Notes from the darkroom.

#5
on the next day

The day ends; the room heavy with silence and silver. 

Each print laid out to dry carries its own small promise. You leave them, believing you already know how they’ll look by morning.

You never do.

Expectation softens overnight  —usually.
The mind releases its grip, and the paper hardens into truth.

The light you thought you controlled shows its real intention. Highlights you protected bloom too bright, shadows you thought gone return from the obscure.

The work becomes something other than what you planned, and better for it.

Spread across the table, the prints begin to speak.

Tonal echoes, some dissonance, the rhythm of decisions you didn’t know you were making. The accidental conversations between them tell you more than you imagined.

This is the part of the process that humbles most. Art refuses to obey intention.

It does what it needs to do once your hands let go.

And somewhere between the intended and the found, one image keeps calling.

Not the sharpest, not the most perfect, but the one that still feels alive
when everything else has dried.

That’s the one you frame.