Light from the Dark Room

Though young boys are usually intrigued by places “out of bounds”, this did not apply to the Dark Room down the corridor from our dormitory.  If one chanced to glimpse its interior when members of Photographic Club made a rapid exit, what looked like paint trays and chemical bottles explained why they smelt so funny.

Perhaps the teacher-in-charge realised the general lack of interest and told his members that they were allowed to bring a friend into the Dark Room.  Whatever it was, one afternoon after school I found myself there with Carl. “I’m going to enlarge one of my photos, blow it up so that it’s bigger,” he told me, which seemed pretty ordinary, as did the surroundings, more like the science lab than a studio with interesting photos stuck to the walls.  The only evidence of anything obviously photographic were the flimsy strips of negatives hanging from pegs above some trellis tables where roller-brush trays held what looked like water.  Bottles alongside had labels: “Developer”, “Fixer”.

The rather nice red light had suddenly gone.  “Don’t worry,” Carl’s voice from the dark, “I have to turn off the light because I’m opening the packet with my photographic paper.  If there’s any light the paper will be spoilt.”  A sound of something being slit.  Movements in the dark. “I’m putting the negative into the enlarger.”   A sharp white light had come on in what looked like one of those powerful microscopes we had pictures of in our science lab. “This light in the enlarger’s exposing my negative to the paper so that the print will be as big as the paper.”  Darkness again, but after a little while, the red light was back on.  Carl had taken the paper from under the enlarger and, using tweezers, dropped it into one of the trays.  “We have to wait now for the print to develop.  Can you see?”

No, I couldn’t… . But then, through the clear liquid I began to see shapes and lines forming on the paper.  And then his house, its walls soaring from their foundations to meet the dark thatch, so sharp and clean in their black and white. “It’s amazing,” I murmured.  He removed the paper from its bath and placed it in the tray alongside.  “Stop-bath now,” he said, “otherwise it will become too dark.  Then it goes into the Fixer so that it stays the same,” he continued. “And, finally, it gets rinsed in water.”

In 1966, I was too young, both in looks and age, to see Blow-Up.  Though thirteen, even a 4-to-12 film (only persons younger than four and older than twelve admitted) was a challenge; Blow-Up’s  4-to-18 was impossible.  But that did not stop me from being hooked by its plot.  The Sixties, and Swinging London.  A professional photographer, Thomas, casually snaps some pictures of an unknown couple in a park.  The woman desperately wants the film in his camera, but he eventually fools her and hands her the wrong spool. Curious, he develops the film with its shots of the couple charmingly in love, but then sees, in the bushes behind them, what appears to be a dead body.  The thriller hinges on that moment in his darkroom when that chill of murder enters; and as he enlarges the images, so builds the tension and danger.   

I never got to see Antonioni’s  Blow-Up, but my experience in the Dark Room gave me a window through which I have appreciated its essence, realising  the power of an image, curated and interpreted through the process of development.  That I grew up in the years before the digital image has also allowed me to know the power of a camera snap.  They were rare in 1966: the only photographs I happened to see were those taken on occasions such as Christmas or New Year’s.  But that was only if there was someone keen enough to own and carry a camera, which was no slim item.  Children weren’t often the centrepiece of the photograph either, which meant, by the time I reached an adolescent thirteen, I had a very undeveloped idea of what I looked like.  Not that it had mattered at all, but with puberty and high school, came mirrors and self-consciousness and “ugly” a word most to be feared.  But there was a way out of being trapped by such a label: your face in a photograph could provide a more impartial proof of how you looked, and if those looks approached anywhere near what was considered handsome, or not as dorky as some of the others, the label came off.

At the end of every year, school photographs were taken.  A man, whose egg-shaped head made it unnecessary for him to coax a laugh from the rows of boys, would arrive and disappear every so often beneath the black cape attached to his camera. The boarding-house photograph he took in 1966, the year of Blow-Up, with me seated cross-legged in a line of similarly-sized boys at the feet of the personages of the House, was one when I looked really good, good enough to hold my head up high and meet the world going forward.

To those of the digital generation, my fear of and trust in the camera may seem ridiculous. They choose how to see themselves: they can select, delete, alter and transform.  Digital power allows it.  But, owing to their ubiquity and frequency – and the selfie – photographs carry little freight nowadays. Anyway, no one trusts them.

But I had.  As had the photographer that day in his darkroom.  We had seen a past moment becoming a present one, as real as the paper on which the images were forming beneath our eyes.  And when I see now the images which are known as iconic, those black-and-white photographs of fame, I trust them: they have substance, they will last, just like my school photo from 1966.