i miss the darkroom...

As a key-holding Lab Assistant at American University's Photo Lab, I had total free reign of the darkroom and processing lab and would be in there on weeknights, weekends, sometimes til 1AM the week before final critiques. There was a group of us always there, hanging out in the hallways, commenting on each others' prints, dodge this, burn this, just do another print this one's not worth it. It was fun and really, the most vivid memories I have of AU are at that lab. I miss the smell; stained hands and clothes from mixing chemicals; jumbled sounds of the exhaust fan sucking the fumes out of the lab, music blaring on the 10-year old boombox (which by the way is still there and being used) and the staccato beeping of the timers; faint red light peeking out over us as we stood by the chemical trays; the intimacy of the partitioned enlarger stations...

Most of all I miss the process of creating a physical product. I admit that I was/am terrible at rolling film onto spools - AU had different spools from the ones I used in high school at ISB and I never quite got the hang of them. Half the fun was seeing if I had rolled my film properly. I probably shouldn't admit that. Yes, I got pissed periodically, I specifically remember ruining half a roll of film that I had taken in Halong Bay, Vietnam, but I was able to salvage a section of it and make prints from that.

The darkroom itself was a romantic experience; minimal lighting, picking out the frames I wanted want to see in full size, printing images I was in love with... the excitement of dipping the paper into the developer to see if it was the correct exposure, slowly, slowly, tipping the tray back and forth to ensure even development... by the time the print went from the developer to stop bath to fixer, I was so anxious to have the print in my hands and it seemed like it took forever for a fiber print to dry. Oh, but it was so worth it, all the effort it took to get an image from negative to paper...

That tactile experience is hard for me to translate into the new world of digital photography. These gadgets require precision, they require a new learning curve, they require money... I absolutely understand the value of digital but the personal relationship I had with images printed in the darkroom is hard to recreate through the computer.