Disappearing darkrooms.

DARKROOM

BY MICHEL CAMPEAU

EDITED BY MARTIN PARR

PORTLAND, OREGON: NAZRAELI PRESS AND THE JGS FOUNDATION, 2007

80 PP./$65.00 (HB)

One hundred and sixty-nine years alter the official birth of photography, painting is still alive and well and photography may just have facilitated its reinvention. The same process of reinvention has been underway within photography itself through the advent of digital technology. Two years ago, Michel Campeau, a Canadian photographer based in Montreal, decided to address the issue of this transitional phase in the history of photography in a rather humorous, though poignant, and aesthetic way: photographing disappearing darkrooms with a digital point-and-shoot camera. During the 2005 Mois de la Photo in Montreal, Campeau met Magnum photographer Martin Parr, who had just been commissioned by Nazraeli Press to direct publication of a collection of ten books by ten different photographers. Campeau's project seduced Parr and a publication project was born: Darkroom would be the first book of the collection.

Parr and Campeau share a rather idiosyncratic and tongue-in-cheek approach to the medium. They have the same wry and humorous relationship to the world and are both dedicated and thoughtful photographic practitioners. Campeau's Darkroom project consists of a series of color photographs taken over two years in more than seventy-five Canadian darkrooms, using a Canon G6. Campeau's intention was to address both the history of art and photography. He could not resist the irony of using a digital camera to document darkrooms dedicated to an analog process. The creativity triggered by a new tool, a new situation, the opening of a new door, and the weight of nostalgia infuse the images with a sizable tension.

Instant feedback on the way the camera "sees" and records is the first benefit of using digital cameras. In Campeau's case, the point-and-shoot camera, with its pivoting and swiveling LCD screen and flash, generated original vantage points and images that could not have been taken with a film camera. As Campeau states, "With digital cameras, photographers are freed from the burden of waiting, the archiving of useless or superfluous images. I can instantly check and question the rigor, the tension, the structure, the chromatic qualities of each photograph contrary to silver-based processes with which results have always been an approximation, without the possibility of immediately going back." (1)

This detailed and somewhat humoristic inventory of darkrooms, with all the idiosyncratic habits of their owners exposed, reveals an intimate, somewhat closed, and claustrophobic world bathed in ochre or red light, inevitably filled with the smell of chemicals. Campeau's approach is so close to his subject, to its physicality and emotional baggage, that memories cannot but rush back to an audience of aficionados.

What Campeau's project unveils is also of archeological value. The sub-layers of darkroom life are exposed: the tools, the colors too--quite paradoxical in a black-and-white darkroom. In such an environment the photographer becomes a jack-of-all-trades: plumber, electrician, chemist, carpenter, painter, optician, engineer, puppeteer, janitor, and, ultimately, printer and light alchemist--and it shows.

Campeau's monochromatic prints of saturated color are also mesmerizing. The texture of solidified chemicals against the background of an intensely red tray, a deep blue wastepaper bin, and the off-white bottom of a film drying cabinet become as enticing as abstract expressionist paintings while retaining that very close relationship to the world that defines photography. It is "Le referent adhere" (the referent adheres) as Roland Barthes astutely put it in Camera Lucida (1980). Because of its documentary content, the work also stands as a historical record.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Darkroom is composed of seventy color images, only ten of which are horizontal, confirming somehow the narrowness of the visited spaces. Many shots are close-ups, if not macro-photographs, and many are either high- or low-angle views. With a "camera-eye" account of darkrooms, the appearance of things is modified toward the spectacular or the enigmatic (scale, angle, color, abstraction). These factors will become even more obvious once in front of the 40" x 55" exhibition prints generated by the project. Campeau's range of colors starts limited to black and white, evolving from within this purposely limited palette: the red that evokes darkroom safe lights; trays, sinks, and bottles; followed by the yellow, ochre, and orange of various paper box labels, from Kodak to Agfa. Suddenly there is the intense azure of the bottom of a dustbin starred with dried-up photo chemicals, then a crown of laundry pegs hanging from the ceiling, holding nothing where once were drying rolls of processed film. Most of this work is very graphic, verging on pure abstraction at times.

"I gave birth to a crime story, a thriller. It has become another CSI series, an investigation on the scene of a crime, of a disappearance," says Campeau. There is an unmistakable pathos in Campeau's Darkroom that cannot be ignored. Darkroom reasserts the fact that being an artist is, above all, a matter of vision: an "imagining" power that pushes the world around us beyond its limits and the very boundaries of our limitations. Fiction is of no use to anyone who can see. The world is here, quietly making signs for us to read.

BRUNO CHALIFOUR is a photographer, photo critic, historian, and educator based in Rochester, New York.

NOTE 1. All quotations are from an interview with the author in September 2007.