Brighton Pier during lockdown, Brighton, 2021.

5 minute read

As a photographer who, as readers of my last article will know, learnt my skills in the good old days of a pre-digital world, developing and enlarging are what happens in the darkroom.

For those of you who have not had the treat of being in a darkroom, let me enlighten you. A darkroom is a place of magic. As you leave your worries and your phone at the door, as you shut out the real world, you enter a liminal space where time stands still. The tangy smell of the chemicals mixes with the soft red light as you watch blank pages become alive before your eyes.

It is a place of transformation.

You start with a film, a little canister that holds all the hope, inspiration, creativity and expression of you as a photographer all locked away. When you develop it, the images are small and in a negative form. Everything is back to front and unclear. You have to use a magnifier and lightbox to pick which image you think might be worth exploring, which one has the potential to become great.

The next step is to take that raw back to front little piece of film and, using an enlarger, blow it up into a larger image which is then cast onto your photographic paper in a beam of focussed white light.

Brighton beach during lockdown, Brighton, 2021.

At this point the paper gives no hint as to the transformation that’s just happened. It looks just the same as when you took it from the packet. It is bare, naked.

But underneath its surface, a quiet change has taken place, nascent, waiting to be seen.

Now is the time for the final transformation, which happens gradually in stages. First off, the paper is put into a tray of developer fluid. Within seconds the faintest trace of lines and shadows begin to appear; 30 seconds or so longer and the full image has emerged. At this point the paper is plucked unceremoniously from the tray and quickly doused in a chemical called ‘stop’, that, well, stops the development. The final stage is when the paper is laid in a tray of ‘fix’, which finalises the image on the paper as it is, with no further change taking place that isn’t at the hands of time or a photographer who wants to add colour and other embellishments back in the studio. For all intents and purposes, the transformation is now complete.

But it’s not really fixed. For once you have developed the image for the first time, there may well be further adjustments you want to make. So you go back and repeat the process, this time maybe dodging, burning or masking at the point of exposure, to bring out and emphasise certain areas that may be a little reticent and to make other more dominant areas blend into the image as a whole. It takes a while to get the image to how you truly want it. And even then, photographers often revisit images many years later to make further tweaks and improvements, using the techniques and perspectives they have learnt in the intervening years to recast the image in a new light.

It strikes me that this entire process of transformation, from the negative to the positive, could just as easily describe the development of the self.

We are not static beings, fixed at an arbitrary age when we become a "grown up”. We too are at the hands of time. We continue to evolve, reacting to things that happen to us, around us, we change and we grow. We take the bits we do like about ourselves and our lives, and try and make the most of them. The bits we don’t like, perhaps that we don’t let many people see, we work to blend them into the background, to give them less of a presence. We add colour and embellishment and although some things do become solid and anchored within us, we repeat this process of evolution for the rest of our lives.

We don’t really ever fix.

One way to grow and change is to get bigger. This is the concept of enlargement, that’s how it works in the darkroom, in mathematics, in physical augmentation of the body. And it can be applied to the self too.

By far and away one of the most powerful things I have read in recent times was Oliver Burkeman’s last advice column in the Guardian. He proposes, in the context of making big life choices, a refocus from happiness to enlargement. Happiness is a blurry concept at best, especially when it comes to the future, where we make decisions based on emotions, context, money, status. Burkeman proposes that if we reframe the question of “will this make me happy?” into “will this choice enlarge or diminish me?” we will get a different response. He feels that, intuitively,

“you tend to just know whether, say, leaving or remaining in a relationship or a job, though it might bring short-term comfort, would mean cheating yourself of growth.”

Enlargement of the self thus becomes about moving away from a narrow range of focus on happiness and actively seeking wider horizons. Choose things that will give you new perspectives, opportunities and experiences which you can learn from, that will help you recast yourself in a new light.

Darkrooms were built to facilitate developing and enlarging, that is their raison d’être. But transformations of the self are not limited to the cosiness of a blacked out room suffused with red light, they can take place anywhere at any time.

And in the same way a tattoo artist will often describes a body as a canvas, see your self as a piece of photographic paper, waiting in the dark for the process of enlargement, development, stop, fix and embellishment to begin, again.

All photographs are from the first roll of film (Ilford HP5) shot in a decade and taken on my late father’s Leica iiia camera.

On developing and enlarging

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