A Beginner's Guide to the Darkroom

I'm back to darkroom manual.  I think that, especially given the time constraints, this is the most practical option.

Here are bits I'm working on:


It’s the fixer that stays with you. Even though it’s the smell of stop bath that brings tears to your eyes, it’s the fixer that lingers long after you emerge back into lit rooms again. It sticks to your hands, no matter how many times you wash them. You find yourself talking to a friend when suddenly you can smell your hands as they move in front of you. You try to like the smell, because it’s the smell of productivity, it’s the good days that end with the smell of fixer. But it never works.


It’s the fixer that ruins your clothes, too. You never see the marks, it dries clear, but when you take your clothes out of the wash you’ll find the marks, like tea-stains, on everything you own.


The invention of photography was really the invention of fixer. Scientists had long before discovered that silver compounds responded to light. They coated pieces of paper or metal with those compounds and set drawings or leaves on top of them, watching the shadow of the object create it’s double on paper. But then the paper or metal slowly darkened, and the images fled. What no one could do was get an image to stay.


Anything that casts a shadow can create a photograph. A negative is just a fancy way of casting a shadow. And everything we see in a finished photograph was once a shadow amongst the light. We create by withholding. We hold back the light, and then we hold back the darkness.


A photograph defies the natural order of things. A photograph stays.