#239: alchemy in the darkroom

"Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it" -Ralph Waldo Emerson

My dearest reader, greetings on a Sunday afternoon.

I intended to send you this love (news)letter last week, right after experiencing a most wonderful Darkroom Photography workshop at the Chennai Photo Biennale Foundation in Chennai. But like film photographs that take time to reveal their true beauty, this too took its own sweet time.

There was a potent sort of sorcery and magic at play in the darkroom, agitating the chemical-filled canisters, awaiting any sort of proof that the images I had captured really did manifest on the negative. What a rush when those visuals did appear, implying that I had successfully stopped time.

I’m so stoked to be sharing some of my favorite images from the workshop, particularly because they serve as memories of memories:

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Poetry Corner

1. Double Exposure by May Swenson

Taking a photo of you taking a photo of me, I see
the black snout of the camera framed by hair, where

your face should be. I see your arms and one hand
on the shutter button, the hedge behind you and

beyond, below, overexposed water and sky wiped white.
Some flecks out of focus are supposed to be boats.

Your back toward what light is left, you’re not
recognizable except by those cutoff jeans that I

gave you by shooting from above, forgetting your
legs. So, if I didn’t know, I wouldn’t know who

you are, you know. I do know who, but you, you know,
could be anybody. My mistake. It was because I

wanted to trip the shutter at the exact moment you
did. I did when you did, and you did when I did.

I can’t wait to see yours of me. It’s got to be
even more awful. A face, facing the light, pulled up

into a squint behind the lens, which must reflect
the muggy setting sun. Some sort of fright mask

or Mardi Gras monster, a big glass Cyclopean eye
superimposed on a flattened nose, that print,

the one you took of me as I took one of you. Who,
or what, will it be—will I  be, I wonder? Can’t wait.

2. War Photographer by Carol Ann Duffy

In his dark room he is finally alone
with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows.
The only light is red and softly glows,
as though this were a church and he
a priest preparing to intone a Mass.
Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass.

He has a job to do. Solutions slop in trays
beneath his hands, which did not tremble then
though seem to now. Rural England. Home again
to ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel,
to fields which don’t explode beneath the feet
of running children in a nightmare heat.

Something is happening. A stranger’s features
faintly start to twist before his eyes,
a half-formed ghost. He remembers the cries
of this man’s wife, how he sought approval
without words to do what someone must
and how the blood stained into foreign dust.

A hundred agonies in black and white
from which his editor will pick out five or six
for Sunday’s supplement. The reader’s eyeballs prick
with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers.
From the aeroplane he stares impassively at where
he earns his living and they do not care.

3. Portrait of my Father as a Young Man by Rainer Maria Rilke

In the eyes: dream. The brow as if it could feel
something far off. Around the lips, a great
freshness--seductive, though there is no smile.
Under the rows of ornamental braid
on the slim Imperial officer's uniform:
the saber's basket-hilt. Both hands stay
folded upon it, going nowhere, calm
and now almost invisible, as if they
were the first to grasp the distance and dissolve.
And all the rest so curtained within itself,
so cloudy, that I cannot understand
this figure as it fades into the background--.

Oh quickly disappearing photograph
in my more slowly disappearing hand.

4. A Photograph by Shirley Toulson

The cardboard shows me how it was
When the two girl cousins went paddling
Each one holding one of my mother’s hands,
And she the big girl - some twelve years or so.
All three stood still to smile through their hair
At the uncle with the camera, A sweet face
My mother’s, that was before I was born
And the sea, which appears to have changed less
Washed their terribly transient feet.
Some twenty- thirty- years later
She’d laugh at the snapshot. “See Betty
And Dolly," she’d say, “and look how they
Dressed us for the beach." The sea holiday
was her past, mine is her laughter. Both wry
With the laboured ease of loss
Now she’s has been dead nearly as many years
As that girl lived. And of this circumstance
There is nothing to say at all,
Its silence silences.

5. Fragment by Cynthia Cruz

I would like this poem
to be a machine.
Concise, metallic,
a counting apparatus.
A means to keep each moment
contained and fixed, akin
to a series of Polaroids,
photographed and fixed
to cardboard or some other
paper-panel backing.
Then photographed and affixed
with Scotch tape to the wall.
Or, a vitrine, a glass case,
within which to gather and collect
each moment, each object
representing each moment.
A bundle, assemblage, or archive
constructed of letters and notes,
diary entries and fragments,
articles and photographs
torn from books.
A machine that measures
the space between
the body and the mind,
the dissonance that exists
inside that moment. And there,
in that static, in the rip,
the mar, the error
between, is where,
when it begins, it will
begin.

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Communities of Practice

Some amazing photography-based projects and collectives I adore:

• @loversonfilm, an IG page curating analogue love ❤️

• Her Pixel Story, a collective of Kashmiri women photographers bringing distinct visual narratives from Kashmir.

• Photo Pedagogy, created by photography teachers for photography teachers.

• 8:30: 9 women. 9 photographers. Across India.

• AllFormat is an international collective of photographic artists who share a love for film photography and forms of darkroom-based creative expression.

• She Shoots Film, dedicated to improving the representation, consideration and celebration of women in the field of photography.

• darkroom is a mobile photography program for vulnerable and underprivileged children residing in south east of turkey, a few kilometers away from the Syrian border.

• The Dark Room Collective was an influential African-American poetry collective. Established in 1988, the collective hosted a reading series that featured leading figures in Black literature.

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Words that resonated

via

“Sometimes I wait a long time before developing my film so I forget what I had captured. The sensation of the image appearing on the paper in the darkroom is magic.”
-Nicolas Hermann

“Our lives at times seem a study in contrast…love & hate, birth & death, right & wrong… everything seen in absolutes of black & white. Too often we are not aware that it is the shades of grey that add depth & meaning to the starkness of those extremes.”
– Ansel Adams

“What I want in poetry is a kind of abstract photography
Of the nerves, but what I like in photography
Is the poetry of   literal pictures of the neighborhood.”
-From Pictures of Little Letters, John Koethe

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Shoutout to Varun, Gautami and the rest of the CPB team for such an incredible experience. Not only is there more love for the camera and what it’s capable of doing but there’s also a rekindled excitement for seeing and experiencing the world around. So thanks for that :’)

ALSO, if there’s film photographers among you who are reading this, I’d love to see your work and feel more inspired. So please do write back and share? Merci.

Here’s to beauty in abundance, and taking a moment to capture it. 📸

Love,
Rohini