The Dark Room
If you were lucky enough to be in a secondary school where they had a dark room, you may remember that space, no bigger than your box room that stank of vinegar where you could escape the watchful eye of roaming adults.
My friends and I, when we weren’t smoking de ‘erb in someone’s car, were most likely to be found at lunch time in the dark room, developing pics of us most likely smoking de ‘erb in someone’s car at lunchtime, or if we were really imaginative, a cringe-worthy profile pic of us wearing school uniform and looking profound, or something. The main thing though, is we had this space which was ours and where nobody bothered us and if someone did knock on the door, we could tell them to get lost, because it’s supposed to be dark in there, isn’t it? Clever, huh?
I don’t recall taking much interest in the mechanics of good photographic development. I remember dousing pics in the stinky stuff and hanging them up to dry afterwards, but in terms of really good practice, well, it was all pretty basic techniques really. Besides, we weren’t serious about photography back then, we just kidded ourselves we were doing something meaningful and arty.
Even adults love ‘em. My friend and her soon to be husband met while dicking around and no doubt flirting shamelessly with each other in a dark room when they both worked as support teachers in a school in Hackney.
Ah, the romance.
Where do the kids go now to develop the bulk of their pics, now that it’s all digital and stuff? Hmm? In the IT Suite where the rest of the teachers are checking their emails in their lunch time? Down with that sort of thing.
We have a darkroom as well as all of the digital bollocks but the kids don’t seem terribly interested. ‘But mis..sir, you can’t photoshop it’. I tell them they need to think about making digital collages – film/text/photo/ la la la and they say that they can always take a digital photo and make it look like it was done on film, in fact won’t that get more marks because they’re demonstrating more technique?
To be honest, more than anything I laugh at the fact that I seem to be teaching photography when all I know is point and shoot. Time to fall back on the departmental motto – “Let’s just show them another film”. We do at least have it translated into Latin on the wall.
Ah, the dark room days, how well you evoke them RE. It was warm and red-lit and womb-like in there and I can still whiff the ‘fixer’. I had a key. Because I was a ‘founder member’ of The Camera Club. Oh yes.
So compare, if you will, the ‘cool reading’ of the kids in the camera club with the kids who, similarly locked away with special equipment and skills, ran the ‘radio station’ (for which read internal PA, no doubt). Why are cameras so cool, and why does ‘college radio’ attract such nerds? I met one of the college radio kids at a ‘uni kids come back to college’ when I was a first year undergrad and, well, he was/is a very very nice man but he brought with him the technical specification of his Uni’s radio station because he thought people would be interested.
Davy, did you see that Rodney Bewes ‘play for today’ thing about the Camera Club once upon a time. The one where they hired a model for the night. I was at a certain age at the time and it had a seriously major impression on me.
I don’t think I’ve seen that Play for Today. I’ll look out for it!
I didn’t get involved with school or student radio at all. There wasn’t any. I do love internet radio now though.
My little brother is studying photographic art at the moment at university. It’s impressive seeing how he’s improving. It sounds like a fantastic course. He mixes digital with dark room type stuff, like you were saying Adam.
Play For Today, Rodney Bewes, Camera Club…worra combo and DAMN but no, I haven’t seen it Adam. But now I want to. Badly.
Found it. Not a play for today, an ITV thing – Glamour Night
and it’s on YouTube
As a veteran of my uni’s radio station, I must object to the sweeping characterization of radio kids as nerds. Admittedly there were many such students at the station, but I was certainly not among them. Much.
OK, maybe a bit. But only about 10%.
Maybe 15%.
I’m disappointed you haven’t gone to decimal places.
Kind of interestingly, either that YouTube thing of Glamour Night has been cut or else I misremembered it as being much more explicitly rude than it actually is. In my defense I thought at the time that I’d stumbled across something which (a) ticked all of the right on boxes on women owning they way they were represented and being assertive and therefore not just being sexist, oh no and (b) had breasts in it. I may have just extrapolated the nudity scenes from my imagination. My recollection, er, pretty strong recollection to be honest, is that she makes her speech about what a bunch of tossers they are in full body mid shot with her hands on her hips completely starkers.
Gosh, Reece Dinsdale has had one of the most enduring acting careers of his generation. Good to see yer man Salthouse from Abigail’s party and The Bill in it too.