Printing Photographs

My Brownie Bullet

I printed with my own hands (or more likely assisted in printing) my first black and white photograph when I was maybe 10 years old, circa 1963. A young boy with a Kodak Brownie Bullet camera and a Dad who was, for a time, a serious enough amateur photographer that he had a 3 foot by 6 foot, homemade, portable darkroom for printing black and white photographs.

Even before I printed those first photographs, that darkroom had been a place of quiet retreat. A place where fantasy happens. A spaceship with colored lights and motors. To be able to print a picture in it that I'd made with my own camera was icing on the cake! I wish I had a picture of it. It was a very cool space. Magical really. 

Dad was always interested in photography but he only processed and printed his work for a couple of years after that. By the time I was 12, the darkroom was abandoned. Sometime later it was sold off.

But the memory of the magic never left me. Nor has the fundamental principle embedded in that magic -- that a photograph is a hand-made object.

William Henry Fox Talbot

Maybe that’s the reason inkjet photographs rarely move me. Absent the human hand, I don’t see the magic in them. I can appreciate the image itself of course, but I can do that looking at a book or on a website. In the end, the physical inkjet print doesn't hold me in person like a gum print does. Or a cyanotype print. Or a platinum print, or any photograph printed by hand.