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.