Following the marketisation of dry plates (i.e., glass plates coated with a gelatine emulsion of silver bromide) from the end of the 1870s, which had greatly simplified the taking and processing of photographs, a growing number of middle-class photographers began using cameras in their leisure time (Pritchard, 2013). The availability of celluloid film from the late-1880s simplified the process further, creating a new market and leisure culture for photography. This familiar narrative identifies a watershed moment in 1888, when George Eastman launched the Kodak camera. The tale of liberation encapsulated in Eastman’s well-known “You press the button, we do the rest” slogan, however, has eclipsed the fact that, for many, “the rest” - i.e., developing and printing one’s own photographs - was actually a fulfilling and enriching experience.

The Victorian popularisation of science and technology, which was aided by the specialist press, how-to literature, informal spaces of learning (e.g., photographic societies, camera clubs, regional federations), and public spectacles, and the social pressure to occupy oneself with activities considered to be ‘respectable’, made it both possible and desirable for amateur practitioners to enter the darkroom (Cunningham, 2008; Dominici, forthcoming; Lightman, 2007). A preliminary text-based study of how amateur photographers described and interpreted their own use of the darkroom indicates that this environment was an important part of their lives: not as a space of research and scientific experimentation, which is what had largely defined the experiences of the amateurs of the previous generation in Britain, but as the space for new experiences of learning, sociability, and self-assertion (Dominici, 2021). These findings call attention to the performative aspect of darkroom work, particularly the tacit knowledge of embedded rituals, and the central role played by the coordination of tactile and sensory bodily gestures. Specifically, they indicate that, by shifting the focus from the role of vision to the sense of touch, these experiences had a profound impact on how people could conceptualise darkroom practices and, consequently, understand photography.

Amateur Darkroom Practices builds on this preliminary work to research such mundane embodied knowledges of making. The material processes of attending to glass plates that occupied non-professional practitioners were, in many ways, unremarkable: although these photographers greatly enjoyed the darkroom practice, many amateurs were not particularly knowledgeable of chemicals and solutions, produced negatives and prints considered to be of average quality, and never really developed that mastery of processes that the more expert photographers could command - although, of course, many others were proficient darkroom craftspeople. While most research to date has focused on the processes of making of those whose scientific and technical experimentations influenced the development of photography, or the photographic objects and processes that are connected to famous/professional photographers or owners (Osterman, 2011; Robinson, 2017), we know remarkably little about the experiences of ordinary non-professional darkroom users. How did these practitioners’ sometimes rudimentary and often trial-and-error led practices of making shape how and what they could learn about photography? What did the engagement with the materials in the darkroom demand of amateur photographers’ bodies and senses? What do their experiences tell us about the role of the darkroom in the context of the increasing popularisation of photography?

In order to address these questions, Amateur Darkroom Practices examines amateurs’ experiences in the darkroom by combining textual analysis with performative research methods (Dupré et al., 2020; Fors et al., 2016) This approach seeks to disclose sensual information, gestures, and patterns of bodily enactment that might not have been recorded because tacitly understood or considered to be unimportant. Simultaneously, it uses such experiential knowledge of past bodily sensations and techniques to reach new insights into textual description of photographic processes, amateurs’ written recollections of their time in the darkroom, and the materials that they used and produced in this space. I approach this investigation with an old body memory of manual film processing and printing, but no darkroom expertise in gelatine dry plate technology, an expertise that it is not my expectation to reach as part of this project. Rather, by following in the footsteps of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century amateur dry plate users, I endeavour to glimpse what learning new skills to process one’s own plates would have been like, and, through this, rethink the darkroom not as a neutral container for photographic production, but as a space with its own materiality, rhythm, and choreography that shaped amateurs’ ways of knowing and of living.

References

Cunningham, H. “Leisure and Culture.” In The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750-1950. Volume 2: People and Their Environment, edited by Thompson, F.M.L., 279-340. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 279-340.

Dominici, S. (2022) “Early Photographic Federations and the Pursuit of Collaborative Education.” Early Popular Visual Culture https://doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2022.2087710

Dominici, S. “Darkroom Networks: Mundane Subversiveness for Photographic Autonomy, 1880s-1900s.” photographies 14, no. 2 (2021): 265-286. doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2021.1877186

Dupré, S., Harris, A., Kursell, J., Lulof, P., and Stols-Witlox, M., eds. Reconstruction, Replication and Re-enactment in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020.

Fors, H., Principe, L.M. and Sibum, H.O. “From the Library to the Laboratory and Back Again: Experiment as a Tool for Historians of Science.” Ambix 63, no. 2 (2016): 85-97. doi.org/10.1080/00026980.2016.1213009

Lightman, B.V. Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Osterman, M. “Mid-Nineteenth-Century Photographic Studio Technique: Why Recreate Nineteenth-Century Photographic Technology? In Reconstructions: Recreating Science and Technology of the Past, edited by K. Staubermann, 252-271. Edinburgh: National Museums Scotland Enterprises Limited, 2011.

Pritchard, M. “Who Were the Amateur Photographers?” In Either/And, edited by A. Pollen and J. Baillie. Bradford: National Media Museum, 2013. http://eitherand.org/reconsidering-amateur-photography/who-were-amateur-photographers/

Robinson, M. “The Techniques and Material Aesthetics of the Daguerreotype.” PhD, De Montfort University, 2017. https://dora.dmu.ac.uk/handle/2086/14332