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069 05 May 2004

In the past we could have marvelled at the fine grain and acutance of the film development, of the virtues of a mellowed deep tank and weak developers. But all of this, along with water, thermometers, funnels, measuring cylinders, rubber tubing and the rest of the paraphenalia of the dark room are now obsolete. It is tempting to descibe, for aanother generation, the dextrous business of threading film onto spirals, and other parts of the learning curve of working in a dark room. Future photographers and their historians will see the late twentieth century chemical processes as part of an improving but seamless technical history reaching back to the era of Wet Collodion and the albumen print. A philosophically different time when when the making of photographs was practiced in the dark and the mantra of a photographic truth was never in doubt.