Darkroom Material:Race and the Chromogenic Print Process

Lily Cho (bio)
York University

Abstract

This essay argues for the need to historicize and theorize race in photography by attending to the interventions of darkroom technicians, especially those who are themselves racialized. Understanding the crucial role of the darkroom technician challenges the idea that photographic development is merely a mechanical or technical process. The photograph in development represents a moment of transition that illuminates the instabilities of photographic images in general, and those that attend to race and diaspora in particular. Racialized and diasporic identities are constructed out of and despite ongoing processes of transition, fragmentation, and dispersal. This essay focuses on Chinese approaches to photographic development, exploring the cultural histories that inform the technique and craft. Engaging with photography as a process of development uncovers a powerful connection to the construction of diasporic communities.

改色

改色 (gaisè), to correct color: this was what my father did most days and most nights. This was the skill he learned in Hong Kong after escaping from a gulag during the Cultural Revolution, while waiting for his papers so he could emigrate to Canada. This was what he did after the failure of the Shangri La, a Chinese restaurant he ran in Whitehorse in the 1970s. He was gifted at this darkroom work (so I am told) and caught a lucky break when he got a job as a darkroom technician with the audio-visual department of the Government of Alberta, where he worked for over fifteen years. He lost his job and became permanently unemployed during the twin calamities (in my household at least) that were the massive job cuts engineered by the provincial government of the time, and the rise of digital photography. But for many years it was his day job, and at night my uncle would call and ask him to come over to his place to 改色, to correct color. My uncle owned a small grocery store in Edmonton, Alberta, with a professional photography studio in the back. The studio was both a business and a passion for my uncle, who mostly did family photographs and weddings. No matter their circumstances, people still wanted their pictures taken. He was almost always busy with this work, and my aunt and my cousins ran the grocery store out front. Almost every night after dinner, my dad would get a call and head over to my uncle’s darkroom to help process and print photographs. My brother and I often went along and played or helped out in the store until my dad was done. I was not permitted into the darkroom, but I knew it was a special, magical place of craft and artistry. This work was a part of the daily rhythm of my life, and an essential part of my family life and livelihood. Deborah Willis argues for “photography as biography” in her demand for the critical work of “visualizing memory” and portraying black lives (22). Thinking about race and photography has brought me to this private history of perpetual proximity to the magic of the darkroom, and to the specific work of color correction as an integral yet disaggregated part of the process. In Willis’s terms, biography can reveal how the darkroom is itself a site of complexity and contestation for racialized and diasporic communities.

This essay theorizes the darkroom. In doing so, it attends closely to the darkroom as a generative space for understanding the relationship between race and photography. Not only has the darkroom been largely absent from contemporary cultural criticism on photography; it has also been a space of normativized whiteness. Its equipment, chemicals, and paper are calibrated for representations of white subjects: “Mid-century film was engineered by white technicians and optimized for white skin” (Peters 65). Film sensitivity and color processing standards resulted in images that left dark-skinned subjects distorted or rendered them invisible in images with shadows or dark backgrounds. Black photographers have long grappled with the problematic intersection of photography and race. Syreeta McFadden describes how they had to “teach the camera” to see black skin:

Through experience we adapted to film technology—analog and digital—that hadn’t adapted to us. We circumvented the inherent flaws of film emulsion by ensuring that our subjects were well placed in light; invested more in costly lenses that permitted a wider variety of aperture ranges so we could imbue our work with all the light we could; we purchased professional-grade films at faster speeds, or specialty films with emulsions designed for shooting conditions strictly indoor under fluorescent or tungsten light. We accepted poor advice from white photo instructors to add Vaseline to teeth and skin or apply photosensitive makeup that barely matched our skin’s undertones.

Sometimes this constraint produces beautiful work. For example, Clorinde Peters describes how Roy DeCarava “responded to the inadequacies in film and the optics of race by occupying the low tonal range in his photographs, rather than compensating with exposure or development. DeCarava’s images are tender and somber” (65). New York Times critic Vicki Goldberg describes them as “bafflingly dark, suffused with stillness.” Teju Cole writes that “[i]nstead of trying to brighten blackness, [DeCarava] went against expectation and darkened it further. What is dark is neither blank nor empty. It is in fact full of wise light, which, with patient seeing, can open out into glories” (147). DeCarava made beautiful images out of the bias against black subjects embedded in the available film technology; it wasn’t until the late 1970s that Kodak introduced Gold Max film, which improved the emulsion sensitivities for darker tones. Parallel to Coco Fusco’s much-cited discussion of how photography produces race, artist and writer Michèle Pearson Clarke observes that “photography… did not so much record the reality of Blackness as signify and construct a way of seeing it” (2). Clarke understands the profound difficulty of seeing Blackness given the histories of racism embedded in photographic practice:

