MY CHILDHOOD FRIEND, RICH, AND I BUILT OUR FIRST photographic darkroom when we were both about nine years of age in Sherman Oaks, California. We bought some heavy visqueen plastic sheeting, found some 2x4s, nails, a hammer, and a heavy duty staple gun. The outside back wall of Rich’s garage served as the “stable” wall, and the rest was a sort of “lean-to” structure that often fell down when there was a breeze. The darkroom floor was the back lawn. It was about 10 feet square and worked a lot better at night than it did during the day.
We borrowed Bryce’s enlarger, easel, and safelight. Bryce was about 12 years old and had a lot of “experience”. He was cool—showing us 8x10 black and white glossies of spider webs and stuff that he had shot and printed. Rich’s dad had a long orange extension cord that we strung from Rich’s bedroom window out through the back yard.
Golly, we had fun.
From the age of nine until my mid thirties I’m certain I shot tens of thousands of frames of black and white film. I developed all of the film myself and made contact sheets in my various darkrooms. I also printed hundreds and hundreds of black and white prints. Sometimes, I would use tints and washes to color or antique them.
I also used the same camera all of those years. A basic Pentax Spotmatic. The only bell and whistle it had was an internal light meter. Nothing else was “auto”. In many ways, that camera was my closest friend as I grew up.
At some point in my thirties, life got harder and busier. I shot less film. My eyesight wasn’t as good either, making it harder for me to see through the viewfinder of my Pentax to focus each shot. I pretty much stopped using my camera. For the following 20 years there was a photographic hodgepodge of stuff—mostly drugstore prints from one-time-use cameras that I didn’t have to focus.
Yesterday I had a few hours to kill walking around downtown Philadelphia—iPhone in hand. With help from a couple of easy-to-use apps, my iPhone is not only a decent camera, but it’s also a darkroom, art studio, archive, and publishing/sharing platform.
In a very short time I took a few dozen shots, then developed, cropped, uploaded, and shared them online—all from my phone (images above).
The process wasn’t better, just different.
But the best part about it was, at least for a couple of hours yesterday, I felt like I was nine years old again—sweating out prints in my visqueen darkroom.
