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My first darkroom was exceedingly primitive: an Arnold Sunray enlarger and three developing trays set up in a corner of the basement bedroom I shared with my two older brothers. There was no running water; I had to run upstairs to the kitchen sink, dripping fixer all the way. Once my prints were washed, I'd dry them between my bed sheets. By and by I partnered with my friend David Brown, who had set up a darkroom in his mother's fruit cellar. There we enjoyed ample supplies of bottled preserves and the company of spiders. Often, during a lengthy exposure, a spider would scramble across the easel. My first attempts at dodging involved waving my hands in the air in a frantic effort to keep pesky arachnids on the move. When I first started out, roll film could be developed under a red safelight. That changed in the mid-Fifties, when processing instructions for Verichrome pan began to include the admonition: "Develop In Total Darkness." Unfortunately, I hadn't bothered to read the instructions and thus learned-as I have learned so many things-the hard way. Total darkness being next to impossible to find during the daytime, I became something of a night owl. Luckily, I had an older friend who would let me into a darkroom situated inside a World War II-era barracks that served as the chemistry lab at the local junior college. Fred wouldn't trust me with a key to the building, however. I was only allowed use of the darkroom on the condition I tell no one, and that I keep the front door locked at all times. At least once a night, the night watchman would swing by to make sure the door to the chemistry lab was locked. Sometimes he would open it and step inside; I could hear his footsteps on the floorboards on the other side of the partition. That's when I would switch off the radio, shut off the water, and hold my breath. "Anybody there?" the watchman would call out timorously. Dead silence. "If you're in there, you'd better say something!" I said nothing. No sound-only the beating of my telltale heart. The watchman, ears cocked for the slightest noise, would cautiously retreat. I'd wait another five minutes, then resume work. I'd turn up the volume on the radio-thanks to ionospheric bounce I could pick up "Nightflight" on KRLD in Dallas, fifteen hundred miles away. In the morning I'd tiptoe through the chemistry lab and let myself out a back window onto the football field, my shirt filled with 8x10 glossies still warm from the drum dryer. After I left home, I set up my lab in various basements, some of which were just as primitive as David Brown's fruit cellar. Often, I found myself sharing space with a furnace, which kept the backside of me warm and certainly accelerated the chemical processes. Lack of running water was an ongoing problem, except for the three summers I lived in a tiny mountain cabin on the banks of Snake Creek. There I had an abundance of fresh, flowing water, plus an occasional live trout in the tray to facilitate agitation. In college I also worked for a time in "a print factory" along with half a dozen other spiritless darkroom drudges. Each of us toiled at a wall-mounted Beseler MCRX, cranking out countless wallet-sized school portraits and the occasional 5x7. Thanks to rigid dress and grooming standards at my school, the subject matter was remarkably uniform, the sheets of uncut wallet prints echoing Andy Warhol's multiple images of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell soup cans. Following graduation I worked at a succession of jobs, some of which were photography-related. In San Marcos, Texas, I labored briefly in a studio that specialized in weddings and gigantic group shots. There I learned how to load and process sheet film and the fundamentals of posing and portraiture. Or, as my elderly colleague Senor Acosta phrased it, "Smile now, pay later." During the 1980s I worked as a printer in a custom processing lab called The Photographer's Workshop. Day in and day out I struggled to make silk purses from sow's ears. I also made countless copy negatives from drugstore prints of dubious quality. How odd that people will dash into a burning house to rescue the family photo album, yet will blithely toss their original negatives into the trash can! Ansel Adams, a classically trained pianist, likened the negative to a musical score, the print to a musical performance. And just as no two musical performances are the same, neither are two darkroom performances. Offhand, I can't think of a single picture in my portfolio that is a "straight" print. Each has been dodged, burned, exposed and developed with an eye to nuanced tonalities. My trash can overflows with performances that didn't quite measure up. Currently I use three enlargers, each with a different light source. The Beseler MXT with its air-cooled halogen bulbs and diffusion head is for denser, "fat" negatives. The venerable Omega D-2 with the double condenser head is ideal for the thinner ones. The Omegalite B with its cold-light (fluorescent) head is my enlarger of choice for everything else. All three machines came from estate sales, as did the hard rubber trays and sheet film tanks. I'd like to think the deceased photographers who previously owned all this stuff are resting easy in their little dark rooms, secure in the knowledge that their equipment has gone to a better place. |
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