What Is There Left To Do? or, What I've Been Doing For Some Time Now...

...is that i've been making, i admit it, these weird pictures. But because it all happens in the darkroom that is my darkroom, I think it's important. And since it is a slightly altered version of that mostly predigital all analogue prepared kind of darkroom place, it becomes, it is actually a very new kind of darkroom. And I'm saying it right here that what we've all really been wanting are some new kinds of images (image, rather than picture, is more up to this newness.) Right? That is right. So, I'm claiming on behalf of this way of working, a difference of kind. Then I owe you some detail here and now about what this kind of darkroom does. Because we have this general but very collapsed sense of what the darkroom can be and what light sensitive media like negatives and photopapers can do, and it has many elements that are the same but with some simple additions, really. The enlarger is here in its honorable role as a delicate and nuanced comingling of projection and light source. Timers, easels for papers, sinks and trays for development. Same old. New elements, simple: stacks and stacks of transparent stuff are here instead of negatives. And these stacks are variously flat stuffs, paper, plastic, transparency papers. And, here's a really fun back to the future addition to it all: glass. Yes, as in like etched and cut trays and crystal saucers and plates. Victorian'ish stuff, like we all used at our grandmas for dinner circa 1967 (just like a negative, instead of a negative.) So, you might've thought already if you're still following, a universe of Goodwill items available for, what? To take advantage. To put in the enlarger head, to project. But, since it can be anything more than the 1 mil of densit (negatives of yore) I'm using anything that fits into the head of enlarger that has optical potential. And 3-d - transparent lucent graphical opaque - works! Thus the stacks and bundles and small baskets just waiting for the ultimate moment, the mashup, the final appropriation. Instead of just a lot of negatives in glassine sleaves. That is what photography was. For what? And forget about cameras. Avoid them as they will just lead you away from the privacy of your very own darkroom cave camera. Glass, plastic, all of it visual fact, truth. Just waiting for me (and you?) to get involved with it, in it, with our fictions and (dare i hope) poetries. (Question for me: is this the original photoshop? and so is it a back to the future, regress to progress sort of moment?) But, to finish, what you can do, what i do, is capture these improvised optical affects on beautiful silver gelatin papers, although there's not much of these papers left in the world. Antique for sure, almost extinct. But there was a before inkjet. And one last thing, I forgot. You can make lenses too. Not the fancy machined and polished for your Nikon type. Anything transparent is the stuff. So why not do it?