Friday:
Mani Sitaraman: Mike Johnston doesn't have a darkroom? Truly, we are living in the end times.
Well, we might be, Mani, but me not having a dark room is only because all the rooms in my small Gothic Revival farmhouse (built c. 1888) have windows. As for a darkroom, I don't think my lack of what my friend Nick Hartmann once called "the room-sized photo accessory" is quite as portentous as the rough Beast slouching toward Bethlehem or the birds flying backwards and like that.
Looking back, it's been the norm. I seldom had a darkroom in my life. I've used a parade of workspaces, from professional and school facilities (some of which were very nice, some of which were dank and cavelike) to the most crude and rudimentary workarounds.
Here's a brief sampling of a few of my actual own darkrooms:
When I lived in downtown Washington, D.C. I tried to press into a service the closet area of my tiny studio apartment, using a rubberized blackout curtain to keep out all the light (as well as all possible air circulation, which was a problem). A board across the tub in the adjacent bathroom served as "the wet side." I had to use a tiny super-amateur beginner enlarger because it was the only thing that would fit on the built-in dresser. The largest print I could make was 8x10. That attempt at a darkroom proved too crude and awkward even for me, and I got no work done there. Fortunately I began teaching shortly afterward and gained access to various school darkrooms.
In Oak Park, where I lived in a "vintage" apartment that a friend of a relative had saved from the wrecking ball, my kitchen was half kitchen and half darkroom. The wet side was a melamine-topped table; the huge Saunders 4500II enlarger sat perched precariously atop a freestanding single cabinet with a countertop. It would move with my footfalls on the floor, so I learned to stand very still for a minute or so before each exposure, to quiet down any movement. I counted off exposure times using an electronic metronome set to 60 beats per minute, so I worked to what sounded like a ticking time bomb.
When I lived in Woodstock, Illinois (where the movie "Groundhog Day" was filmed), I used a small patch of the basement that hadn't been finished. It was dark and dusty and had cobwebs in all the nooks and crannies past the area I cleared out for myself. The ceiling was so low that I had to sit down to work at the enlarger, which was right next to the furnace. I could only work after dark, which was easiest in the Winter months. Before doing any darkroom work I had to turn the heat way down, because when the furnace shuddered to life it made the enlarger table vibrate. In contrast to the one in D.C., though, I was reasonably productive in the darkroom in Woodstock.
In Forest Park, a near suburb of Chicago, I lived for a time in a beautiful rehabbed loft, in which my darkroom was the intended powder room with all the furnishings removed. The enlarger went on a cabinet I built in the doorway, so I had to turn sideways and suck in my gut just to get inside. However, it had a ventilation fan, and I could work at any hour of the day, and Xander was very young and going to bed early. So I was quite productive there too. When I sold the loft I had to remove the bathroom and turn the space back in to a powder room.
Backstory
There's one moral to this story which might so far be hiding.
Just out of curiosity the other day, I compared the pool money list to the one for golf. Briefly, here's a rundown:
The top money-earner in pool in 2020 was Dennis Orcollo (pronounced "or-COOLio") of the Philippines, who earned $84,000 and change. Top golfer: $7,344,000. Or, about 87 times as much. The top female pool player earned $10,000, the top female golfer $1,668,000.
In fifth place, pool: $40,000; golf, $5,100,000.
To get to the first golfer who earned less than Dennis Orcollo, you have to go all the way to Satoshi Kodaira of Japan, who is 214th on the men's list in golf.
The lesson seems to be that you shouldn't encourage your kid to play pool. If anything, nudge them in the direction of golf. The income ceiling is higher. (My own son's sport is rock climbing, but he arrived at that all on his own.)
Similarly, is it a good idea to encourage a kid to become a photographer? Peter Lindbergh and his like notwithstanding, I'm not sure it's the greatest choice of profession any more (if it even was then). Although some of you within the sound of my voice are examples to the contrary. At the very least, I would guess, if you want to make a living at it, you have to accept that it's a business and you need to treat it as such. A friendly local couple approached me recently to tell me that their daughter really enjoyed macro photography and was thinking of becoming a professional macro photographer. They were curious as to whether that was a good career choice.
Me: She'd probably do better if she decided to be a professional water-skier.
The man: But she's 36.
