The “Dark Arts”

For many years, I was part of a group of people across the world who used to celebrate “the Dark Arts”.

I would enter a darkened room with just the low light coloured red or very dull orange. I would breathe in the intoxicating smell of strange elixirs.

Rituals would begin with some people putting on certain articles of attire – special gloves, a face mask, even a pinafore, and then loading into black canisters a celluloid material and the canister was then sealed.

A normal light would be switched on, and a strange ritual began with the mixing and pouring of substances, the rotating of the canister, then washing with water the inside of the canister.

After a time, the Celluloid material was taken out and viewed on a box emitting light, accompanied often with gasps of joy and occasionally a groan of disappointment.

The material was then hung up to dry while I would retire to rest and sip coffee or tea.

Later, replenished, I would return to this strange room and its subdued light to begin the second part of the sacred ritual.

The celluloid was placed in a strange machine with a light source which projected a negative image vertically onto its baseboard.

After examining the image in detail on the baseboard, more substances were mixed and placed in trays, then a piece of special paper was placed on the baseboard of the machine in which a low powered light was turned on for a brief time whilst I performed a strange dance of a shadow puppet with hands blocking light from the machine from reaching parts of the paper.

After a short time, the paper was placed into a tray of substances, and then, as if by magic, from nowhere a positive image would appear on the paper.

High priests of the art knew they could put a warm finger onto areas on the paper in the substances to allow certain areas to appear faster.

When I was happy with the image, I would turn on the normal light and marvel at what the process had produced.

I would wipe off the water from washing the paper, then hang the paper on a washing line or tape it on the wall, stand back, and admire the product of this ancient dark art.

Well, for years I was part of this cult and progressed from the simplicity of a “Dark Art Room” to two machines (enlargers) an Ilford resin coated B&W print processing machine, an Ilford Cibachrome machine (incredible quality prints from transparencies), a Fuji C41 print processor plus relevant systems for developing transparency, colour negative (C41), plus B&W film.

I decided to do the whole of the processing myself because it gave me complete control of my workflow from pressing the shutter to the final image, whether a print or transparency.

But being in control of the whole process meant hours shooting and even more hours practicing the dark arts, somewhere along the way, something had to give – my marriage.

The transition

I bought my first digital camera in the late 1990s, a Fujifilm MX compact, and could instantly see the benefits but not the quality.

From the late 90s to 2001, I started to use enlargers less and transitioned to scanning using Nikon and Minolta professional medium format scanners, along with an Epson flat bed scanner for scanning sheet film.

A constant change along with the scanning process was the development of inkjet printers, and at one stage I had 6 printers, including two which were converted to black and white using Lyson inks. Hand in hand with printer development was the development of printing papers with the ultimate goal being the matching of the quality of analogue printing papers.

I will spare you the details of the complete journey, but now I sit in a comfortable chair with a coffee, looking at a snow-covered mountain. I use two screens, and via software, Fuji cameras/iPhones have control over making images I could only dream of in the past and make archival pigments prints up to A2 in size on Baryta papers.

In the days of the Dark Arts, I used to work with fine brushes and paint opening eyes on prints, retouching dust and also using dyes with a powerful magnifying glass to retouch colour transparencies.

You had, of course, limited margins for exposure (transparency film in particular) when making images on film, and you adjusted development times and chemicals to extract the information and create the mood you wanted in the final image.

Now I have Lightroom and Photoshop, an iPhone and wonderful Fuji cameras, plus infinite possibilities.

Do I miss the cult of the Dark Arts? Well, yes and no – there was something special, more like a craft, in the older processes, but ‘no’, I now smell of Argon oil and YSL instead of fixer and developer, plus living in a tiny house, I do not have space to practice ‘The Dark Arts’.

I enclose some images from the days of film (films developed and scanned by me), an image of me and a friend from my first digital camera, along with some recent digital images from Fuji cameras and iPhone. Not great art, just for illustration purposes.