The year I spent in the darkroom

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.

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.

At some point, I was drafted (or volunteered) to shoot some photos of a baseball game for the school newspaper, The Eye. I rode the bus out to the field with the team. My camera was Dad's old 35mm, a simple device, totally analog, all manual. No light meter. You set the aperture and f-stop based on the available light and film speed, then bracketed the exposures above and below your best guess. I shot everything from far, far away. I gave the undeveloped film canister to the editor, but the paper didn't use any of my photos. Did they even develop the film? Nobody cared about baseball anyway.

Somehow I got the idea to have my own darkroom. I borrowed a book from the school library. I was reading it in the bathtub when it slipped from my grip and got a quick douse. Some pages were misshapen on the bottom. The fear and anxiety I felt about returning the book seared the author's name into my memory. It was Hans Windisch, who it turns out was a world-famous freelancer, but I didn't know it at the time. I had to beg forgiveness from Brother Balconi when returning the book. In a rare episode of Jesuit mercy, he let me escape without fine or punishment. 

Windisch and some other authors described how to outfit a darkroom. It had to be dust free. Dust could get on the lens of the photo enlarger or on the negatives or on the paper for printing and spoil the images. The room also had to have not even a pinhole of light penetrating the space.

We had a candidate in the basement. An unused shower room about 5 by 5. If I remember correctly, two walls were the house foundation--crumbly concrete with peeling paint--a dust nightmare. The other two were vertical wooden slats with lots of little pinholes of light between the boards. I scraped off the concrete walls with an iron brush, plugged up the holes in the wooden slats with caulk and applied a coat of dark gray paint that was left over from some earlier project. 

Then I went to Dodd's Camera on Prospect Avenue downtown and bought an enlarger, probably the cheapest they had, and some other equipment for about 40 bucks. I lugged it several blocks to the Terminal and then took the train and bus home. Why did I do this by myself? Why didn't I ask anyone for help? Did I actually do it all by myself, or did I get Timmy to help me? He would have been my first choice for help.

Then I needed the chemicals for developing the film and the prints. The Yellow Pages listed a place on Detroit Ave not far from St. Ed's. The office was on the second floor, above some stores. An old guy in an old place surrounded by lots of old stuff. He gave me a lecture about these whippersnappers who bought chemicals already mixed. The fools, he said. They were paying to ship all that water. But oh Wise One, I told him, I am not of that Tribe. I will buy the magic powders from you and mix them according to the formulas passed down by the sages through the ages of ages, and I will store them in the amber bottles prescribed in all the good books and ensure that they are not defiled by the blazing light of day. And so we shook hands and so it was done. 

By this time, Mr. Flynn was giving the photo club members some assignments. He asked us to take a series of photos that would convince someone to move to our town. I remember taking photographs of City Hall and the fire station, a police car, some houses, and other buildings. These were amazingly flat and boring, but I was happy with them. I don't believe there were any people in any of the photographs. This series I do remember developing in my darkroom.

The room was not completely impervious to light. I could tell the darkness wasn't complete. Light was somehow sneaking in here and there but couldn't figure out how to eliminate it. Maybe that's the reason the images on the negatives were not crisp and sharp.

To process the prints you had to put them into a tray filled with developer, then a tray with fixer, and then they had to be washed in a tray with holes on the side so there could be a continuous flow over the surface of the paper, removing all the chemical residue. (Honestly, I don't remember all the steps in the process any more.)

For my print washer I sliced through an old bicycle tube, fixed one open end around the shower head and aimed the other end at an old plastic dishpan with several holes cut into the side to let the water wash over the prints. Total Rube Goldberg. To get high-quality prints the temperature of the developer was critical as was the timing of the exposure of each print. I wasted a lot of paper on bad prints. It was all pretty slapdash, and the results were somehow not equal to Hans Windisch's work. Once I tried developing a roll of color film with my black-and-white chemicals. (Why? Probably to avoid the cost of sending it out to a lab or just to see what would happen. What happened was the chemical bath came out filled with blobs, and there were images on the negatives but they were unusable.

Then it was summer 1967, and I was working nights at Malley's. And then it was fall and I was in a play at St. Augustine's, and then I was in at least one play every semester till I graduated. I must have given up on photography. What happened to that photo enlarger and all the other equipment? I would love to believe that I gave it or sold it to Scott McGregor, who has made a career of photography and comic art. But I just made that up. I have no idea. Maybe others remember. 

But I remember at the time feeling ashamed that I was not as systematic and disciplined and careful as all those other Ignatius kids. And that was part of the feeling that came back to me last week, some 50 years later. And I suppose it had something to do with the fact that I was producing short YouTube videos that I could see had little problems, some rough edges. And a podcast that I had just produced also had rough edges. But I published them all anyway. The pattern has been to learn while doing, and accepting something less than perfect while rushing to see the final product. Impatience, impulsiveness. Nightmare.