This ongoing archive of willfully fabricated Black representation is now 175 years old, and represents a formidable obstacle to any contemporary photographer. When I look at any image of a Black body, or I imagine anyone looking at one of my own images, I am profoundly aware of the presence of this archive, operating as a kind of thick filter, obscuring and complicating the view. (3)

Clarke and Fusco have in mind Shawn Michelle Smith’s work, which uncovers the intertwining legacies of photography, biological racialism, and eugenics that established “social hierarchies anchored in new visual truths” (Smith 4). For Clarke, attending to the formal practices of Black photographers—in particular the choice of practitioners like Deana Lawson, Dawoud Bey, Myra Greene, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Jalani Morgan to shoot in medium and large format film—offers one way to remove the “thick filter” that obscures race in photography. Some of the most innovative and provocative contemporary black photographers choose to work with analogue photography despite its history, producing what Clarke calls “affective grit,” the “friction produced by its granular textures [which] conveys the embodied intimacies and emotional realities of Black people, because we feel differently, we see differently” (6). Clarke’s insistence on the importance of analogue photographic practice points not only to the haptics of these images, but also the need to think through photographic processes themselves.

I want to build on Clarke’s call by considering the work of the darkroom technician and, in particular, their potential agency as a diasporic and racialized subject. What happens when we understand the darkroom technician as separate from the photographer, but playing a crucial role in the making of a photographic image? And what happens when we think about that technician as a racialized figure who might bring their own histories and techniques to bear in photographic production? Working alone in the deep red glow of the darkroom safelight, the technician has not occupied much of the discussion in contemporary photography theory. Yet until the recent era of digital photography, there would be no photographs without the work of the darkroom. Even with the rise of digital photography, many of the most celebrated images by racialized photographers have remained aligned with the wet process: the darkroom technologies of film, fixative, developers, enlargers, and images in solution (as Clarke’s survey of contemporary Black photographers who choose analogue reminds us). What happens in the darkroom matters. And it matters particularly for thinking about race and photography.

Darkroom materiality

Theorizing darkroom work through the figure and craft of the darkroom technician destabilizes the binary between the photographer and the photographic subject. More, understanding that the work of the darkroom can manifest across multiple cultural registers opens up the homogenizing tendencies of its techne; even when technicians used the same enlargers, printers, papers, and fluids, they used them differently in different places. To think of the darkroom process as my father did, as 改色, is to put in place radically different circuits of knowledge, craft, and practice than those dominated by Kodak and Ilford. Even though developing processes are integral to photography, they remain curiously under-theorized. My theorizing of the darkroom process is guided by, and extends, the materialist turn in photography criticism. This materialist turn emerges in Tina Campt’s conversation with the Black British photographer Ingrid Pollard on the subject of photographic negatives: “photographic images have a tangibility, a materiality that we often lose sight of when we engage them only in print form, and negatives remind us of this materiality” (128). As Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart observe, “a photograph is a three-dimensional thing, not only a two-dimensional image” (1). While this observation seems obvious,

[t]he prevailing tendency is that photographs are apprehended in one visual act, absorbing image and object together, yet privileging the former. Photographs thus become detached from their physical properties and consequently from the functional context of a materiality that is glossed merely as a neutral support for images. (Edwards and Hart 2)

Attempting to push beyond this glossing, Lee Mackinnon asks, “How might consideration of photography as a material ontological event allow us to go beyond the well-established subject-object positions that have long underpinned photographic critique?” (150). Mackinnon’s question disrupts a longstanding immateriality connected to ontological approaches to photography. In his formative 1958 essay on “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” André Bazin removes the intermediary role of any material processes necessary for the production of the image. Instead, he dwells on the intrinsic relation between the photograph and its object, and the power of the photograph to remove barriers to representation:

It is not for me to separate off, in the complex fabric of the objective world, here a reflexion of a damp sidewalk, there a gesture of a child. Only the impassive lens, stripping its object of all those ways of seeing it, … [is] to present it in all its virginal purity to my attention and consequently to my love. (8)

This elegiac ode to the impassive and objective power of the camera to capture its object powerfully signposts the turn away from precisely the kinds of material considerations to which Mackinnon returns. For Bazin, “[t]he photograph as such and the object in itself share a common being, after the fashion of a fingerprint” (8); for Mackinnon, the fingerprint demands attention to the viscosity of the ink and, more pertinently, to the ways in which the photograph is much more than an imprint.

