue; when computer makers were still hopefully banging rocks of silica together and a 128 Kilobyte Mac was considered a big deal; when photography was still something silvery that the great (and of course very English) Fox Talbot would have recognised; when printing was still something leaden (not to mention antimonic and stannous) that Gutenberg could still have made sense of; when ...
when ...
O, damn!
I really am getting old, I’ve forgotten where that sentence was going ...
O, yes! ... Yes back in the eighties! One day I was sauropodically slouching along Monroe Avenue, near where it crosses 490, when I chanced to stumble into that famous hidyhole for old-time photographers, the Community Darkroom . Over the next few millennia (or was it merely years?) I used and abused its facilities; even, on occasion, building the odd darkroom or so.
I also viciously taught there: classes in the more arcane areas of photography; areas haunted by Scheimpflug and high-pH lith developers; areas hedged about with dire, yet mysterious, warnings directed to those of a nervous disposition. Why I even have (appropriately enough) pictorial proof of my activities! ---as I write I have a photo before me, one perhaps even taken by Sharon Turner herself (our Lady with the Lens, who in those far off days ran the place, and runs it still, and I assume ever more shall run it, sæculum sæculorum, the ages aging, world without end and ... so forth.
This picture, I like to call ‘The Moment Of Truth’, was taken as my class in large format photography examined that nerve-wracking first Type-55 Polaroid test shot. I stand there, left of frame, all docent before my docile class, with my 1970’s mustache and 1980’s glasses and the, by the looks of it, an 1890’s shirt.
And what, if you are still listening you may well ask, has brought these sad ruminations into an essay?
Well, the events I recall occurred almost thirty years ago, and it so happens that it was exactly thirty years ago that the Community Darkroom was founded; and now they are about to have an exhibition (called ‘30 Years of Eye Work’) to celebrate their surviving me, and of a host of other (though not necessarily equally) weird bods who’ve worked there through the last almost-third of a century. And so they set about finding all We-who-had-done-work-there.
And through the world-wide wonders of the internet they succeeded in finding us (and through the blessings of repressed memory syndrome they actually included me in the list of those-to-be-looked-for).
So in return I’ve submitted a good example ... well at least an example ... of the sort of stuff I used get up to there. It’s a portrait of a girl taken on 4x5" Ilford FP4 with my sinar view-camera, using an antique 12" Beck Symmetrical lens (made in 1891 pretty-much like that shirt); and then printed at the Community Darkroom on 10-year-out-of-date Kodak LP litho-proofing paper, grossly overexposed and pull-developed---in a remarkably athletic technique. Since mere fractions of a second in the developer made an enormous difference to the finished result, after exposure I'd leap from one side of the darkroom to the other to pre-wet the print, hurl it into the developer, vigorously agitate it (a state I would often find myself sharing during the process) for a few fraught seconds, before diving with it into a really strong stop-bath (at which point I would often have a really strong cup of tea), before the slightly more leisurely fixing and rinsing of it. [sigh] It would typically take hours of strenuous work and many attempts to get the desired effect; which was of a sepia wash in the high-to-mid-ish tones with a very grainy ‘pointillist’ effect in the darkest areas.
I figured (accurately as it turns out) that after all this ancient photographic athleticism there was no way they could refuse my contribution: and they didn’t. They even invited me to the reception next Friday (28th Sept), though I did notice that they checked first to make sure I was still down in Texas.
So, especially since I can’t be there, I strongly urge you all to go to the show---and to blurt out strange irrelevant stream-of-conciousnessy things to make up for my absence---and maybe you could build them another odd darkroom.
Cheerio for now
from
Richard Howland-Bolton
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Notes:
You can get your mind out of the gutter---the title is a reference to the sort of safelight used in the darkroom when working with lith film or paper, both of which are orthochromatic .
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