Empty Dark Room
When I was born in Hamburg, Germany my dad used an all mechanical Nikon camera to scoop up the light bouncing off of my pink baby flesh, new to the world, and raced home. He returned to the hospital with printed photographs, and mailed copies to a slew of excited relatives around the world. The image traveled via an ancient form of internet powered by a rusting Fiat Spyder and a series of postal employee handoffs. It was brought to life by my dad’s skills with a series of chemicals, tanks, special papers and something called an enlarger: a long-necked metal bird who’s eye looked ever downward. It waited patiently to imprint the next invisible image, the paper’s secrets only unveiled later as they slowly emerged beneath a clear chemical bath in the dim red light in a process that remained forever magical. My father stood before me now, holding that magical bird by the throat, saying, “I don’t know who would even want this stuff any more”.
He had only been back from the hospital for a few days, and I worried about the way he was exerting himself as he yanked out drawers and boxes. Days ago he hadn’t been able to stand on his own. No matter how skilled the doctors that had rerouted and repackaged his heart, his body had, in effect, just been hit by a mac truck. But my genetic code is half his and so he couldn’t handle inaction any more than I can. The time of film photography had passed and now that I was back in town it was time to tear apart the old dark room.
My parents designed and built our house to have, as a central component, a dark room for printing and developing our own photos. It had a water supply, drainage, and counter space for all of the baths. Strips of drying developed film hung from the ceiling: long black tape filled with tiny images of people in reverse black and white. There was, as in nearly every room in the house, an old stereo system playing classical music. Those old systems with their already obsolete 8-track tape decks still had radios that were “perfectly good” and never cost more than five dollars. When developing film, the room had to be completely dark and so the howling of a tenor opera singer filled the space left vacant by light. I remember feeling through the process, carefully loading the film strip onto the spool and into the stainless steel canister, slipping it through my fingers to be sure I could keep track of it, those voices ringing through my head and keeping me company.
“I think your mother has a piano student who is taking photography. We can see if she wants anything before we just dump it at the Goodwill.”
In the first house I remember as a child, in West Chicago, I helped my dad tape black plastic over the windows in the one tiny bathroom. We broke apart hand-rolled film spools and developed them on top of the back of the toilet. I was terrified to handle this mysterious material that could be destroyed by the touch of light or my fingers, but he made me struggle through the process, insisting that I learn by trying. He produced endless pictures of my sisters and I, large black and white images including one of myself with a mop of home cut hair covered by a crushed felt cowboy hat. That particular image grew and changed with me over time. At first it was fascinating, then embarrassing, and at last adorable as I grew older.
“These are some pretty nice lenses.”
In Jr. High I produced my first monster movie made entirely of still images. It was really more of a comic book. I rolled my own film, built a structure out of cool-whip containers and lego people, and had a dinosaur-like creature arrive to destroy the whole thing piece by piece. I used a classic dark room trick, and by waving a cutout piece of paper over the image as the enlarger projected it into the waiting paper below, I created the creature’s fiery breath that set the raised roadway full of matchbox cars ablaze. I called the creature Schalk, an old German world I found in a German/English dictionary that meant, “trickster”. The book was a school project, and so the deadline had me covered in chemicals, alone in that dark room, for days. At last I crawled upstairs to rejoin my sisters and sat exhausted holding my dry, cracked hands. For years afterwards, as I walked through the halls at school, I would hear the both taunting and endearing mock cries of terror, “Schalk! Schalk!”
“Here, just throw all of these pieces and the chemicals in a box and leave them at the bottom of the stairs. At least we should keep them together.”
I started picking out and sorting old cameras, with their black leather covers and old metal bodies, into a box. They don’t make anything out of metal any more.
“OK, I have to go lay down.”
My dad headed upstairs to sleep and I continued placing the lenses, filters and paper together in low cardboard boxes for the last time. I grouping them carefully, perhaps just to honor them. Perhaps just in case there was some last bit of use in them, one last person who still loved the feel of doing things by hand, of seeing images grow like blooming flowers in a watery bed, who wanted to feel the touch of the slippery surface when moving the print from one bath to the next, who loved the sound of the timer humming as its hand swept slowly back towards its place, the image held glowing before them until, with a click, it vanished again into darkness.
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