darkrooms past

in these strange times when i don't step into a darkroom for six months, these strange times when everyone is affected by a single virus, everything we do probably needs to be done differently from now on. for my part, i had already decided to move from new york last fall and was set to leave at the end of the school year. and that's what happened, with no going-away get-togethers, no making plans to see friends in los angeles. so i took the time to build a darkroom and started printing again. life goes on. on some level. and inside my new darkroom i reminisce about darkrooms past.

in france, my first enlarger, a christmas present, was a durst for 35mm only and a cheap 50mm. i had a canon av-1 since my 12th birthday a few months earlier. a darkroom in the bathroom, mostly rc paper, processing color chromes in a bain-marie in a porcelain sink.

another darkroom i remember was in seattle, i was there for a year and made prints of my own pictures for the high school newspaper and yearbook, lots of prints, back when i aspired to be a photo journalist.

but my first professional darkroom was a color one, in new york. the year i graduated from college, from the darkrooms of sid kaplan. i worked the night shift as a color printer, duratrans for bus stops, marlboro red and parliament blue, 1990 in midtown manhattan. i was the only photographer there, a manager would do the color correction for all negs. a really fast system and printers don't need that much training. i knew how to color print, but there was no room for interpretation, this was commercial printing.

the next darkroom was black and white again, galowitz photographic lab sponsored me and helped me get a green card. there i learned how to run a dip-and-dunk machine, shoot copy negs, make internegs, fix an RC paper processor and sepia tone single weight fiber paper. almost a year later, i was downstairs smoking a cigarette, and sergio purtell walked by - we had met through a common friend- not that unusual since b&h was down the block on 17th street. i now had my work papers, so i moved into his darkroom on white st in tribeca, around 1991. we improved the space to print 8x10 negatives to 30x40 in. with an L shaped wood-resin sink. i was making prints for wendy ewald and susan lipper, also len prince and everything for paper magazine. in the morning i would process from pretty much everyone who shot for paper, then contact sheets, and prints later. sometimes film all day. sergio still has the lab after all these years, black and white on white.

i had stayed in touch with susan lipper and ariane lopez-huici, later making prints in their respective darkrooms. so i printed "grapevine" and "trip" with susan's enlarger, which was placed using the corner of the counter, a good set up, and processed the film as well. i was also printing for ariane lopez-huici, in a darkroom i fixed up in her loft. i really liked her work so it was very pleasant, and the long lunches with her husband and sculptor alain kirili, and the late jazz concerts, sharing a glass of wine with cecil taylor and others. at the time i really enjoyed being a freelance printer, going from darkroom to darkroom. even through ken taranto's darkroom on 14th street, his lab was 2 floors above a photo studio i shared with jason makowski -who co-founded (t)here magazine with me- so i'd print there from time to time, i met leee black childers who was working for ken at the time. i was enjoying my life as a printer more than shooting commercial assignments as a photographer. so i made the switch.

the next day i went to lexington photo labs on 23rd st, said i could print for len prince and got myself a part-time job, that eventually became full-time, the darkrooms there felt right, it was like being part of something. little did i know at the time that the darkroom at this level would take center stage in my life. so i jumped in with both feet. blind spot was being published there and kim and alberto caputo helped me continue lex labs after they decided to move on. so when i turned 30 i took over -what was to me- a legendary black and white lab in new york. it wasn't easy, all i remember from the first week was an order -among many others- of 20 or so negs, a few prints each, 16x20 bleed matte paper, pictures of ralph lauren's car collection by bruce weber. made them myself, on time. i was hooked. whatever concept of the darkroom i had earlier was now erased. lexington labs had 10 darkrooms, hundreds of rolls of film a week -sometimes a day- same with prints. it was non-stop and i was home. my technical skils were put to the test on a daily basis. my darkroom was my office. kim and alberto introduced me to their clients, people i knew by name, from shows and books etc. so i started to print, process film, make copy negs, internegs etc. i started to do the work, i knew how to do that, but i also started to be responsible for all of it, mine and my employees.

a side note here, when you process someone else's film, you are not technically responsible if something goes wrong, but you don't get a second chance in this business. if you went to some exotic location for 2 weeks, with supermodels and a crew of a dozen, for a world famous magazine or a top advertising brand, you have to trust the lab. this is not an issue with digital photography any longer, but it was when only film was available to shoot. we all felt the pressure, but didn't know any different.

anyway, i learnt to recognize all the mishaps of film photography, to recognize the reason for a defect that happened at some point. detective work to explain the chemical mysteries of film photography from manufacturing to processing. but mostly we'd produce work day after day, prints for everything, all types of reproduction needed prints. 

