Building the Darkroom

This week I gathered materials to convert the spare bedroom in the house to a darkroom.  The biggest challenge for this project was going to be sealing off all the windows to prevent light leakage and constructing some sort of entry/exit mechanism to lightproof the area around the door.

So first we cleared most of the furniture and clutter our of the room and off the walls, leaving the desk so I would have somewhere to put the trays of chemicals I will need to use for the photograms.

Sealing the windows was actually fairly easy.  All we needed to do was buy some insulated weatherproof board, cut it slightly bigger than the height and width of the window, screw it into the drywall, and caulk around the edges.  That created a good enough seal to keep out the light.  For this window in particular, we will later be installing a standard bathroom vent type device to ensure good ventilation.  For that, we would need to keep the window slightly cracked at all times (which is why we got the weatherproof board, and cut a small hole in the bottom of the foam board so that the vent can suck air through the space in between the board and the window.  Since the mechanism for the vent will be outside and going over the window, we should be able to seal the edges in a similar way to prevent light leaks.

For the door, we bought some PVC pipe and blackout curtain material that we made two makeshift quarter-circle drapes out of.  To mark where the drapes were going to go, we held a Sharpie against the door and let it mark the ceiling as we opened and closed it to see the area the door would need to travel.  We ended up having to break the pvc pipe in a few places to get the curve we wanted, so to hold the pieces together we threaded some rope through the pipe and then rolled the curtain over to lock it in place.  We then screwed the pipe into the ceiling with drywall lock screws and attachments and attached the sides of the curtains to the drywall by screwing them into some spare pieces of board we had laying around.  Against the bottom of the door we attached a weatherproofing strip so that no light could leak in through the bottom of the door, where a large hole had been chewed by a mouse at some point or another.

This is the desk that we left in the room to use as a worktable.  The three plastic bins near the wall are what I will be using to store the chemicals and paintbrushes while I'm working.  To the left of the table you can see a large roll of thick brown cardboard.  I'm going to use this to protect the floor by laying out overlapping strips along the ground and stabilizing it by taping it down with blue painter's tape.  The cardboard was relatively cheap so it will be fairly inexpensive to replace and easy to keep clean.

There are a few remaining things to be done, such as the red lighting arrangement and storage for the chemicals, but those will have to wait until my shipments of these materials arrives next week.  Once the floor and vent are installed and all my materials arrive I'll be ready to start making some art!

Plans for a Darkroom

    I spent most of last week searching for and pricing materials to convert the spare bedroom in our house into a darkroom.  The facilities offered at A&M won't be suitable for the type of work that I wish to do mainly because I'm doing large scale photogram prints with non-standard developing practices, which is what the darkrooms at the university are set up for.

EXTRA-SENSITIVITY EMULSION

    Because of the scale at which  will need to complete my work, it'll be much cheaper, and honestly give me a lot more flexibility,  to make my own photo paper.  The product above is a high sensitivity photo emulsion that can be painted onto any porous surface, or even non-porous surface as long as a foundation of some sort is painted on first.  By using this, I can turn any medium into material for my photograms, and do any scale I wish at a much cheaper cost.  That being said, a quart of the liquid is $148.00, and the 2 quarts I'll be purchasing make up more than half of my projected cost for converting the room to a darkroom.   The other chemicals I'll be using are as follows:

Kodak Dektol Developer :$8.50

Kodak Fixer : $7.50
Bleach : $10.00

Fortunately, the remaining chemical components are nowhere near as expensive.
    For the medium on which I will paint the emulsion, I'm going to first do tests on this type of paper:

 

Heavy Duty Mulberry Paper

I can purchase a roll of this at 47" x 6 yards for around $70 dollars, and the dimensions are perfect to allow me to experiment with scale and composition.  I have projected the total cost for the materials and conversion of the space to a darkroom to run me about $467.00, which is less than my original estimated price of about $700.00, and this makes me happy!

This is an example Floris Neusüss's work, which is similar to the style I'm going for. I'm very interested in using the silhouette as a method of presenting loss, or lack, in terms of Lacanian theory.  In presenting these forms I'm hoping to make the viewer feel the loss of something which once existed, and push them to fill the void with their own fantasies, in essence, bringing a physical form to the metaphorical "screen" upon which we project our desires.  I also wish to abstract the forms by painting on the developer and fixer and printing them on the textured paper so that the silhouettes are degraded.  This ties in with my own desires of tearing through the screen, changing the way we perceive reality by distorting familiar forms, in many ways similar to the methods of Surrealists in that the distortion they present us with is actually closer to reality than the presentation of straight reality.

In Search of the Gaze

 I have become very interested in the concept of the Gaze and the reverse gaze between the subject and object, and the screen upon which we project our desires that is created at the intersection of the two.  We are subconsciously aware of the presence of the Other that surrounds us, and as our minds seek to label and identify, to keep ourselves isolated in the safe and orderly realm of the symbolic, we can be suddenly reminded that we exist as a visible entity, and that our desires are merely a stain upon the screen that separates our individuality from the lack.

  

For whatever reason, we feel shame at the realization of our existence.  Even the term "stain" coined in the theories of Lacan has negative connotations associated with it.  Why is it that we feel the need to hide from the Gaze that the Other imposes on us.  Why must we separate ourselves from the womb of the universe that we, despite how much we scream and yell of our individuality amongst our peers, are inseparably a part of?  There is an insatiable need to force the predilections of our identity upon the Gaze of the Other, but what is actually being seen?  Will the reality of our identity be too traumatic for us to realize?

 There are so many questions I want to explore on this subject, and I feel that the photogram is the perfect medium for me to conduct my research.  It captures the metaphorical "Stain" directly onto a visible medium in ways that we are not used to seeing, almost like it presents its own perspective.  There is a distortion as well in the way the image is processed that is very attractive to me: the randomness of the aberrations inherent in the technique, the pull of curiosity to see into the image, to explore and understand the image before me.  It's almost like a physical manifestation of the invisible screen which holds the world we wish to see. 

In the case of the photogram, it removes the bias of our personal desires and blurs the form, leaving us staring into the lack of an image that is completely open to being filled with our personal projections.  I take from the realm of the Surrealists the concept that a distortion or breaking of reality brings us closer to its truth than an absolute representation, and I'm hoping that working in this medium will allow me to present the presence of our bodies in a way that invites us to consider looking through the screen and uncovering what lies within the Gaze of the Other.