In this turn to enlarging photographic criticism beyond the photographer and the photographed, the photograph has become an event, as Ariella Azoulay suggests (15). Mackinnon expands Azoulay’s approach into the materials of production:

To think as a materialist is to acknowledge the agencies that participate in the act of making, or taking, a photograph. Taking a photograph indicates the extraction and exchange of certain material conditions that allow the image to come into being. Whether considering the constitutive material elements of devices that are mined, extracted, or otherwise amalgamated, such as silver, aluminum, steel or oil, or the shutter at the moment of its capture in conjunction with eye, hand, body, or remote automated operative, the image is made only in respect of all that has been taken in order to make it possible. The image thus begins its journey through numerous channels, optical and otherwise, that proceed to process it. (153-54)

In attending to the processes of making the photograph, Mackinnon asks us to consider the agential possibilities of a materialist approach in which

the human photographer is no longer the sole agency that authors the image. Agency lends itself to all features of the photographic event as they interact, and the photographic image is a narrow section through the complex black box of such an event. (154)

Mackinnon focuses primarily on the materials that make up the black box of the camera itself: the “apparatus of the camera bears the inscription of global divisions of labour and wealth, sanctioned behind a veneer of techno-humanism… Those who mine its raw materials, those who fit its components in remote sweatshops are the camera’s extended functionaries and its remote body” (155). For Mackinnon, materialism—defined as “a decision to focus upon the materials of engagement, such as the processes of production and their subsequent power relations, the workers who build components, and the otherwise black-boxed complexity of interactions that make the photographic event possible”—makes agency visible (150).

While this turn to materialism enables an understanding of agency that extends well beyond the relationship between the photographer and the photographed, its focus still occludes darkroom processes. This occlusion, the curious invisibility of the darkroom’s processes, can be located in what Kaja Silverman tracks as “the industrialization of chemical photography” and the “ocularization” of photography, which “reached its zenith in 1888, when George Eastman began manufacturing dry, transparent, flexible, photographic film and released the first Kodak camera” (82). Marketed under the slogan “You Press the Button, We Do the Rest,” the camera arrived with the film already loaded for one hundred exposures (82). The customer, now also the photographer, simply used the camera and then “sent it back to Eastman with the film still in it so that the negatives could be processed, printed, and mounted. The camera was reloaded, and returned to the owner with the prints” (82). Wildly popular, the Kodak camera made darkroom work invisible and diminished its role as an agent in the production of the photographic image. Reduced to a factory-assembled technical process, the work of the darkroom ceases to operate as a site of craft, artistry, and agency:

by reducing photography to three predefined steps, George Eastman substituted the Kodak system for the “pencil of nature.” By releasing photographers from “the chemical steps of the process,” he also sealed off photography’s liquid intelligence. Finally, by printing as well as developing the negative at the factory, Eastman created the illusion that the photographs that arrived in the mail were the exact positive equivalents of the negatives that were in the camera when it was shipped off – that the governing principle of photography is “sameness.” (Silverman 83)

Rather than celebrating the idiosyncrasies and instabilities fundamental to the wet process, the Kodak system flattened photography’s differences. In so doing, it suppressed the possibilities of photography as a site of volatile – rather than mechanically reproduced – memory.

In contrast, to embrace the materiality of the darkroom as central to the photographic process is to reactivate what Jeff Wall identifies as photography’s “liquid intelligence” (109). This intelligence allows an even more profound revaluation of the relationship between photography and memory that Mackinnon’s materialism demands. Echoing what Richard Terdiman calls “materials memory” (35) in reference to the persistence of the knowledge of social processes embedded into the construction of objects, Mackinnon asks that considerations of the photographic image recall the material processes of its production:

In materialist terms, memory extends beyond the pictorial surface of the image and is embedded in the core of devices and materials. To invest the surface of its resultant image with the nostalgia of the subject is an act that negates the memory held in these components, or the memory of those who were present at the event of capture and who experienced the extended context of that moment beyond the instant of its abstraction. (155)

Between all the forces of extraction and colonialism (the mining of materials, the physical processes of assembly) that come with the production of the camera as a physical object and the photographic image that you hold in your hand or see framed on a wall, there is a passage through what Jeff Wall identifies as a form of archaic knowledge:

This archaism of water, of liquid chemicals, connects photography to the past, to time, in an important way. By calling water an ‘archaism’ here I mean that it embodies a memory-trace of very ancient production-processes – of washing, bleaching, dissolving, and so on, which are connected to the origin of techne… In this sense, the echo of water in photography evokes its prehistory. (109)

The materials memory of this liquid intelligence also persists and reverberates. As Wall observes, it connects the technological work of producing the photographic image to older processes of memory and to production. Water—and the chemical baths necessary for the production of most photographic images prior to the era of digitization—calls the photograph back to the materiality of a process that emerges only, and precisely, in solution. It is not only the “impassive lens” of Bazin’s ontology that strips the photographic object of “spiritual dust and grime,” but also the liquid intelligence of the wet process itself. Immersed, bathed, and finally fixed in the complexity of multiple solutions, the materiality of the photograph carries the traces of processes that have been rinsed away. The print process therefore demands thinking about photography at a crucially unstable and unfixed moment. Before it is printed, in the black waters of the darkroom, the photograph is literally in development. Much can happen here, in the red glow and maroon shadows of the safelight. Many decisions are made, and each one will alter the image. Each print will carry the invisible traces of the technician who adjusts light, color, and contrast in pursuit of what will be a final image (but never truly so, because another print can always be made). In this uncertain and perpetual calibration, the darkroom is a place of fleeting possibility and material agency.

