My darkroom experiences came back to me recently in a dream filled with anxiety. Not bad enough to be a nightmare. Just bad enough to recall an uncomfortable feeling of things not going quite right. And I felt like it was all my fault.
In my dream it seemed
as though I was trying to develop a roll of film in my homemade
darkroom, and failing. All the workarounds and all the cheapo
rube-goldbergian improvisations I had devised made me feel ashamed. Why
had I created this half-assed darkroom. Why had I settled for this. This
isn't a sordid tale. Just a small mystery.
I woke with that uncomfortable feeling of some unfinished business. Actually, I had improvised that crude darkroom in the unused shower stall in the basement of our house in 1966. And I really hadn't given it much of a thought for more than 50 years. In the dream world, one image conjures up another. People and events merge and divide. And the memories we create are for stories we tell ourselves. They may not have much to do with reality.
What led me to outfit a darkroom? It began when a sophomore classmate told me about the photography club at St. Ignatius High School. The school had a darkroom on the top floor of the old classroom building. A biology teacher, Mr. Flynn, was showing students how to develop film, just like private detectives did in the movies. With only a red light to work by, they would put a blank piece of paper in a tray of liquid, swish it around, and an image would appear. Cool. Could I learn to do this?
At 15, I was impatient and impulsive.
The first skill we had to learn under the tutelage of Mr. Flynn was how
to thread a roll of undeveloped film onto a stainless steel spool.
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He
had us practice with rolls that had already been developed. We tried it
first in the light and then in total darkness. Any light would mar the
images preserved on the film. You had to squeeze the edges of the film
and guide it into the spool so the edges fit into the slots. The flat
surface could not touch itself at any point or it would spoil the
development of the negatives. I couldn't get the hang of it. This short video shows
how you had to do it. We didn't have YouTube. I eventually took the
easy way out and bought a plastic spool whose hubs rotated in opposition to each other so that the film advanced onto the spool via friction with the outside edges. But
that was later.
