Tokyo Darkroom Stye 6
Colin Barey / website / flickr / tumblr / blog
A good friend and a guy who knows more about the development progress than I ever will, Colin’s darkroom is just north of Tokyo in Saitama prefecture- a place that’s often considered the New Jersey of Japan. We often meet up to look over each other’s contact sheets and work prints over pizza or burritos or cheap Chinese food in Tokyo- it’s great to be able to share his utilitarian workspace here.
He writes:
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My darkroom is kind of a squalid mess which I chose not to pretty up, because that would have been dishonest. The truth is that this repurposed bedroom is both that ubiquitous space in any dwelling in which random shit is stored (read “abandoned”) by people too busy or lazy to throw it away AND my darkroom, hence the assorted, random junk under the Costco plastic folding table: the cat carrier our beloved calico, Chibi, arrived in earlier this year, my tool box, filled with poorly organized assortment of largely broken 100 yen store tools, various darkroom trays which I’ve never used but for some reason haven’t thrown out, wedding presents, etc.
This space works for me despite all of that. The cheap shelf against the wall is The Command Center: I’ve got an 11x14 inch paper safe I lugged back from the US on my last trip taped to the top of it so that it can’t fall off. Highly recommended. It closes itself so you can’t be an idiot and leave the lid off when you turn the lights on, and it cuts down greatly on fumbling-for-paper time. Next to it I have the binder of negs I’m currently printing contact sheets of. I have an enlarger from the ubiquitous (in Japan) Fuji 90M series, sporting a 100 yen store egg timer on the dome and a DIY cardboard filter tray fashioned from a photo paper box. The printing templates are in bags tacked to the wall. The overall decor is Late 20th c. American College Dorm Room, complete with Bob Marley banner. There’s also a very out of date Tokyo rail map and a poster for my friends Tom Beswick and Jesse Freeman’s cinematic collaboration, “Winter Mondays Summer Sundays,” from a couple of years ago.
I’m working on printing about 60 rolls of film that I shot in my home state of Oregon in the US in September. I’ve decided to go with a completely analog process for the first time, from making darkroom contact sheets of every roll to the final fiber prints. Every step is a chance to think, self-evaluate and edit. Once done, you can lay the prints out physically, order them, arrange them, and see how they look together, which is impossible unless you add costly and inferior digital printing to the supposedly “free” digital workflow.
It really annoys me when some idiot self-styled photography blogger flavor of the minute buys a Leica, declares digital to be “dead,” tries to shoehorn film into his/her digital process, fails, and comes away with some listicle about why analog photography and printmaking are expensive processes best left to “experts,” whatever that means.
Digital photography is by far the best way to take a ton of crap photos and upload them for the acclamation of the hoi polloi as fast as possible, but it doesn’t offer the natural progression from the field to the page that analog photography does. In the final analysis, when you’re having beers with your peers, which would you rather pass around to show them your pictures: an iPad or a stack of prints?
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Previously:
More darkrooms online:
- Large Format Photography Australia: Show us your darkroomseries
- Pippo, a rental darkroom in Tokyo- Amateur’s Labo, a rental darkroom in Tokyo
- Worldwide Local Darkroom locator powered by Harman