Notes from the darkroom. #14: on latent images Some things don’t need a witness to exist.They form in silence, shaped by the light that reached them, long before anyone notices. Some lives do the same. They take shape when no one bothers to look closely enough. Simply because nothing around them measured nuance, only underexposing them to praise and overexposing them with criticism.Different causes, same effect: you lose what matters. So you adjust. You build a way of reading yourself the way you read light. Not an act of confidence. Not a declaration.Just a metering system tuned to what others refuse to see. A way to register nuance on your own terms. Film works like this. The latent image doesn’t explain itself. It just is there.Light hits it, something takes form. Invisible, but intact. The darkroom doesn’t create the image. It only reveals what was present all along. Some truths are no different. They stay latent until something meets them with enough clarity to make them visible. Not truer. Just visible. Photography was never about being recognised.It was about seeing myself with enough clarity to stop depending on others’ blindness. On second thought… Hit the road. Further thinking?
