Darkroom by Michel Campeau

When I multiply 24 by 52, I get a total of 1,248. When I then multiply 1,248 by 21, I get a total of 26,208. That tally of 26,208 is a close estimate of how many hours I have spent in a darkroom over the course of my career. Having spent an average of 24 hours per week printing jobs for money and printing my personal work means that if that was a prison sentence served out under the amber glow of a safelight, then it would last 2.99 years with no time off for good behavior. That number does not include how many hours I spend each year teaching others how to print. That might be what I call my “community service” after parole.

I have loved printmaking since I was first introduced to the process in high school. It wasn’t the magic of watching the image appear in the developer tray that grabbed me like most photographers mention while waxing nostalgic. For me, darkrooms have always been places that served practical solutions for a different set of problems. First and foremost, the darkroom I set up as a teenager in a hidden storage closet in my parent’s house served as a pretense for me and my girlfriend to spend a lot of time in the dark without the chance for sudden interruption. Secondly, during and after four years of art school, darkrooms served as a way for me to make a living without having to work more than two or three days a week. And last in priority, darkrooms allowed me to see what my own photographs looked like.

To many it is sad that these spaces are disappearing due to the advances in digital imaging. For the photographer Michel Campeau, I suspect his new book Darkroom from Nazraeli Press and the JGS Foundation serves as a kind of lament to their extinction.

His photographs show the wild and often desperate improvisations that spring from the minds of photographers when constructing or “improving” a work space. Jury rigged fans, safelights and enlargers of all sorts are exposed to the white light of Campeau’s strobes - their brightness exposing all of the flaws that are normally hidden under the amber safelights. Funny thing about darkrooms is that in the white light there is something so cold and almost nauseating about them that miraculously disappears once the safelights take over. This book may be a funeral dirge for a dying craft but the tone generally would cause most to be thankful to sell the entire kit on eBay.

Campeau’s still-lifes describe how darkrooms are often personal spaces and how they become lived in and cluttered with talismans; a taro card, an old test print, notations penciled right onto the wall. (I remember reading a story about Garry Winogrand moving his darkroom and upon unpacking the enlarger he decorated it with several items including an old bow-tie and a string of rosary beads. When asked if these additions helped he simply replied, They can’t hurt).

The book progresses along until the pipes become so corroded and the walls are so filthy with fixer that we no longer want to enter. Or perhaps this is what the next tenant has to look forward to cleaning up. Campeau ends the book with an unappealingly stained work shirt hanging against a field of the darkness that signals all have gone home to the Macintosh to slide arrows along histograms.

This is the first in a series of ten books that are being selected for publication by the British photographer Martin Parr. For starting with a requiem, I hope he has more life affirming subjects ahead.

I love this book but then again I am a printer, and just the first few images bring back a flood of memories: Printing in Helen Buttfield’s ancient darkroom at 212 East 14th street (right above the old Irving Klaw Studio where Betty Page was often photographed) and using GAF paper that had expired in 1968, the same year I was born. Daydreaming and pouring the fixer into the film tank before the developer and clearing 8 rolls of Gilles Peress’s film (from a New Yorker assignment). Printing and chain smoking through the night at Brian Young’s Phototechnika full of self pity and weeping over a recent break-up with a girlfriend. Finding out my cat had used one of my 16X20 trays as a litter box. Improvising a darkroom in my tenement apartment’s bathroom and dropping a 50mm Schneider lens into the toilet. Printing a long afternoon of 11X14’s only to realize afterwards that the client wanted 16X20’s. Watching my teacher Sid Kaplan light up a cigarette in the darkroom, sending all of us students diving to close our paper boxes. Watching my 90 dollar Kodak Type 1 Process Thermometer fall in slow motion to the floor. Traveling 45 minutes to my darkroom, setting up to print and having the last enlarger bulb blow out right when I turn on the focus light. Having my exhaust fan fall out of my window and wind up shattering my downstairs neighbor’s window.

My Gra-Lab timer counting down: 5, 4, 3, 2.…

www.nazraeli.com

Book Available Here (Darkroom)