PRINTS OF DARKNESS
Photographers from the digital age get their hands on film, darkroom trays and developing tanks.
Digital superstars are seduced by old-fashioned film photography
REMEMBER Cujo, huh, do ya? The rabid, slick-with-drool,
angry St Bernard in the Stephen King novel who traps a family in their broken-down car and tries to kill them by biting the car to pieces? That Cujo.
You can meet Cujo any time. It walks among us. Just go on any of the photography forums that litter the ’Net and say something like “Film is better than digital” then sit back and wait for the fury, the hate, as Cujos from both camps rip into each other in furious bellows and bitter snarls.
I know, because I was one of them. I am a child of the ’60s. I grew up with film. I salivated over magazine ads for glossy black Nikon F and Pentax Spotmatic and Olympus OM-1 cameras. There was a darkroom at my school, a time machine out of which the hours would spool like a ribbon and I would emerge blinking into the twilight, wondering where the day had gone.
I am not a good photographer but I get by, shooting travel for work. One day I had the money to buy a Nikon FM2 — the camera of my childish dreams — and a fast 35mm lens (“A beautiful piece of glass,” said the camera shop owner and just like that he got me). The Nikon and I became firm friends. We travelled the world and I shot roll after roll of film, loving the smooth action as the shutter cocked, the heavy “thunk” as it released, the sound of the film spooling over the sprockets . . . Who would not love a machine like that?
I stuck with film long after my colleagues had abandoned that rusty freighter and swum over to digital’s shiny new ocean liner. I was the only one trekking to the lab with rolls of Kodak Portra, my editor’s cries ringing in my ears, “Developed? What the f*** do you mean?”
Then I gave in to the tide. I bought a digital SLR. The FM2 went into the back of a dark cupboard. Oooh, I loved the shiny new Nikon, even if none of the old manual glass worked properly on it, even if it was plastic and ugly and didn’t shout “use me!”.
But, as happens in the digital age, it wasn’t enough. Not fast enough. Not enough megapixels. Not enough bells. Too few whistles. I bought another camera with a big, fat, fast zoom. It’s a beast. It has bells and whistles to shame a circus. Now I work in Photoshop and talk about “workflow” and “histograms” and “RAW”. And here’s the thing: I hate it. This game, this love of cameras, this hunting for what that genius, Henri Cartier-Bresson, called the “defining moment” — gone, debased by a thousand badly shot shitty frames, a million lousy JPEGs. Who came up with JPEG as a term for a photograph anyway? That acronym alone says everything about the shallowness of digital photography. See? Cujo. You just got mauled. Or did I bite myself?
THE tetanus shot, if you could call it that, came the week I planned to drop my cameras off at the camera dealer and be done with photography. There was a weekend workshop on black and white printmaking at the Alternative Print Workshop in Joburg — would I like to do it?
In truth, I expected little. The workshop was small, just five people, a diverse group which included two of South Africa’s biggest Instagrammers. But it would be conducted by Dennis da Silva, who is to black and white photography what Neil Armstrong is to space travel, and his colleague, photographer and “chemist” Janus Boshoff. I dusted off the FM2 and the last remaining Nikon lens and went to Parktown.
Working from a darkroom which occupies an annex in what, from the outside, is an unprepossessing house, Da Silva makes prints for photographers such as Roger Ballen. He does only black and white work. Swimming against the tide.
If Da Silva is the wizard, Boshoff is the sorcerer’s apprentice. For years I had heard mutterings about “some young guy from Potch” who was mixing darkroom chemicals in his own back yard — film and print developers to rival Kodak’s D-76 and Ilford’s ID-11, the scents of which will be lodged deep in the sensory memory of anyone who’s ever truly worked with black and white film. The softly spoken Boshoff took one of my favourite pictures ever — a black and white shot of a huge Afrikander bull with great, curving horns that make it look like a escapee from the time of mammoths. When I saw it hanging on the wall of the Silvertone darkroom, I felt a Flickr of happiness. Maybe there was life in the old dog yet.