Wet process and the negative histories of seeing color

Despite my commitment to locating the agential possibilities of the darkroom process, especially for racialized and diasporic subjects, I am keenly aware of the ways in which photography has served colonialism and racism. As the work of photography scholars and practitioners shows, color photography has been an instrument of discrimination and violence. Lorna Roth’s work on color balance and the Kodachrome process gets to the heart of the racism in the chromogenic print process. Roth’s extensive research shows that the process is racially coded in that it makes whiteness normative and works to obscure blackness. Roth focuses on the so-called “Shirley cards” used by Kodak to instruct darkroom technicians and photographers on color balance and process. The “Shirley card” is a

norm reference card showing a “Caucasian” woman wearing a colourful, high-contrast dress [and] is used as a basis for measuring and calibrating the skin tones on the photograph being printed. The light skin tones of these women – named “Shirley” by male industry users after the name of the first colour test-strip-card model – have been the recognized skin ideal standard for most North American analogue photo labs since the early part of the twentieth century and they continue to function as the dominant norm. (112)

Roth identifies several factors that forced a change in the emulsions. In the 1950s, school photographs began to depict black and white children together. Different skin tones could be accommodated through “compensatory lighting” and “technical adjustments learned through experience” as long as the children were photographed individually, but in a group portrait, “these techniques could not resolve the problem of the film bias in favour of ‘Caucasian’ skin… the picture results showed details on the white children’s faces, but erased the contours and particularities of the faces of children with darker skin, except for the whites of their eyes and teeth” (119). As Roth is at pains to show, this imbalance is the result of a sustained history of racial and gender biases that contributed to the development of the technical materials, such that “refinements to the chemistry of film emulsions have never been issues of physics or chemistry exclusively, but have been the result of cultural choices as well” (118).

Even without Shirley cards, professional photographers had long been aware of this bias in color film. Jean-Luc Godard famously refused to use Kodak film during a 1977 trip to Mozambique and declared the film to be “racist” (O’Toole 373). The artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin pick up Godard’s statement in To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light, a 2012 photographic exhibition based on Shirley cards and dead Kodak film stock used on a trip to Gabon that produced only one successful image. The title is taken from “an expression used by Kodak executives to euphemistically allude to the ability of their new color film stocks to better represent a wide range of skin tones” (O’Toole 373), and the exhibition insists on the materiality of the image and the history of racism over which so much image-making had glossed. In particular, Broomberg and Chanarin’s work refers to, and recalls, the racism of Polaroid’s ID-2 camera, which had been deliberately modified to produce an extra burst of light to illuminate the features of black people (O’Toole 379, Morgan 525). the South African apartheid government used this camera to produce identification photographs for passbooks that controlled and regulated the movements of black South Africans. After discovering the connection between Polaroid and apartheid in South Africa, workers at Polaroid posted flyers that declared “Polaroid Imprisons Black People in 60 Seconds”—the time it took to produce the image (Morgan 524). These protests ultimately lead to Polaroid’s withdrawal from South Africa in 1977, revealing the complexity of the racism of color film processes (Morgan 546).

In the South African context, color photography carries its particular morality. Jennifer Bajorek’s discussion of the color photography of David Goldblatt and Richard Mosse reveals its complex moral dimension—what Bajorek calls an “extra-moral” dimension. Goldblatt refused to photograph in color during apartheid, and only began to shoot in color post-apartheid. But Bajorek cautions against making easy connections between color and the “sweetness” of the end of apartheid:

Everyone likes a felicitous correspondence between the aesthetic qualities of an image and its theme or subject matter. Such a correspondence is, however, in the case of Goldblatt’s colour work, false. Interpretations of Goldblatt’s post-apartheid work that confuse the “sweetness” of colour with that of the end of apartheid fail to engage with its most interesting interpretive challenges, which are, I would venture, connected with its probing reflection on the nature of democracy. (Bajorek 226)

Bajorek goes on to offer just such a probing reflection, ultimately suggesting that

