For my thirteenth birthday, my father gave me a “junior darkroom” kit and taught me how to use it. Developing film and making prints was, to my dad, something that boys simply should know. My subsequent obsession with photography lasted into early adulthood, and even my father was ill-prepared for its intensity.
But these days I rarely take out the camera and haven’t been in a darkroom for at least 20 years.
A recent browse through several old photography magazines (1949 to 1957) reminded me that my interest in photography was probably less about art and more about stuff.
I really miss the commerce of it all. I’d spend hours poring through the pages of photography magazines, learning as much from the ads as I did from the articles. Here are just a few of the images that caught my eye during my recent return to their pages. Click on any picture for a larger version.
I miss the little canisters that 35mm film came in, especially when they were metal and had screw-on lids. I miss getting slides back in a small cardboard box, and I miss round carousel trays stacking up in the closet. I miss leaving a slide in the projector so long that it melted.
I miss safelights and the red glow they gave off, and I miss watching as a print faded up in the tray like magic. I miss the smell of fixer and the yellow stains you’d get on your fingers from the stop bath. I miss tongs and squeegees, and clothespins on strings to hang things from.
I miss those square black GraLab timers that clicked off the minutes and seconds and sounded with a jarring buzz. I miss paper safes and special lightproof packaging for film and paper. I miss beakers and thermometers and glass mixing rods. And I miss listening to the radio while I worked.
I miss focusing. I miss clicking through f-stops and knowing where each one was on the dial. I miss dodging and burning with light instead of icons. I miss anti-static brushes and Dust-Off in a can and special dryers to make your prints super glossy.
I miss Tri-X and Plus-X film, and I miss processing Panatomic X in Microdol developer for super-fine grain. I miss pushing film a stop or two. I miss trying to thread 35mm film onto reels in complete darkness. I miss putting my hands through the black cloth and elastic arms of a changing bag.
I miss choosing between glossy and matte, and I miss getting double prints, even of the bad ones. I miss contact sheets and glassine envelopes and the grease pencils that wrote on them. And I dearly miss loupes.
Go to page 2 for more photo history.
This article was last modified on May 17, 2023
This article was first published on September 3, 2010
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