darkroom

In the basement of the house where I grew up was a darkroom, complete with a full set of 1950’s era film and photograph processing machinery. All that was lacking, when Dad and I first went down there with the idea of putting some of the stuff to use, was the necessary chemicals.

Dad originally thought there were several jugs of developer and fixer down there, but the big 20-gallon glass bottles were full, instead, of very old whiskey that my grandfather had stored away in preparation for Prohibition. They were large and mysterious and half-full of dark liquid of uncertain origins, so it was rather understandable for Dad to have mistaken them for the necessary chemicals.

Dad had bought our house, half-finished, from his brother-in-law, Foy, who was a photography buff, so Dad became one too. There were boxes of Uncle Foy’s left-over negatives stacked under the counters, all of people and places I never knew. They were of a world only 15 years previous, but a completely different universe from mine.

Mine was color, after all, and these were black-and-white. Eventually, Dad got the necessary chemicals for processing color film, but back then, after exposure, one had to be in total darkness during the development process until one got the thing into the fixer. I got to handle that part, and Dad would stand outside the room’s entrance (doorless and serpentine so the light couldn’t get through) and call out the time to me. In the total darkness, sloshing the paper gently in the developer, I felt both safe and scared.