Colour, it turns out, belongs neither to a moral nor to a political discourse. The questions we should be asking are not whether colour is too sweet or too seductive, or whether it distracts us from passively receiving a political message, or from engaging as political actors with “hard realities,” but whether and when it allows us to visualise these realities differently or to ask new questions about them? When and where, in what images, does colour allow us to ask, to think, to see or to do something new? (234)

Bajorek’s questions point not only to the experience of seeing color, but also to its production. To think about producing color is to think about the print process and the work of the darkroom. In the darkroom, the processing of the photographic image turns on interaction, subtraction, and balance. To make beautiful color prints, the darkroom technician (who is sometimes, but certainly not always, the photographer) must balance the colors by creating an interaction between the three main colors (magenta, yellow, and cyan), and then slowly subtracting them (usually magenta and yellow) until the image colors are correct or true.

Correcting color and alternative modes of darkroom production

There are implications for understanding the darkroom technician both as potentially disaggregated from the photographer, and as integral to the photographic situation. Sometimes photographers develop their own images, but often they do not. The darkroom technician’s work is usually invisible; it happens where there is no witness. While it seems to lack the panache of the auteurship wielded by the photographer, this work too is marked by complex decision-making, craft, and artistry. Despite the job title, the darkroom technician’s work is never merely technical, not simply an automated process of churning out contact sheets and printing images through a prescribed formula. Like the photographer, the darkroom technician must master an array of equipment and substances. The enlarger. The printer. The chemicals and the paper. And the norm references or indexes. It matters where and in what context a photography technician learns their craft; like photography itself, photographic development processes are not neutral.

Much has been made of the Shirley cards, and I’m sure they were essential, but I never saw one in my father’s darkrooms. He tells me he never used them. My father’s route to acquiring darkroom skills occurred outside of commercial photography or amateur darkrooms across North America, where tools such as the Shirley cards were standard practice. He was trained in Hong Kong in the late 1960s. After escaping from a gulag where he had been imprisoned for five years, and a different gulag before that for two years, he was given shelter by a man who adopted him as a godson. This benefactor had a medical practice in the central district of Hong Kong. Even all these years later, my father still remembers every detail. He slept in the office. He tells me that a small darkroom had been installed in the medical office because it was more efficient and less expensive for the doctor to develop his own x-ray images than to send them out. There my father learned how to process and print, and he was captivated by the way an image could be manipulated in the darkroom. Where the makeshift darkroom in the medical office in Hong Kong offered a preliminary space of learning and shelter, he honed his skills in the semi-professional darkroom in the basement of a grocery store in Edmonton. His diasporic route was marked first by seven years in the dark room of Chinese state persecution before an escape to a literal darkroom shelter in a British colonial protectorate, and then by yet another darkroom in the refuge of a small city in a British settler colonial country. His darkroom skills had to be translated across these cultures and geographies.

In attending to the translation work that my father had to do in the darkroom, it is helpful to consider the differences between photographic practices in China and those in North America. Photography in China was and is not the same as photography in Europe and North America. Critics such as Roberta Wue and Wu Hung have written extensively about the distinctness of photographic history and tradition in China, outlining its close relationship to ancestor portraits and landscape paintings. Still, Wu Hung cautions against falling into easy binarisms that characterize eastern and western conceptions of photography as intrinsically different rather than as a more complex combination of difference and mutual articulation. The skepticism over any kind of intrinsic east-west aesthetic divide is warranted, but at the same time, it is absolutely the case the Chinese portraiture has a long and robust tradition that influenced the rise of photography in China in ways that differ from the emergence of photography elsewhere. As Yi Gu posits, “While we may downplay the emphasis on ‘Chinese peculiarity’ as a mere reflection of colonial anxiety, traces of stylistic distinction were manifested in a good many photographs of Chinese sitters” (122). Gu recognizes the specificity of Chinese photography without falling into binarism through a rigorous investigation of the Chinese names for photography, their evolution, and the way they illuminate an approach to photography that could be identified as specifically Chinese. Gu draws attention to the intimate relationship between painting and photography in China: “The first names for photography in Chinese – yingxiang, xiaoxiang, xiaozhao—were all preexisting terms for portrait painting” (Gu 121). China’s encounter with photography needs to be understood as part of a broader complex of visual practices in which painting and photography are synchronous rather than diametrically opposed:

If there are antinaturalistic traits in Chinese photography, they neither indicate a lack of understanding by Chinese photography’s media specificity nor demonstrate a conscious resistance to it. The fact that the names first used for photography were all preexisting words for portrait painting highlights a historical moment in China when photography belonged to a rapidly changing and expanding field of visual practice that was conveniently dubbed “painting.” (122)

Gu’s interventions break down the divide between photography and painting in Chinese visual practices. Her examination of the Chinese terms for photography calls attention to the specificity of photographic traditions outside of North American and European contexts.

