Time in the Darkroom

Lately I’ve been having somewhat of a reckoning as far as my practice of photography is concerned. And it involves something I thought I’d never return to: making prints.

I can’t remember where I read this, but somewhere at some point in time I came across a passage in a book or article where the writer made the case that, even in this digital age of ours, the print was the natural endpoint of the photographic process. Upon reading this, an image appeared in my head of my plastic storage bin where all my 1990s-era 4x6 color prints live. My next thought was the memory of me digitizing all those prints with a flatbed scanner in early 2013. At the time, my goal was to merge my collection of film photos together with my digital photography, which I adopted at the end of 2002. At the time, I thought I would never go back to film. The convenience of rendering images on a handheld device like an iPad was too alluring to give up. If that wasn’t enough, the cost savings seemed to make the choice obvious.

Fast forward to today. Over the course of the past few decades, I’ve accumulated thousands of digital images and have printed only a few of them. Whatever prints I made were in frames around the house—a totally legitimate thing to do, but an approach that’s far short of thinking about the photographic print as the primary way to look at an image.

But the more that time goes on, the more I am drawn to proper prints. Maybe I’m reaching into the ether of nostalgia, or maybe a sense of fatigue with electronic devices is setting in, but one thing is certain: I am getting tired of looking at a glowing screen to view my photography.

I’ve been harboring this feeling for quite some time. An introduction to darkroom printing that I attended at Franklin Foto this past February catalyzed it. Loading negatives into an enlarger, projecting a tonally reversed image onto a piece of photographic paper, putting it in a bath of developer, and watching a positive image appear: all of this rekindled my fascination with making a physical print—a real print, not some mediocre image that my computer printer spit out. During my high school years, I had access to a darkroom, something I have always remembered fondly. How did I drift so far away from that love affair with darkroom work in the twenty or thirty years that followed?

After being re-introduced to darkroom printing earlier this year, I realized that I wanted to bring more of my photographic practice in house. A few months ago, I began to develop my own film at home. Having discovered the joys of taking control of that simple process, my mind continued to churn over more possibilities. What about going all the way and setting up my own darkroom?

Before I took that leap, I went back to Portland a few weeks ago for more hands-on time in the darkroom at Franklin Foto. My earlier experience in February only lasted a handful of hours. The actual instructional part of the session took precious time, and I only had an hour or so to do my own print work. This time around, I wanted more sustained time to make as many prints as I could. Long story short, I ended up spending the better part of two eight-hour sessions at Franklin Foto.

I was surprised to discover how quickly time passed in the darkroom. Knowing that I had only a few days in Portland, I got myself organized as much as I could before leaving home. I made a prioritized list of photographs I wanted to print, pulled my negatives, and formulated a way to take notes—what good would getting experience with this kind of thing do if I ended up forgetting most of the particulars?

Having arrived at Franklin Foto at the beginning of my first day with a full 100-sheet box of 5x7 Ilford Multigrade RC Deluxe Paper, I walked away at the end of my second day with prints for 32 photographs, my print duds, test strips, and 29 unused sheets of paper. While some prints are better in image quality than others, the important thing is that I got the kind of extended hands-on time that I was after.

But apart from that experience and my set of prints, I also walked away with a lot more.

For one thing, I was reminded about how much the process of darkroom printing is a true craft. Distinct from tweaking this or that photo editing software application setting, the act of using an enlarger and developing chemistry is most certainly not an exercise in giving commands to a computer. After the end of two days in the darkroom, I was exhausted. But it wasn’t the same kind of fatigue that sets in after parking myself in front of a computer screen for hours. Making and evaluating a test strip and creating a full-size print was an exercise in trial and error that didn’t feel like a burden. It was a rather intense learning experience and a source of true satisfaction.

In the wake of my time at Franklin Foto, I find myself reconsidering my photographic practice. When I first got back into shooting film a little under three years ago, I adopted a workflow that involved shooting through a batch of film rolls, sending it off for developing, waiting patiently for its return, and scanning my negatives. A few months ago, I replaced the use of outside labs for one I created at home, but the act of scanning remained the endpoint of my workflow.

Now that I’ve had more meaningful time working in the darkroom to make prints from negatives, my thinking about the behavior of various film stocks has shifted. Instead of asking how a particular type of film will scan, I now find myself asking how it will print. The tonal characteristics of a film photograph rendered as a print is a breath of fresh air. A print’s resolution, depth of contrast, granularity, and the surface finish of the paper all offer a decidedly different aesthetic than what a digital scan offers on a screen.

Another experience that has had a deep effect on me was the simple act of handling a stack of physical prints. Rather than swiping from one image to the next on a handheld device or computer, being able to take a pile of prints, lay them out on a table, and shuffle them around is a rather different and refreshing thing to do. Being able to stand over my work and look at everything at once enables me to see a bigger picture (no pun intended) and find patterns in my work that are much harder to see when the medium is a glowing electronic screen which either renders images one at a time or presents several at once but as little thumbnails.

Having gotten meaningful darkroom printing experience, this past week I decided to go all the way with my film photography practice. To be sure, I don’t see myself totally abandoning digital photography. There is still a place for that in my photographic toolbox particularly where color images are concerned. But I’m definitely moving away from seeing film photography merely as a different way to rendering images digitally. Rather than remain dependent upon my film scanner and electronic devices, I am adding an analog step at least for those photographs I deem worthy of printing. Just a few days ago, I placed an order for an Intrepid Compact Enlarger and a number of other bits and bobs for getting myself set up for proper darkroom printing at home. I’m eager to get started.