Lily Cho. 2018. ‘Darkroom Material: Race and the Chromogenic Print Process’, Postmodern Culture, Johns Hopkins University Press.
Not only has the darkroom been largely absent from contemporary cultural criticism on photography; it has also been a space of normativized whiteness.
What happens when we understand the darkroom technician as separate from the photographer, but playing a crucial role in the making of a photographic image? And what happens when we think about that technician as a racialized figure who might bring their own histories and techniques to bear in photographic production? Working alone in the deep red glow of the darkroom safelight, the technician has not occupied much of the discussion in contemporary photography theory.
Theorizing darkroom work through the figure and craft of the darkroom technician destabilizes the binary between the photographer and the photographic subject. More, understanding that the work of the darkroom can manifest across multiple cultural registers opens up the homogenizing tendencies of its techne; even when technicians used the same enlargers, printers, papers, and fluids, they used them differently in different places. To think of the darkroom process as my father did, as 改色, is to put in place radically different circuits of knowledge, craft, and practice than those dominated by Kodak and Ilford.
Rather than celebrating the idiosyncrasies and instabilities fundamental to the wet process, the Kodak system flattened photography’s differences. In so doing, it suppressed the possibilities of photography as a site of volatile – rather than mechanically reproduced – memory.
The print process therefore demands thinking about photography at a crucially unstable and unfixed moment. Before it is printed, in the black waters of the darkroom, the photograph is literally in development. Much can happen here, in the red glow and maroon shadows of the safelight. Many decisions are made, and each one will alter the image.
The darkroom technician’s work is usually invisible; it happens where there is no witness.
While it seems to lack the panache of the auteurship wielded by the photographer, this work too is marked by complex decision-making, craft, and artistry. Despite the job title, the darkroom technician’s work is never merely technical, not simply an automated process of churning out contact sheets and printing images through a prescribed formula.
Like the photographer, the darkroom technician must master an array of equipment and substances. The enlarger. The printer. The chemicals and the paper. And the norm references or indexes. It matters where and in what context a photography technician learns their craft; like photography itself, photographic development processes are not neutral.
he first character, 改, is a verb that means to correct, alter, improve, or remodel. The second character, 色, is a noun that means color, tint, or hue, but also form, body, beauty, and the desire for beauty. This phrasing differs radically from Anglophone terminology for the same work: wet process, or developing the photograph. Further, 改色 is terminology that emerged outside of the industrialization of chemical photography.
When so much of the terminology for photographic practice is dominated by metaphor and analogy (developing the negative, shooting the film), 改色 describes exactly the work that must be done in order for the negative to be printed as a positive image. As a term, 改色 understands that the film that has been “shot” requires a great deal of further work before it can be printed as a finished image. It also assumes that the photograph is only finished after this process of correction.
The passage from negative to positive is not merely a mechanical process of inversion and imprinting. It is full of conflict. It is not linear. It is a procedure and a process that demands balance. More, the truth of the image is not simply already there waiting for a technical or mechanical process to make it complete or visible. Rather, it is always under construction. Each print is a repetition that is also original. Repetition is originary.
If each print is an instance of making race disappear only to make it reappear in a stable and fixed form, dwelling in the difference of each reprint, each repetition, can make visible the potentiality of the photograph’s passage from negative to positive. It opens up a generative space for racialized representation that has been largely invisible: the work of darkroom technicians who are not white, and who do not print and produce photographs according to norms and conventions of whiteness.
That is, the darkroom technician understands that there is no image without interaction; that color emerges, paradoxically, from the removal of color; and that this work is ultimately one of balance.
To pay serious attention to the darkroom as a crucial site of the event of photography is to attend to the instances where the photograph is at its most vulnerable, already in existence but not yet formed. It is to understand that the materiality of the process also draws us to the immaterial – the instances where the photograph could be something else, something other than what it will be. It is anticipatorily spectral.
Racialized and diasporic identities that are constructed out of and despite processes of fragmentation and dispersal are always in process. They are perpetually at risk of becoming unfixed and always in transition. Understanding photography as a process of development demands inhabiting the vulnerabilities of these instabilities.
Playing Against The Camera 