Similarly, the Chinese term for darkroom process, 改色, reveals the specificity of the skills that my father brought to the darkroom. The first character, 改, is a verb that means to correct, alter, improve, or remodel. The second character, 色, is a noun that means color, tint, or hue, but also form, body, beauty, and the desire for beauty. This phrasing differs radically from Anglophone terminology for the same work: wet process, or developing the photograph. Further, 改色 is terminology that emerged outside of the industrialization of chemical photography. As Silverman observes, “Most of the terms through which we conceptualize the medium were manufactured for us, just like our equipment and material” (70), but 改色 opens up a different conception. Circulating outside of the imperatives of the industrialization of photography, 改色 offers an alternative route to the liquid intelligence of the photograph. 改色 is notably literal as a term for the work of the darkroom. When so much of the terminology for photographic practice is dominated by metaphor and analogy (developing the negative, shooting the film), 改色 describes exactly the work that must be done in order for the negative to be printed as a positive image. As a term, 改色 understands that the film that has been “shot” requires a great deal of further work before it can be printed as a finished image. It also assumes that the photograph is only finished after this process of correction. That is, the film is always already in need of correction; it is not simply finished, correct, or true until it has undergone this process of balance and modification.

The language of development, of the fluidity and change and progress, pervades photography. There is an inherently unfinished nature to photography such that its evolution seems twinned with that of its users:

Not only is the photographic image an analogy, rather than a representation or an index, but analogy is also the fluid in which it develops. This process does not begin when we decide that it should, or end when we command it to. Photography develops, rather, with us, and in response to us. It assumes historically legible forms, and when we divest them of their saving power, generally inputting them to ourselves, it goes elsewhere. The earliest of these forms was the pinhole camera, which was more “found” than invented. It morphed into the optical camera obscura, was reborn as chemical photography, migrated into literature and painting, and lives on in a digital form. It will not end until we do. (Silverman 12)

Silverman moves quickly to metaphor, but she is careful not to insist on the necessity of understanding the idea of development as a linear process. As Sara Kofman warns, the turn to metaphor in photography demands a wariness of any language of development that is too linear. She refuses a linear approach by which a photographic negative is transformed into a positive, printed image. Writing of the use of the photographic metaphor in Freud, Kofman notes that, despite its claim to science, “Freud’s text nevertheless fails to avoid the traditional system of mythical and metaphysical oppositions: unconscious/conscious, dark/light, negative/positive” (26). These oppositions imply linearity by marking the passage from unconscious to conscious, and from negative to positive, where “[t]he positive image, the double of the negative, implies that ‘what is at the end is already there in the beginning'” (Kofman 26-7). If we were to follow this line of thinking, then the work of the darkroom would become irrelevant: “Development adds nothing; it only enables the darkness to be made into light” (27). Against this reading, Kofman argues that

the passage from negative to positive is neither necessary nor dialectical. It is possible that the development will never take place. Repression is originary, and there is always an irretrievable residue, something which will never have access to consciousness. The death drive, as a generalized economic principle, prevents us from confusing the negative in Freud with that in Hegel. What is more, when there is a passage into consciousness, it depends not on logical criteria, but on a selection involving conflicts between nondialectizable forces. Finally, to pass from negative to positive is not to become conscious of a preexisting meaning, light, or truth of a reason diverted from itself… The passage to light takes place through a procedure which is not theoretical but practical: the analytic cure. As with Marx, only a transformation of the balance of forces leads to clarity. To pass from darkness to light is not, then, to rediscover a meaning already there, it is to construct a meaning which has never existed as such. There are limits to repetition inasmuch as full meaning has never been present. Repetition is originary. (27-28, my emphasis)

In this extraordinary meditation, Kofman traces a path from analogy and metaphor to practice. She insists on the active and deeply creative role of the darkroom process. The passage from negative to positive is not merely a mechanical process of inversion and imprinting. It is full of conflict. It is not linear. It is a procedure and a process that demands balance. More, the truth of the image is not simply already there waiting for a technical or mechanical process to make it complete or visible. Rather, it is always under construction. Each print is a repetition that is also original. Repetition is originary. In attending to the passage of the negative into a positive print as a process that is not simple inversion, Kofman’s analysis corrects and balances the occularization of the photograph whereby Bazin could contemplate an ontology of photography that eliminated the darkroom from consideration.

