Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Crappy Darkrooms

Last night I pulled an old book of mine out of my little photo library room. The book was on building darkrooms, I think it might be one of the first books I ever bought related to photography. It was fun looking through this thing again but one section amazed me. At the beginning of the book in the opening chapters they had photographs of famous photographers darkrooms.

The surprising thing is the majority of these great photogs worked in crappy/shitty/lousy darkrooms. How the hell did they work in such shitty places and yet create such wonderful prints? A few photographers, Bernice Abbot, Jeanloup Sieff had quite nice darkrooms but others like Harry Callahan and W. Eugene Smith worked in tiny, dirty, ill equipped places. Callahan even had to do his printing in cycles (not sure how he managed that) as the wooden sink he had made was to narrow and short to hold all his trays.

Gosh I feel spoiled now, my darkroom is very nice and very large. If guys like Callahan and Smith could create the great work they did in the holes they were working out of then I have no excuses!

Dry side of W Eugene Smith's darkroom