by lens
Leaning on a very nice project by photographer Richard Nicholson in which he is documenting some of the last remaining photographic darkrooms in London and a post by the Guardian that has been published under the headline of “the dying art of the photographic darkroom" and that featured this project, I tried to leave you some personal thoughts, that has been haunting me for a while.
Even more since I read an interesting manuscript called “Rauchzeichen aus dem Labyrinth, Der onthologische Anspruch der Photographie” by Steffen Kammler last year (N°6 in the series published as the “Rostocker Phänomenologische Manuskripte”).
Bringing what i read in the manuscript together with what i saw in Richard Nicholsons project and what I experience of being a photographer that still partly processes in the darkroom, i am wondering … “What esle is going to be gone if the photographic darkroom really dies out? Where (if there) is this thin border between photography in the broader and photography in the narrower sense? The border, that after Steffen Kammler and in conjunction with the darkroom would have to be drawn behind “the negative that has been the last instance that has direct contact with the light and therefore carries the trace of the referent”? Something that digital photography can not claim for itself as “the lightsensor that literally takes the place of the photosensitive layer, in comparison does not show any trace of contact after the contact with the light …” because “the location of the light-contact is seperated from the location where the information is stored.” (Steffen Kammler, Rauchzeichen …, page 28).
I’m not a philosopher and I know that in the end it might not really matter for the (average) spectator. But still I do - as an artist - confront myself with the media I’m working with. As I had to deal with some slight problems after Kodak lately decided to stop production of a certain paper I partly used over the last 9 years of printing - and loved, I had to think about that question of the media even more and had to involuntarily compare those two (very different) crafts from an at least process oriented point of view:
“The craft and process of taking a negative, filterting colors and getting a result by printing in the darkroom” VS “the craft of ... Read more ...