W E meet at the house on a Saturday morning: me, a marketing executive named Michael-Giles Coyle, a young business consultant named Mira Atanasova and the two Instagrammers, Gareth Pon and Alexi Portokallis. As it turns out, I am the only one who has ever worked with film before. Pon, named South Africa’s biggest Instagrammer in 2014 and 2015, is shooting with his uncle’s Leicaflex SLR (in the world of film cameras that’s like driving a Mercedes 280SL — classic, and refined if not quite buttery smooth).
“I was born into a digital world,” says Pon. “I had never shot on a film camera until six months ago and even then it was only one roll of film and I didn’t know what I was doing.”
We are each given a roll of 400ASA black and white film and let loose in the artist’s house. Other than the rough-and-tumble staffies and a cat with devil eyes, it’s mostly a still-life experience. “Remember,” says Da Silva, “this is film, not digital. Expose for the shadows.”
I shoot slowly. The dogs argue with a KONG toy. The cat watches from under a bush. There’s a scary preacher statue and a pair of film cameras on a table. These are not great pictures but the heft of the Nikon in my hands, the feel of the film-advance lever and the thunk of the shutter are deeply satisfying. We mill around the house, looking for light, for shapes, looking for our defining moments.
For people used to blitzing off a thousand pictures on their phone in a couple of hours, the notion of having just 36 exposures is like a lightning bolt.
“It made me slow down,” Portokallis says later. “I had to be more patient, shoot with intent. Being an Instagrammer, taking your phone out, taking a photo, it’s not as intentional as it is with film.”
In the afternoon we head to the darkroom where Da Silva and Boshoff show us how to load the film — in black, velvet darkness — into developing tanks. “Everything in black and white film developing is about being consistent,” says Da Silva. The water temperature. How many times you agitate the tank and how often. How long you develop the film for. It’s a good life lesson.
We work quietly, watching the clock. The chemicals gurgle in the tanks. Developer. Water. Fixer to render the film insensitive to light. Wash. All done to the clock. The anticipation hangs in the air. Will the dogs come out? Will the cat’s devil eyes be sharp?
“It’s quite daunting,” says Atanasova who, until today, has never shot film. “You can’t review your photos. There’s this anticipation and suspense until you can get in the darkroom and see what you have.”
The films are washed and pulled from the tanks and Boshoff hangs them in the drying cabinet. They are barely dry before we have them gingerly in our fingertips, holding them up to the light and . . . there . . . the raw material of our images, shadows and shapes on celluloid, the magic of light on silver halide crystals.
We are shown how the enlargers work, and print contact sheets from which we will choose our prints. The process is the same: expose, develop, wash, fix. Only now we slide photographic paper into developing trays under the soft glow of red lights. It is cool and quiet and the only sound is the slosh of chemicals and the soft thud of trays in the tin sinks. The dogs turn out great — nice blacks, lots of detail in their muzzles — but devil-eye cat, frankly, looks insane.
We are back at 8.30am on the Sunday for more. We make test strips to get the exposure right, then make our prints. Then, in the red glow, we slip the pictures into the developing trays and watch the images appear on the paper. “You see it happening in front of your eyes,” says Coyle. “It’s like witchcraft.”
After each picture, the lights go on so Da Silva and Boshoff can guide us. Expose more there. Burn that bit. Dodge that. Lights off, back in the red glow. We try again. Time slips away.
By the end of the day we have each done five prints. Five. Well, Pon has done four. “And that took two days of getting my hands dirty,” he says. “That versus shooting 1 000 pictures in an hour and getting 30 or 60 from that 1 000.” He pauses. “People are very trigger-happy nowadays. This,” he says, holding up one of his prints, “is about feeling the photo.”
We have spent the day on our feet yet everyone looks blissed out, as if they’ve had an all-day spa treatment. Pon and Portokallis have no intention of putting down their digital cameras but the ground has clearly shifted. “Shooting on black and white film is not an excuse, it’s a reason,” says Pon.
“From today, I’m a black and white convert,” says Portokallis. “I’m actually going to look at all my black and white digital pictures in a different way. Dammit.”
The digital and film worlds collided and no one got bitten. The only fighting dogs were the ones in my picture. We’ve made something with our hands. And that feels good.