The woman: And she can't swim.
Me: Great, so the analogy fits even better.
(Okay, I didn't actually say that out loud. I was polite.)
I think I was in my 40s when it really hit me that a lot of the guys I'd grown up with could afford better cameras than I! That didn't seem fair. I was the one who had sacrificed to be a photographer. They had become stockbrokers and doctors, lawyers and engineers. That's when my standard advice to wannabe full-time photographers shifted: maybe it's a better idea to remain an amateur, and go make your money some other way.
That's probably what I should have done if I'd wanted a great darkroom. But I had fun, anyway.
Bug of the apocalypse
By the way, out of that wettish darkroom in Woodstock one day, quite improbably, across the carpet in the adjacent office, stalked the most outlandish insect I have ever laid eyes upon. It was some exotic sort of hard-shelled multi-legged creature about an inch and a half long. Vaguely resembling a multicolored miniature version of the AT-AT's in The Empire Strikes Back, it walked with its thorax well up off the ground and moved like the priest in a funeral procession. I captured it, examined it for a few hours, then let it go in a field, without, unfortunately, having the slightest idea what it was, or what its normal habitat was, or even if it was a native species, an escaped pet, or something sinister I would have been better advised to destroy. I've never even been able to find a picture that looks anything like it. Still one of the weirdest animals I've ever encountered in the real world. How it got into my house I'll never know.
Maybe it was an omen of the end times, I don't know. I certainly can't explain it any other way!
Mike
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Book of interest this week:
PhotoWork: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice, Edited by Sasha Wolf
(clicking on the link above takes you to Amazon)
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Crabby Umbo: "It's virtually impossible to make a living in photography these days. The paradigm has changed so much, there is no path to solvency. Even in the heyday of my self-employment in the '80s, I was living hand-to-mouth while grossing decent money, while my friends in the business were relying on spouses' medical insurance and 401k's to make sure they weren't going to live in a box when they couldn't work anymore. You could write a 40-page paper on why, but I'll just cover a few points.
"I remember reading a while back, that photography was now one of the worst-paying professions in the U.S., and that between 2004 and 2014, average income had dropped $10k! In my last management job, 2013–2017, my average photographer made $10k less than I was paying the average photographer on my staff in 1995! The 2017 staff were also less qualified and less skilled by a long shot!
"The majority of photography jobs available today in commercial and advertising photography are in e-commerce. Did you get into photography to take stuff out of box, clean it up, and shoot it on a white background all day? I didn't. And in fact, I know of situations where companies have hired temp people with no photo experience at all to do this.
"One of the key killers of the professional photography industry is the 'good enough' mindset. Forty years ago, no art director I knew would hire a pal to take a picture for a job, even if they were good. The attitude was 'I'm a professional, and I'm working with other professionals.' Now, if a millennial art director can have their cat press the button on their iPhone, without getting out of their chair, it's all good! I was chatting with a West coast food photographer one time, who was opening a gallery in fly-over for his retirement hobby, and he said: '...when the latest group of art directors decided they could push a table up against some windows, shoot a picture with their iPhone, and they couldn't see the difference a professional food stylist would make...well, it's all over, isn't it.' Yep it is.
"As for film, I'm a film guy through and through, and I would love to shoot more, but my current small apartment is impossible to process film in. It's also one of the sootiest places I ever lived. One day after cleaning my closed, sealed bathroom, by the next day, there was dust and soot all over the place, from I-don't-know-where. It's the craziest thing I've ever seen.
"I would shoot judiciously, and use professional labs, but it's almost impossible to find high-quality labs to just process and proof; they all want to process and scan. By the time some millennial has dragged your film through a film gate on some scanner, and scratched the living hell out of it, it's not worth the trouble and cost. Where are the pristine, high-end, high-quality process-and-proof labs? You can't imagine how many people have recommended labs as 'great,' who think nothing of scratching the hell out of your film. Almost any recommendation from the Internet is one of these labs! Vintage lab owners, where are you?!"
Gary Nylander: "I worked as a newspaper photographer for 41 years, working for three different small-sized newspapers in Canada from 1976 to 2017. It provided me with a good living and I thoroughly enjoyed my work. I wouldn't want to be starting out today trying to make a full time living as a photographer."
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
