I studied political theory and photography in college. I thought I was going to be a photojournalist and writer. A mix of Annie Liebowitz and Hunter S. Thompson, but with fewer guns and drugs. Back in the day I did like my psychedelics, but not to the gonzo point of a Hunter S.
Nothing even close to that dream ever happened.
At age 21, the harsh reality of making money set in. I had a string of shitty jobs. Busing tables. Phone polling. Selling artwork to strip mall business owners. A "photographer" at a mall portrait studio where they wanted me to come in to shoot some photos of a 6 month old baby while I was down with bronchitis. In 1994, I landed a job at a shitty photo lab in Santa Cruz. It paid $6.25 an hour, which was decent at the time considering my rent was $225/mo. and the general cost of living was pretty low at the time. Shit. Gas was still about $1/galon and smokes were $1.25 a pack.
I got to use my darkroom skills at this awful place as well as learn how to use the one hour color printer. This is where I honed my sensitivity to color. Being able to look at a color negative, determine a color cast, and make the appropriate additive color correction gave me a very firm foundation for a lot of what I would do professionally in the not too distant future. Unfortunately, a lot of that involved looking at super grizzly images from the coroner's office as they were our #1 client. There's a certain shade of green that haunts me to this day!
I worked with Eric, and Todd. Eric and I ran the counter and did most of the "automated" color printing. The one hour stuff. Todd did most of the custom color work and finishing. The owners were really hands off, deep in debt, and only came in to check on things very infrequently. We liked them mostly because we never saw them and could just go about our work.
They were cheap though. The business was struggling and they cut corners all over the place. We were doing half the business that they did a year ago when there was 5 times the staff. Bluntly, we were understaffed, overworked, and grossly underpaid given this reality. It was stressful. The three of us were photographers, so, even though most of the work we did was one hour printing of tourist, real estate, and coroner photos, we strived to provide the best possible work with the least amount of waste in the shortest time possible.
Eric and I had a refuge in this place though. The B&W darkroom. Occasionally, we'd get requests for custom B&W printing. We both loved our drakroom time. Even if it wasn't our own work, we really wanted to impress people with our printing skills. Early on, the automatic B&W developer, stopper, fixer broke down and the owners were too cheap to fix it. Cool! Printing by hand! Even better!
If you're a photographer, there is a particular joy that occurs when you first dip your photo paper into the developer bath. You slide it in gently so that the developer coats the paper evenly at a consistent rate. If you haphazardly plop the paper in and push it down with the tongs, the developer will start working at different intervals making a consistent tone nearly impossible as different parts of the paper are developing on different timelines. Slide the paper in. gently agitate the solution. Wait. You learn to ignore the weird qualities of the deep red light in which you bathe for hours at a time. Wait.
Boom!
There it is. The light sensitized silver halides begin reacting with what is essentially powdered laundry detergent and the image begins to emerge. It takes some practice to judge when the image has been developed to the proper point before yanking it out and quickly getting it into a solution that is basically highly concentrated orange juice. Wait. Let the chemical reaction that darkens the silver in the emulsion come to a stop. Gently pick it up by the edges and drop it into the final solution of acid, basically ammonia, to fix it. Put a final stop to the development process. Neutralize any alkaline molecules that might tempt the silver particles to darken some more. Pull it out of the fixer and bring it outside to dry on the rack. GAH! THE LIGHT! EVERYTHING IS BLINDINGLY BRIGHT AND BLUE!
Your pupils do an abrupt contraction reminiscent of the shooting up montage in Requiem for a Dream... only in reverse. Take a moment to orient yourself to the new lighting conditions and hang your print to dry.
Once dry, evaluate it for any subtle tweaks you might need to make or any spotting that might need doing. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Can you tell I liked darkroom time?
This was sanctuary for Eric and me. We would check in with each other to see who was the most stressed and could use some time in the dark, using the skills we loved to practice. (We also always had a 6 pack of Guiness in there)
Remember when I said the owners were cheap? Yeah. That bit us in the ass by making our darkroom Shangri La more of a torture chamber.
Beside proper technique, the number one thing that determines that quality and consistency of your B&W prints is the freshness of your chemistry. Once their chemical power is diluted or neutralized, they behave in less effective and predictable ways, or cease working at all.
Now, being cheapskates and trying to milk this business to pay off their personal debts, the owners decided to start cutting back on the frequency of B&W chemical purchases while upping their solicitation of custom B&W work.
Ok. Not an ideal situation. We dealt with it, grumbling all the while and drinking Guiness in the darkroom while doing so. We drank a lot on the job at this shop. We also took out a lot of our frustrations by "opening" all the Fuji waterproof single use cameras by throwing them against the shop wall in the parking lot until they cracked enough for us to get at the contents. It was very therapeutic.
The darkroom. There's a massive, unpleasant side effect of stale B&W paper chemistry. Remember when I described fixer as basically ammonia? Yeah. You know what also reeks of ammonia? Cat piss. Stale paper fixer smells almost exactly like a litter box desperately in need of cleaning. Add the musty quality of expired developer to it and spend 8 hours in a poorly ventilated 250 cubic foot box of this... you wind up infused with this repellent aroma. It's in your clothes. Your hair. Your skin. Only you can't smell it because it's 50% of what you've been breathing for most of the day. I'd come home from work. My girlfriend would poke her head out of the hallway upstairs, not say a word, and just point to the bathroom. If I were to spend any quality time with her or the other housemates, I must take a long shower and basically scrub off several layers of my epidermis with steel wool.
I worked here for about 6 months. It was terrible and yet I loved it in a perverse way. I learned a lot. I got to use the skills I enjoyed using so much. Ultimately, I couldn't take it anymore. This place was circling the drain. I was never going to get a raise despite helping increase revenue and profit margins...
Then... they bounced a check. Ok. Fuck this shit! I'm getting a new job. I was living with Brendan, Jim, and Ashlie at this point. Ashlie was still in school and very seriously focused on that. Jim and Brendan both worked at Kinko's at the time. Brendan worked in Computer Services at the Capitola branch and Jim was as assistant manager at the Los Gatos location... which had a photo lab! They had an opening and Jim fast tracked an interview for me.
I got the job! It meant a 25 mile commute every day over Highway 17 from Santa Cruz to Los Gatos, but it was better than working for a couple that were too cheap to buy chemistry essential to their product and bounced checks. Fuck them.
This Kinko's photo lab was a different beast. All pretty much automated other than manually feeding the developed film into the printer. The actual work was not all that fun. It was all about time management and workflow. Not at all about actual photography technique or craft. It was however an entry point for what I thought would be a new career path, potentially lucrative.
It was and it wasn't. What this job really did was set me on my trajectory to Seattle, and, ultimately becoming a filmmaker.
So thank you shitty photo lab that made me smell like cat piss for helping pave the course that would lead me to where I am today.
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