One wants a room with no view, so imagination and memory can meet in the dark. —Annie Dillard
These chromogenic prints, photographed in the colour darkroom, symbolically represent a moment of transition. It aims to point at a dying analogue process, alongside the end of my access to that process. The three photographs are of the darkroom hallway, the chromogenic processor, and Room K. You cannot see what I have photographed in the darkroom, but you can imagine it. What precedes it and what comes after is not visible.
Perhaps I’ve overthought the matter, but the nostalgia is setting in and I haven’t even left. I suspect my affinity to the process is because I’ve spent a significant amount of time trying to perfect a skill that is becoming obsolete. As analogue printing sits on the cusp between contemporary and historical, I cling to the process despite our heavily digitized lives. And then, of course, there is the passing of time. A sixty-second exposure for the print. Seventy-five years of the printing itself. And an uncertainty of how many more to come.
I’m not quite sure what the allure is. Part of it is the quiet solitude of the darkroom. And then there is the patience it warrants, alongside one's relationship with the materials that is both intimate and meditative. You wait in the dark as the paper feeds through the processor, the edges caressing and running along your fingers until it is gone. And then you wait, patiently, on the other side.
The series of three photographs is about the death of the present and the uncertainty of what comes next. We can never really know the outcome – be it what will show up on the negative film frames or the unpredictable future. As our lives progress further and further into the digital realm, I am reluctant to move with it. There is something lacklustre in it all—so efficient, so immediate, and so predictable. But, perhaps, inevitable. It is difficult to reconcile this fact after spending several years attempting to perfect one’s analogue process. I could foresee the outcome when I had begun, but it is still strange that in the end this process will merely be a memory.
24 x 24 inches
Chromogenic Prints
Edition of 2
2015