BRIGHT ROOMS: A DAY IN THE LIFE AT THE DARK ROOM

Walking into the darkroom in the morning, escaping the people, the business and your everyday life, the darkness absorbs you. You squint as your eyes adjust to the room and the space around you, and your nose breathes in the comforting smell of the chemistry that you know will bring your photographs to life.

I use the darkroom as a way to create work that is original and one-off, as my work is very experimental. Playing with the traditional timeline of developing and printing film, as written below, I am able to produce amazing and interesting effects from making film soups for my negatives, for example, or changing the way light is used whilst in the darkroom. This pushes the boundaries of the darkroom and this is something that at Bright Rooms we use are always interesting in doing and sharing through our workshops. It is an environment that encourages you to challenge yourself, and to push your work towards more innovative and interesting creations.

From the communal area you can walk through into our developing room, where you wind your negative onto a spool, hoping your hands will understand what your eyes cannot see inside the light-proof changing bag. You then seal it in a canister and take it out. Monitoring the temperature of the water to 20 degrees, you mix it with your chemistry and begin developing. There’s something so meditative about counting down the seconds until you have to agitate the canister again and again and again, coaxing it towards the end of the process.

The next part fills you with excitement and anticipation, once you finish developing you get to take your film out of the light-tight canister and wash it. It is here that I always unroll the film a little from the spool as the child inside me is too excited to wait to see what is on my negatives. Will there be silver left behind, or just blankness where there should be a string of images? You never know until this final moment, but always have faith in the process. After the negatives are dry we will then take you into my favourite room, the darkroom.

Printing the photos onto light-sensitive paper has a similarly unpredictable magic, the process of taking your image from a tiny negative to squinting at your contact sheet to see what you want to work with, to making your final print.

Placing your print into the developer and watching it appear out of nowhere is a thing of beauty. I am always reminded of the very beginnings of photography when photographers would print in their makeshift darkrooms trying to achieve the technique what we are still using today.

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