I always thought that someday, when I was done with the cares of earning a living, I would return to my old passion, photography. But now that I am nearly at a point where I might do so, the craft—if not the art—has utterly changed. No one mixes chemicals anymore, and I feel sad that I won’t have to board up the windows of an unused bathroom, or buy a big metal printer. I feel sad, too, for the waning of my generation. Most of all, though, I am sad for the end of that womblike darkness and the silence of that ancient relic of a more solitary age: the dark room.
I have always been driven to compose my world, and have never entirely understood people who seem content to accept the random features of existence as they are. Their functional homes—possessing a table here, a few chairs there, baby carriage and kitchen towels—feel dead to me, or worse: like small black holes, sucking energy out of the universe.
My first memories are of a pitch-black room, red light casting an eerie but exciting glow on everything. I remember my father bent over an image, most likely of me, his precious youngest child. That was a “father” to me—someone who, when not raging like King Lear, created images out of strange light and even stranger darkness.
It never seemed strange, though, that my father wanted to spend hours every weekend in his dark room. I spent many hours in there with him, staring at black and white images beneath the red glow of the printer light, watching his strong hands glow, listening to the timer’s violent, sudden buzz. The chemicals had a deliciously acrid smell that I would sniff until my head spun.
Outside the dark room, my father frightened me. When not focused on one of his curing arts—music and photography—he could erupt into violence at any time. Rarely was it physical violence, although I do recall a few thrown plates and a single punch to the gut—not for having run away, but for having returned, to face his grief at having lost me. My sister, too old to have been much help, recalls being hit with a broom as this tortured man leapt from a closet to hit her and her forbidden date.
My mother feared him as well, but even more so did she fear the world beyond him: starvation, food poisoning, and disease. Car accidents, criminals, single womanhood, and weight-gain. Most of all, though, she feared losing me to an ocean-deep passion she could not begin to fathom, one that removed me from the narrow world she knew and confused with safety.
I grew to associate the dark room as a place marvelously absent from fear. At the age of twelve or thirteen, I returned there alone, with my own ambitions and a Nikon camera that cost $204 dollars.
I remember the exact amount because it took a year of babysitting for me to save the money. All that time, I kept staring at its picture in a Japanese mail order catalog, until I could have drawn its every detail by heart.
The moment Nikkie, as I called it, arrived, it became a permanent part of my body, resting either between my developing breasts, or chipping away at my skinny hipbone. The camera weighed several pounds and sometimes I became queasy from its sheer weight. After Nikkie entered my life, nothing would be the same. My world changed from a bland and intransigent suburb into a warehouse filled with both natural and unnatural treasures.
Soon after getting my camera, I discovered the platinum prints of Alfred Steiglitz in the Museum of Modern Art, in New York City, and from that moment, I felt I had to create those same sublime shades of gray, that silver luminosity.
I procured a recipe to make platinum prints and studied how to make them. You had to bring the plates out into the sun and leave them there—it sounded frighteningly imprecise. Mistakes would be expensive. I could probably afford some platinum if I saved for another year, but the prospect of working with hydrochloric acid proved too daunting.
Fortunately, there were other riches to be had, other techniques to use. By the sound of the furnace’s roar, surrounded by the tart smell of fixer, which made my nose run, and the poisonous yellow glow of the stop bath, I spent my days staring down at glossy white paper, heart thumping wildly at the vast unknown spread out before me.
Whenever I clicked the printer’s shutter, I became giddy with the possibilities of that unrevealed, soon-to-be-revealed, image. “One, one thousand, two, one thousand,” I counted, just like my father had taught me, always hoping that this time I had snagged a masterpiece. I never knew upon taking a photograph whether it was destined for greatness. It was in the dark room that greatness happened—or didn’t.
The delicious anticipation surrounded me like the cold liquid that surrounded my fingers, dark and wordless. I gently rubbed the paper’s surface and—there! Just there! Gray crept into one corner, then another, and then unrecognizable shapes would appear whose perfection nearly made my heart stop.
It was like the times when, as a young child, I amused myself by pressing my eyeballs down onto the ridge of my palms. Soon, feeling a sort of delicious ache, I would see curtains parting, as if I were traveling into a snug, velveteen tunnel. At the end of the tunnel, upon a starry stage, a message was lit up in neon bulbs. The letters of the message would begin to assemble and would just be at the point of revealing their secret to me when ache turned to pain, and I would have to lift my head from my hands, and the nearly-discovered mystery would dissolve back into bright, inchoate stars.
In the dark room, it was always disappointing to turn on the light and observe the truth: that my pictures were never as beautiful or marvelous as I had imagined them to be. In the light they became merely imperfect images of things in particular, very different from the Aristotelian ideals in my head or on the wet paper in the developer, before the images had fully appeared. No, then I always found a bit of dust that I had not seen beneath the printer’s forgiving red light. It was tedious to have to return to that now un-mysterious image, remove the negative from its steel trap, and dust it off. Inevitably, another minute speck took the place of the one I had so painstakingly removed. I wanted, not reality, not the thing in itself, but something a bit removed from reality: finer, and far more beautiful.
