A developing tank and spiral
I was hopeless at chemistry at school. Spectacularly bad. The subject was a miasma of foul gases, , disastrous experiments and incomprehensible theory so I dropped it as soon as I could. Perhaps, however, there remains some slight bruising to my psyche because the moment I unpacked the developing kit that I had ordered just before lockdown I felt a quiver of unease. Thermometers, decanters, pungent liquids: could this developing business be as easy as they said?
Not in fact a straitjacket but a mini-darkroom.
What you do is wind your film round that white spiral and you pop the spiral in the black tub there (above right). Since no light must intrude you have to do that with your hands and the kit inside this black bag with the light-tight sleeves here. If you have a darkroom of course you can use that instead of the black bag. Once the undeveloped film is out of the camera, onto the spiral and into the tub you can bring them out into daylight because the tub is light-tight. Simples.
Then you dilute the chemicals according to their label and put them sequentially into the black tub through its clever light-tight spout. Developer, stopping agent, fixer and wash: all at 20 degrees centigrade for specific lengths of time, inverting at regular intervals. Out they come, lovely toned negatives that you allow to dry and then scan into your system.
So it is indeed a simple enough process. But my first two attempts have not been without grief. First, getting the film onto the spiral can be a minor wrestle in the dark. Rather unwisely, probably, I started with larger, medium-format film which is harder to get onto the spiral because it can buckle and twist more easily. Inevitably it did buckle and twist and the results can be seen below in those white scars across the face of the image.
Next: who knew how hard it could be to get a constant 20 degree stream of water out of a standard mixer tap? I faffed about endlessly, then gave up and let it sit in jugs until it was just about right. I think the problem with a mixer tap is that there are two streams of water, one warm and one cool and so it isn’t just the one temperature throughout. When you come to wash the negatives you really need a stream of water though. If you don’t wash (or dry) properly you can get the sort of problem you see below. The main image is a detail of the one to the left. Those tiny white marks suggest, I believe, a failure to wash or dry properly.
Then, after drying the developed negatives, I found this. What is that dark shadow down the left-hand side of the photo? It is visible to a greater or lesser extent on every image in the roll – but only the one roll. Internet research tells me that there are several reasons you might get a lighter strip down the side but I seem to be on my own with the darker one.
A number of proverbs spring to mind:
Rome wasn’t built in a day.
What’s worth having is never easily got.
If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well
If you can’t fight, get a big hat.
(That last one was a favourite of a long-dead auntie of mine. It is perhaps of doubtful relevance here but I’ve always liked it. It suggests that if you look the business, people will take you for the business. I find its moral ambiguity much more attractive than the questionable certainties of the others.)
Clearly, I need a strategy here before the whole thing becomes an endless replay of the psychological trauma suffered by my fifteen-year-old self in the chemistry lab. I am therefore cropping and reframing the project in my head. I am lifting it right out of that chilly scientific context and setting it down somewhere warmer where I have always felt much more at home: the kitchen. From now on I am going to see the development process as more like a recipe: necessary ingredients, of course, but a hint of this and a pinch of that too – a craft to be developed over time. I am not built for the clear-eyed precision of the laboratory scientist, the endless and exact replication of set tasks, nor indeed to follow instructions to the letter. It’s just not my way.
I’ll let you know how I get on. In the meantime here are a couple that did come out and which I am adding to my pylon series. Magnificent things, these pylons. They can spoil an otherwise pristine countryside of course, but when you are up close and you can hear them hiss and crackle you get a sense of fantastic power. Stephen Spender says “Like whips of anger/With lightning's danger”. I’ll go along with that.
