Nano

Last One Out, Please Turn On The Light: a survey of London’s remaining professional darkrooms

roy bass, michael dyer associates

Summer 2006. Durst announces that it will no longer manufacture photographic enlargers. Sales have plummeted from a peak of 107,000 units in 1979 to just a few hundred units in recent years.

1979 was the year my father constructed a darkroom and introduced me to photography. I was immediately entranced by the printing process, and I cherished the long hours spent in this dark, silent, private space. Ever since the darkroom has been integral to my work as a photographer. But for how much longer?

Labs are closing their doors - Joe’s Basement, Primary, Metro Clerkenwell, Metro Soho have all gone. Polaroid has stopped making instant film. Clients are demanding the immediate feedback of digital photography.

This project, shot on 4”x5” film, documents London’s remaining professional darkrooms. It is based on my nostalgia for a dying craft (there are no young printers). It is in these rooms that printers have worked their magic, distilling the works of photographers such as David Bailey, Anton Corbijn and Nick Knight into a recognisable ‘look’.

I have lit these often-gloomy spaces to reveal the beauty of the machinery; enlargers are masterpieces of industrial design. And I have sought to shed light on the surrounding personal workspaces (snapshots of family members, souvenirs from globetrotting photographers, guidebooks to Photoshop, out-takes from glamour shoots, lists of unpaid invoices).

Several of the darkrooms featured have since closed down. Others will surely follow. (The darkroom with the slogan pinned to the wall, ‘I want to stay here forever’, was dismantled shortly after I photographed it and is now being converted into luxury apartments.)

Since starting this project, I’ve become a late and reluctant convert to digital photography. I now spend less time in the darkroom and more time in front of the computer. With film I had a network of contacts across London and I felt embedded in the city. In comparison, digital feels disembodied.

I miss the darkroom’s ambience, the physicality of dodging and burning, the shaping of the light.

More here

Persona

Persona

Is Persona the way others perceive us? Or is it the way we perceive ourselves?

This project allowed me to explore my perceptions of other people, while also giving them a chance to express themselves. I took portraits in locations I associate with each subject – whether or not these spaces have any personal relevance to their identities. Although it was to some degree a collaborate process, I deliberately posed each subject in ways that express the images, thoughts, and emotions that pop up in my head when I think of him or her.

I asked each subject to lend me a few objects that while small say something about him or herself. I asked the subjects to choose these objects independently, without any necessary connection to the portraits I took. I hoped, in some small way, to change my role from that of an artist with an agenda to that of a more neutral documentarian.

Utopia?

Utopia?

In a utopia, people would live together harmoniously, happily, and fulfilled.

We don’t live in a place like that.

We live in a world where humans and relationships have been replaced with technology, substances, and the mass media. Why engage in real human contact when it’s so much easier to let these other things mediate your existence?

In this project, I attempt to depict of these mediating influences that, in many ways, control our lives. But who’s to say life would be better if we did away with these things entirely?

Emulation

Emulation: Bernd and Hilla Becher

Bernd and Hilla Becher started taking photographs in Germany in the late 1950s. Their photographs document industry all over the world: blast furnaces, water towers, winding towers, factory facades, gas tanks. The Bechers’ images strip down industry to its most basic parts. The composition is simple: centered and straight-on. The tonal range of the images is deep, yet few if any shadows can be seen. There are no clouds in the sky, and everything in the image is completely sharp. All of these techniques come together to create images that are breathtaking and desolate, but still seductive and intriguing.

Or is it the idea—the depiction of industrial wasteland—that makes the photographs what they are? What is it about, say, a gas tank that makes its photographic documentation captivating? In my emulation, I found objects that share forms seen throughout the Bechers’ body of work: round gas tanks with superstructure, rotary objects, and complicated devices with unclear functions.

Do these forms have any essential meaning? Or is it the Bechers’ context that makes them silently sing?

Mapping: Infrastructure

Mapping: Infrastructure

We live at the surface of a layered world. We move from place to place on top of streets and sidewalks, by foot, bike, and car – thinking little about what we’re walking upon. Not just the Earth, but what we’ve stuck below. We love to outsource our dirty work – carrying energy, water, information, and sewage – to pipe, wire, and conduit below the ground and in the sky. We only care about these things when they break, even though we rely on them all day, every day.

Inspired by my experiences last summer as an intern at a Japanese natural gas company, I attempted to map vestiges of infrastructure. These telltale signs of the world beneath are not the whole story: the true story is carried by the gas, water, electricity, telephone, and sewage services we use, without a second thought.

And sometimes, there’s a world above, too.

The Fabric of Brooklyn A digital photography series

“The Fabric of Brooklyn” series presents a vivid and accurate portrayal of the peopling of Brooklyn at a specific point in history. With elaborate digitally composited images, the project compresses time in informationally rich ways, and paints a portrait of neighborhoods through the minutiae of their fine details.

Each image is composited from parts of up to 100 different digital images, and its subjects represent every person to pass through the fixed frame over a span of time - usually 20 - 60 minutes. While the resulting image creates a completely artificial scene, it also functions as an objective sampling of the unique population who live, work, and play in Brooklyn’s neighborhoods.

Click on the thumbnails to see a larger version.