another side note: one person's job was to collect wet prints from the darkrooms, then wash, dry and press them. all day. another fulltime job was just to spot and light retouch.

my personal darkroom there was very much like the other ones -similar to the one i just built at my home- the sink facing the counter, wet side dry side, a couple enlargers. no door - i have put a pocket door here now - but then it was all open, at the end of a long hallway with a curtain. once in, you could walk from darkroom to darkroom, each could have its own light on, it was all very convenient to check on everyone. lisa kereszi printed there before she quit to go to grad school, so did laura larson, charles griffin left and started his own lab that same year, later and if i remember correctly it was nick zinner who helped me print "700 portraits" (3 sets) by timothy greenfield-sanders, before he quit and took a chance with music. it was about photography, all the time, everyone working at the lab was a photographer and found the time to do their own work.

i also had to find and hire printers to keep up with the incoming amount of work every week. some would bring a portfolio of prints, which would seem appropriate, except the lab needed people who could make quick decisions and move on, producing print after print, clean and matching whatever look had been set beforehand, and that other printers were working on the same day in the darkroom next door. a humbling proposition for any aspiring fine art printer. half of the work was usually done 100% or 200% rush, not much time to think...

this was a time when printing 100 negs in a day didn't scare me, and sometimes it was necessary. i had a lot to do outside my darkroom, but what i really wanted to do was be in the dark and print. some negatives, once you've held them against the light with a loupe, once you've seen the rest of the roll, once you've heard the story about how they came to be, well, what can i say? all of that makes me want to print more.

so i always did, and when i had the chance to do just that i took it, and moved lexington lab into coloredge -renamed it lexington b+w- . i had worked with the owner raja before, and i had done digital work for a few years. it was time to be part of something bigger, yet keep the intimacy of the darkroom. another darkroom, L shape, 2 sides with sinks and 2 with enlargers. i still have one of those now, i print with it on a regular basis. it was the early to mid 2000's, we were busy, there was still a lot of commercial work being done on film. i was more comfortable to print without the bureaucratic part, i could spend more time on each print, and be more selective as of what i would print myself. this is where i did all the multitude of tones for ruven afanador's images from sombra. i have written about some of these darkroom experiences over the years in earlier writings. anyway, on the 9th floor on west 21st street in new york, the RC darkroom had a red safe-window to the counter area. when i think of all those contact sheets, enlarged and otherwise... there were 4 people just to process b+w film, and it was a time when analog and digital photography started to blend. lots of LVT negatives of b+w photoshopped fashion images printed on fiber paper. nowadays its a direct process from file to paper, just like when digital-c print took over the color world earlier.

the digital floor was growing and the analog b+w was shrinking, i had done quite a bit of digital work, color and b+w, sitting in front of a screen, but i never connected. i tried but i missed the crafts part of analog printing, the mixing of chemicals and manipulating of actual light through the air, that's what shakes my bones. after a quickly built temporary darkroom -with a sliding door- on 19th st, still in chelsea, i completed the loop and went back to tribeca, half a block from white st -and sergio purtell who had moved his lab to a new location by then- to join charlie griffin's lab, after all these years, ready to dive into large format darkroom printing, explore and push its limits. i had made smaller prints of the same negs a few years back, now the market dictated i print them much larger. we adapted to the demand and made a third mural darkroom, i would go back and forth, for exemple printing cindy sherman's film stills 8x10 or 30x40 in, depending on the order. the largest grain i saw was 35mm t-max 3200 printed 54x81 in. and beautiful. if you've ever seen a mauro restiffe print somewhere. or the sharpest 8x10 negs from mitch epstein's new york arbor, printed as big as fiber paper is manufactured, 56 inches wide, around 70 in length, warmtone with selenium. no room for error. another humbling darkroom experience. it's a great feeling to print from an enlarger on tracks onto a wall and a high ceiling above

you can go back and read earlier entries to this blog about making large darkroom prints here or here.

griffin editions moved from tribeca in manhattan to gowanus in brooklyn and we built new darkrooms of course, this time more adaptable to different types of work, more versatile to handle seperate projects without much effort. i opted for 3 enlargers, two 4x5's and one for 8x10 negatives.

by then i had owned and ran lexington labs for 12 years, and printed for griffin editions for another 12, before that 6 years mostly as a freelance printer, i found myself with 30 years of experience as a professional printer in new york. time to move on. so i did, to los angeles. i really enjoy my new darkroom here, and it's already proving itself able to handle demanding projects not only in quality, but in quantity as well. i've gotten used to the lighting -bright or safe- it is ready for its own adventures, well ventilated, i will try and make it proud : )

stay safe. life goes on.