Notes from the darkroom.

#6: on development

It’s been months since my last darkroom session.
Not months of reluctance. Months of completion.

Everything I produced had already been processed. Film developed. Contact-sheets proofed. Decisions made. Images enlarged.

The lab was ready. I was ready. But nothing left to develop.

I missed it. 

Enough for boredom to creep in. Enough to feel the physical need beyond the mental one.

I even went back to earlier archives; my reporting years. It didn’t take long to realise what I knew all along. This belongs to another life. I don’t need destruction. I want newness.

Those months without development weighed on me. Suspension slowly turning into frustration. I compensated with writing, of course.

But I missed the procedural intimacy of the darkroom. The smell of chemicals. The dim red light. The reward of seeing work come to life.

Now I’m back from a month in the Southeastern US, carrying more than 130 rolls. The door opens again.
I step back inside, where I belong.

I barely remember the images themselves. A few stand out, inevitably. The obvious ones. The frames you take twice because the subject simply is too good, even though you know you’re burning film you don’t need to burn. Others were risks. Shots taken on instinct, with no guarantee anything valuable would come out.

I learned long ago not to trust memory. Expectations are rarely met with matching results. Sometimes reality exceeds them. Sometimes it collapses under them. Still, expectation is unavoidable. You don’t expose film without projecting something forward. You don’t develop without believing that something will surface.

Projection isn’t optimism. It’s a condition without a cure.

With this volume of material, images won’t come back in order. The trip will reassemble randomly and the development won’t replay a journey. It’ll reorganise it into a new one; one I’m eager to take.

In darkness, everything slows down. The outside world disappears; I enter my own. My hands work from memory while my mind goes roaming. Taking back roads. Detours. Loops. Occasional u-turns. No straight lines; no highways; no shortcuts.

Here, the mind doesn’t have to be efficient. It wanders; revisits what had been left aside. No rewinds; emergence.

130 rolls for fuel.
How many NFTDs will that make?

Further thinking?