Thursday, 19 November 2015

Feature Shoot

Photographer Cleans Out His Late Father’s Darkroom Left Untouched Since the 1970s

Posted: 18 Nov 2015 07:00 AM PST

Sun-Ray Enlarging Easel

Chemical Bottles
“I kept wishing I could sit down with my dad and ask him a hundred questions,” says Brooklyn-based photographer Joseph O. Holmes of cleaning out his father’s darkroom, a process he began six months ago, seven years after his father’s death. My Father’s Darkroom is his ode to the man who raised him, to his own childhood self, and to the place where he first discovered the magic of film, developer, and photographic paper.
The photographer’s memories of his father in the darkroom, he admits, have grown hazy over time; having built it around the time of his son’s birth, the elder Holmes used it during his free time to make pictures of his family. During the day, he worked as an engineer, but with a background in art school, he cherished his private, creative moments in the dark, using only the best cameras and equipment. He ceased using the darkroom, however, when his son was about eight or ten years old. From there, the room was passed on, becoming Holmes’s boyhood domain, where he spent long hours working in silence on his own prints.
When his father was still living, Holmes discussed his career freely with him, mining the older man for insight into both composing and printing images. He did not, however, return to the darkroom for more than three decades, finding that it was more convenient to hire a printer than to travel all the way to the Pennsylvanian home in which he grew up. Until this year, the room remained an unmoved time capsule, standing exactly as it had stood in the 1970s.
When Holmes set himself the task of clearing out the darkroom, he found that saying goodbye was in some ways more difficult than he had imagined. In the meditative and restrained light of the darkroom, he photographed his father’s objects as a way of holding fast to the memories, of safeguarding them from vanishing with the room. The enlarger light, remarkably, still switched on with the press of a finger.
As he examined his father’s things, Holmes felt himself drawn closer not only to the man he knew, but also to his father as a young man. Here, in this silent room, he uncovered secrets and private hopes that his father might never have gotten the chance to share. “I wonder if he ever regretted leaving it all behind,” remarks the artist of his father’s oldest treasures.