Impulse

I am build­ing what may very well be the last dark­room ever built. Why would I build a dark­room in this dig­i­tal world, where most pro­fes­sion­als have moved away from film? I do it because dark­room work is tan­gi­ble and because it improves my work in general.

Handywork
Digital is cool. There are a lot of things that you can do in dig­i­tal quickly and eas­ily. Despite its util­ity, it’s not real. Until you make the final print you’re work­ing in a vir­tual world. You’re vir­tu­ally dodg­ing and burn­ing a vir­tual image. It’s not great for your body either: Physically, you’re doing the same thing regard­less of your task — every­thing is just wig­gling your mouse or sty­lus around, fore­fin­ger click­ing away.
When I first began build­ing my dark­room, I really expe­ri­enced how plea­sure­able it is to craft some­thing with my own hands. There’s some­thing immensely sat­is­fy­ing about grab­bing a saw, cut­ting some wood, and nail­ing some­thing together. I feel more alert because I move around a lot more and in many dif­fer­ent ways. Strangely, it also feels more imme­di­ate. When I fin­ish build­ing some­thing, it’s right there — in my hands. I can shake it, push it around, walk through it.
I also really enjoy the phys­i­cal­ity of work­ing in a dark­room. Standing in the dark­room, slowly slosh­ing a devel­op­ment tank, relaxes me more than any­thing else. There have been sev­eral times where I’ve been thor­oughly ticked off at some­one, gone into the a dark­room to develop some film, and come out com­pletely blissed out.
Finally, with so many of my pre­oc­cu­pa­tions involve using a com­puter — writ­ing, pho­to­shop, read­ing blogs, email, etc — I could eas­ily spend my entire day sit­ting in one place, click­ing on things. It’s really nice to have some­thing that isn’t on the com­puter.
Takin’ it easy
When I work in the dark­room I nec­es­sar­ily have to work slowly and care­fully. Each print takes about five min­utes of float­ing in chem­i­cals before I can see what I’ve done. If I screw up, it takes five to ten min­utes to fix it.
Some would say a ten minute Undo is a great case for using a com­puter. Quite the con­trary. The slow turn­around forces me to really look at the pho­to­graph, to see it, to think about my inten­tions for it, to see how my inten­tions trans­lated, and to think very delib­er­ately about what I’m going to do next.
On the com­puter, it’s so easy approach things hap­haz­ardly — I just click on things, exper­i­ment­ing ran­domly until my dis­plea­sure with the image goes away. I never really judge the image, visu­ally eval­u­at­ing and under­stand­ing it. In the dark­room, I take my time because the alter­na­tive wastes a lot of time and money. Besides, tak­ing your time always gen­er­ates bet­ter work any­way — regard­less of what the work is.
Curiously, I’ve noticed that my dig­i­tal work gets bet­ter when I’ve been work­ing in a dark­room. I think it’s because my atten­tive­ness in the dark­room helps me train my eye. Perhaps it’s just another form of visual pushups.
Different tools, dif­fer­ent jobs
I’m still work­ing on fin­ish­ing the con­struc­tion of my dark­room. I look for­ward to get­ting it done (so do my friends who have lis­tened to me talk about it for a year). I won’t use it for every­thing, though. I’m going fully dig­i­tal for all “com­mer­cial” gigs, all color work, and any time the out­put medium is dig­i­tal. However, for my own black and white work, and in order to keep my eye in tune, I’ll be in the dark, lis­ten­ing to music, slosh­ing trays.

Related posts:

1. This fully oper­a­tional darkroom
2. The cam­era doesn’t mat­ter. No, really.