Apart from those early memories of my father as dark room deity, I recall dreading his lessons. He was an impatient teacher, versed in the old-world techniques of humiliation and ridicule. Yet he taught me anyway, by the example of his prodigious gifts that still have him playing piano and grabbing at his grandchildren’s digital cameras at the age of ninety-one: palsied, frail, and no longer frightening.
My father was never a literary man, but he knew and still knows innately that, by composing the world, one composes the self. He certainly needed composing: not just to satisfy his creative urges, but also to calm him. Photography gave him temporal respite from his demons.
I sought to compose myself, too, sometimes spending an entire day revising a single photograph. I wrapped my solitude around me to protect myself from my parents, and to stave off the sense that I was not like other girls my age, was utterly inadequate to the mystifying task of womanhood.
But it was not merely to defend myself that I shut myself up in that dark room. By gazing for hours at my spoils from the world outside, I was slowly discovering the inner contours of my own brain. I had the wonderful sensation that, like God, I was creating a product so composed of me that I could disappear entirely into it. I would lose track of time, and only my mother’s frantic shouts would draw me out of my hypnotic state. Her footsteps toward that hallowed darkness always had me roaring like a lion, until I heard their doleful retreat.
And yet, for all the photographs I produced in the dark room, the ones I recall most clearly are those that never came to be. These were grievous technical mistakes that nearly made me abandon photography altogether.
The first mistake happened when I was fourteen. I was staying with a family in Libourne, France, a tiny farming village near St. Emilion. The Bertrands owned a small farm and vineyards. They had a daughter my age, and a son, Sebastian, a little bit older. Sebastian was meant to take over the farm some day, but the fall after I left, he was killed in a motorcycle accident.
Everything about their lives struck me as marvelously strange. Not just their language, but the way light struck the bougainvillea on the old stones in the late afternoon; the cool thickness of the linen sheets, which smelled as sweet as the grapey air; and the utter blackness at night, in a place with no lamps but only the light of stars to see by.
The Bertrands brought me to the foothills of the Pyrenees, and the moment we arrived, a purple light above the mountains heralded a magnificent storm. The peaks were shrouded in a diaphanous cloth of clouds. White tines of light raked the jagged mountain peaks. I snapped away with my camera as my host family looked on admiringly.
Later, when I went to rewind the roll, it wouldn’t budge. In the black bag, my frantic hands soon discovered the problem: the film had never advanced. The Bertrands must have shrugged—human devices were not meant to capture such wondrous acts of God—but I was inconsolable. That surreal purple sky, those bolts of lightening—of what use were they if not captured? Of what use was anything if left to pass away, unrecorded? Only now, in hindsight, am I able to question the ingratitude of my youth, when experience meant nothing if not materially possessed.
The following year, an even more grievous loss occurred. I was standing with my mother in front of the New York Public Library in Manhattan. I had thrown down a small piece of bread, when suddenly pigeons began swooping down from the tall buildings surrounding us. First there were half a dozen, then two, and then it seemed that hundreds of birds were flapping and fluttering all around me. I snapped away in this storm of feathers as my mother, outside the whirling vortex, called to me to run.
But I stood my ground. I would not run. It felt not like my mother was rescuing me from the birds, but that the birds were rescuing me from my mother. In that one moment, I could contradict her world of prosaic safety, the sad, boring world of things as they were. “Over here!” the birds screamed, “anything is possible!” There was no limit, they told me, to what the eye could hunt, capture, and transform.
Back home, I developed the roll as usual. I wound the film in the dark around a steel loop—I loved the deep scratching sound of the convex film as its edges slipped into the loop, winding in perfectly concentric circles—but disaster showed itself soon enough: As I hung the roll up to dry, I saw at once that the film was perfectly transparent. Nothing at all had been recorded on it. My lovely images had died without having ever been born.
I cried out. My father, hearing me, came running to the rescue, but when he saw the clear strip, he frowned. Soon, he discovered the problem.
“You didn’t shake the can of developer. The inert stuff settles on top,” he told me.
Heartbroken, I stopped taking pictures. I was finished, I told myself.
Instead, I moped about the house playing Bach fugues too slowly, contemplating mortality, and reading Albert Camus. I wrote in my diary, gloomy page upon page. In it, I found I could conjure that same godly magic trick of placing myself elsewhere. It was a safe place, too, one I would take with me when I left home. The diary then became my mobile dark room, into which I brought all my traumas and, simultaneously, the means of their cure.
Art was my joy and my delight, but with it, I realized, came terrible risks. Those first failures didn’t feel like the disappointments of a failed hobby, but rather like some kind of death. But I was still just a girl. I still had so much hope, and those fallow months were so onerously dull. I found that, like my father, I could not live in a house with a chair here, a table there. I needed to rearrange the furniture. And so, after a few months, I returned to my dark room, consoled by its limitless plenitude, lured by its bright alchemy.