To insist upon the originality of each repetition, to demand attending to the difference in each photographic print, enables a way of seeing race in photography that embraces the trace of the negative in each image, and thus the process of producing an image out of that negative. Each repetition, each print, is an articulation of difference. As Campt understands, photographic negatives

confront us with both the limits of the photograph and our desire for it to simplify the work of racial and diasporic identification and affiliation by doing it for us. We rely all too often on images to confirm our unspoken assumption about race and diaspora through their capacity to materialize the visible traces and visual indexes of difference and affiliation… the materiality of the photographic negative reminds us that even when race seems clearly visible in a photographic print, its visuality is the creation of technical, material, and cultural processes of conjuring and fixing, where the very chemical and technological matter of the image – the photographic negative – must disappear race in order to make it reappear in recognizable form. (128)

If each print is an instance of making race disappear only to make it reappear in a stable and fixed form, dwelling in the difference of each reprint, each repetition, can make visible the potentiality of the photograph’s passage from negative to positive. It opens up a generative space for racialized representation that has been largely invisible: the work of darkroom technicians who are not white, and who do not print and produce photographs according to norms and conventions of whiteness.

In the darkroom, my father corrected color. But he did much more than that. He altered and improved on the image. He remodeled it. And he didn’t do so only in terms of color, but by understanding that color is also its own form, a body of its own. It is beauty and the desire for beauty. He did this work through a process of interaction, subtraction, and balance. That is, the darkroom technician understands that there is no image without interaction; that color emerges, paradoxically, from the removal of color; and that this work is ultimately one of balance. What is more, all color work shares a common ground in that every color is a mix of the three foundational ones: magenta, cyan, and yellow. The darkroom technician handles and sees the photograph in its most unfixed and unstable state. In mid-process, the print is terribly fragile. It is vulnerable to light and heat. It must be bathed again and again in order to emerge in its final state. The layers of its formation are laid bare and are open for manipulation, destruction, transition, and change. Although Roth, Bajorek, and O’Toole are absolutely right to point to the ways in which the color print process fails racialized peoples in its reliance upon the visuality of whiteness as a norm, I hope that this preliminary exploration of darkroom materiality opens up the possibility of a more agential understanding of the wet process. This technology, like all technologies, is open to manipulation. It is a technical process, but one that is fundamentally about a multiplicity of techniques. To correct color, as my father did, is to deploy a range of formal possibilities in the search for beauty.

Conclusion: anticipatory spectrality and liquid intelligence in the safelight

I would like to close by looking at a self-portrait of my father (Fig. 1).

Fig 1.
Self-portrait by Richard Cho. Used by permission.

In this photograph, the colors completely saturate the frame. My father is lit up in bold washes of blue and yellow and violet. The electricity of the color contrasts with the leisurely pose he has adopted for this portrait. He leans on an elbow. He is smoking. His gaze is turned away, off to the left of the frame. You wouldn’t know that this a self-portrait of a man who has just escaped from years of imprisonment in a gulag where starvation, deprivations of all sorts, and torture were the horrifically regular facts of daily life. This image tells me something about surviving the trauma of state persecution. It tells me that, in darkness, one can still find ways to fill a frame with so much light such that even the shadows are completely charged with color. It tells me that how he saw himself in the aftermath of that horror was part of a process where the things that happen in a darkroom can transcend the captivity of the frame.

My father is very proud of this print. He claims to have invented the process for making this image. He tells me he did it by playing around in the darkroom, by over-exposing the photograph at different points in the development process. To arrive at this image, the technician must undertake several submersions and exposures. If there are still doubts about the otherness of my father’s liquid intelligence, let me share with you his own instructions for how to make this image. His process (Fig. 2):

Fig 2.
My father’s instructions.

He wrote these instructions for me nearly fifty years after he made the image. There is no Shirley card here. He is now an old man, but he remembers in vivid and exacting detail how to make that portrait again. I have chosen not to translate his instructions. The difference of his approach, the depth of the connection between these instructions and the life he led, matter more than the technicalities of the process itself. These instructions tell me that one submersion is not enough, that the film must be exposed through multiple filters at different stages in the development process. Looking at these instructions now, I can see that his particular route to photographic development is its own story of the self. I have not yet written of his escape from the gulag. It is not my story to tell. I do not know if it is my story to pass on. He escaped through sewage tunnels and then swam to freedom in Macao. He passed through dark waters and multiple submersions. Every repetition is originary.

