Meditations on a Dark Room
Back in June, while attending a seminar in Joisey, we were asked to close our eyes, get comfy, and go through a guided visualization. OK, I thought, this is easy – after all, not 4 months ago I had received my yoga teacher training certification and already “knew” how to meditate. The silky voice brought us down and then asked to picture a comforting place. Again, easy, right? Especially for a visual artist! My place should have been a vivid playground with swishes of color and soothing rushes of sound. But I surprised myself. Instead, I was surrounded by cool noiseless darkness. The voice brought us back to the present and my boyfriend relayed his wonderplace … and I wondered what happened to mine. Why the darkness? What kind of contentment was I searching for?
Disappointed, I let my little failure of the imagination fade in the busy months ahead. During that time I enrolled in a photography darkroom course at Callanwolde Art Center in Atlanta to print my black and whites fresh from our Right Brain Stimulus Plan road trip. In the meantime, I purchased my shiny Olympus EP-1 PEN and started to realize what digital can do for you. So easy … such high quality with a diminishing pricetag. And fun – just take pictures and you can just delete them, easy peasy!
But then my class started. The first week we didn’t start printing. But the second week … ahhh … well it all came back. And after another month I was back in love with the enveloping darkness. The quietude. The solace. The time dictated by the chemistry … by the prints themselves … watching minutes instead of hours tick by on the clock. Test strip, develop, stop, fix and check … how many seconds? Waltzing with the prints, grab, drip, move to the next tray. Spin, back to the enlarger, add another print … it’s a caboose on the chemistry train. Then wash, blink in the full bright lights, squeegee off the day, hang it to dry.
And again I’m hooked on those chemicals, the touch, the dance, the movements, that magical paper, watching the image bleed into the whiteness. And my shiny new PEN just seems like a tool for convenience … capturing the right now but not the eternity. Is the darkroom dead? Maybe, but it’s ripe for a resurrection. The functionality has died, much like the need for realistic portrait painting died over a hundred years ago. But there will always be a yearning for wetting your hands in the process. For losing yourself in that rosy darkness. For that messy sloppy analog dance with the light.
Damn Liz. Nice writing! I was swept away by your verbal artistry:).