Photographic print processes are processes of development, and are thus fallible and alterable. To pay serious attention to the darkroom as a crucial site of the event of photography is to attend to the instances where the photograph is at its most vulnerable, already in existence but not yet formed. It is to understand that the materiality of the process also draws us to the immaterial – the instances where the photograph could be something else, something other than what it will be. It is anticipatorily spectral. The photograph in development is not haunted by what was, but rather by what could be. Haunting is this “contest over the future” (Gordon 3). It is not about the past, but rather about possibilities curtailed and foregone: “We’re haunted, as Herbert Marcuse wrote, by the ‘historic alternatives’ that could have been'” (Gordon 5). In this take on haunting, Avery Gordon reconsiders the work she accomplished in Ghostly Matters. Nearly a decade after its publication, Gordon refines her thinking to insist on the social and political dimensions of haunting, specifically that of incarceration. In the aftermath of imprisonment and the heady experience of a freedom that was only ever a glimmer of possibility, the spectrality of my father’s self-portrait emerges out of a contesting of futures that could have been. Capturing and fixing a moment of photographic development in flux, this self-portrait makes visible the idea of other futures. What if more magenta had been allowed here? What if the blue along his jaw line had been fixed before it became that particular shade of blue? In its embrace of color untethered from the neutral and normative modes of balance and indexical accuracy, this self-portrait is charged with the excesses of fixatives that have been, if only for a moment, allowed to be unfixed from their usual places. It animates possibilities of pasts that will not remain in the past. Gordon “used the term haunting to describe those singular and yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what’s been in your blind field comes into view” (2). On the edge of each shift in color and tone, this self-portrait is at once exemplary of his technical mastery of darkroom technique, and an experiment in allowing for the loss of balance and control. Allowing for this loss anticipates the ghosts that hover just beyond the field of view. There is no way to see the dispossession of a past marked by years in a gulag with no clear end in sight, other than to look again and again at the contested futures that haunt the present.

My father’s self-portrait reveals a reformation and re-making of the self that anticipates so much. It anticipates the idea of a life that can be made in the aftermath of imprisonment, torture, and persecution. It anticipates and beautifully refutes the idea that the darkroom is merely a place of technical and mechanical reproduction. It anticipates Kofman’s understanding that repetition is originary. More than that, it posits that repetition is anticipatory. This repetition, this portrait produced in a way that so spectacularly visualizes the instability of the darkroom process, anticipates its originality. Look at the swirl of maroon and purple in the top left corner. Look at the opalescent bursts of turquoise, yellow, and orange in the bottom left and top right. This photograph captures the innate dynamism and unpredictability at the heart of photography’s liquid intelligence. This self-portrait knows in advance that it cannot be made again. In its chemical swirls and chromatic ruptures, the self-portrait makes a spectacle of the knowledge of the liquid intelligence that stymies total reproducibility. This image is singular. More than that, even reprinting it from a negative demands a recognition of the difference of each print. The chemical conditions of its production cannot be perfectly reproduced. That is the point.

But this knowledge is embedded in every analogue photograph. To think of the photograph as an object of mechanical reproduction risks occluding how every repetition is a repetition with a difference. This difference haunts photography’s reproducibility. Its anticipatory spectrality makes manifest the darkroom’s materiality. This anticipatory spectrality is a form of agency that emerges most powerfully in diasporic formations. Diasporas do not emerge from nowhere, but the somewheres of their emergence are fraught and complex. Similarly, photographs do not emerge from nowhere (not even digital photographs, as Anna Pasek’s unpacking of glitch aesthetics and post-liquid intelligence uncovers); they are developed. They come into the world through a process as fraught and complex as diaspora. Each diasporic formation is both a repetition of an older, earlier form, and also utterly and necessarily original. To be in diaspora is to grapple perpetually with forms of repetition that are also always new. Diasporic communities are imperfect re-formations of ideas of origin and home that are always elsewhere, but are perpetually re-made in the present. This remaking anticipates its own originality. It knows in advance that what is lost or left behind cannot be copied or made again. Attending to the work of developing photographs calls for a focus on one of the moments when the photograph is most unstable, when it is unfixed and in transition. Such a moment illuminates the particular instabilities of photographic images in general, but also photography that is attentive to race and diaspora specifically. Racialized and diasporic identities that are constructed out of and despite processes of fragmentation and dispersal are always in process. They are perpetually at risk of becoming unfixed and always in transition. Understanding photography as a process of development demands inhabiting the vulnerabilities of these instabilities.

Acknowledgments

This essay owes its first debt to my fellow panelists at the “Reframing Family Photography” conference: Nicole Fleetwood, Sabina Gadihoke, Bakirathi Mani, and Leigh Raiford. Without these early conversations, and the ones that followed with Michèle Pearson Clarke and Gabrielle Moser, I would not have written this essay at all. Many thanks to the Family Camera Network for making these conversations possible. Knowing that this essay would be in the very fine editorial care of Eyal Amiran made it possible for me to imagine publishing it. Thanks, also, to the three anonymous peer reviewers for their rigour and care. Sara Rozenberg offered indispensable research assistance at the eleventh hour. Huge thanks to Postmodern Culture for their willingness to publish this essay in Chinese and to Guanglong Pang for this beautiful translation. Thank you to Richard and Gwen Cho who left behind one world to make a new one for me.

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