The Orange Room

The acrid odour hit my nostrils as I entered the dimly lit room bathed in orange light. The odour came from three rectangular liquid-filled trays that were lined on a counter against the wall. In another corner was a large contraption – an enlarger - sitting on a table. I took a seat next to it and started my work. Minutes later, I dipped an 8”x10” sheet of photographic paper into the chemical in the first tray. As I gently rocked the tray and tapped on the paper with a pair of tongs, a faint outline appeared on the paper's surface. The darker parts first, eyes and hair, then the nose, face, chin. Another two minutes and the outline had intensified into a clear image: my parents posing for my camera.

For those who know only digital photography, the excitement of those few moments would be beyond comprehension. It was sheer magic: capturing a moment in time and fixing it forever on a piece of paper coated with silver compounds, also known as a photograph.

How did I get there? The year was 1980. Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan was running a presidential campaign against Jimmy Carter. I was a third-year student in a gruelling academic program: the School of Electrical Engineering at Cornell University. Between grinding through never-ending homework sets, fiddling all day with oscilloscopes and curve-tracers in the lab, and preparing for tough examinations, I yearned for a break. One day, the break arrived as a black-and-white photography exhibition at the University's museum. It was by master photographer Ansel Adams. The subject was the majestic landscape of the western United States. I still recall the astonishing clarity and lyrical beauty of the photographs, their fine details rendered true with startling sharpness. Surely that was when I got hooked on photography. I plunged headlong into this new world and spent every minute I could spare from my studies on learning this craft of “fixing shadows.”

I quickly learned to make black and white photographic prints in the darkroom, known as “gelatine silver print” in artsy parlance. It was a two-step process. The first step was to develop the film to make negatives. In the second step, you made a print from the negative using an enlarger.

And so after clicking away you went into a pitch-dark room where you took out the film from its canister and rolled it into a developing reel using only your fingers to guide you. But this was the boring part because the negative that you produced was hard to read. The fun part came next. You placed your negative in the enlarger (to magnify it) and exposed a sheet of photographic paper. You took the paper through the three trays and then you took the picture outside, dripping wet, and looked at it in bright light. Was it sharp? Too dark? Too light? Did the negative have a technical flaw? There were so many ways that things could go wrong.

But when you got it right, it was magic. For few things are as beautiful as a well-made black and white print with rich blacks, sparkling whites, and silver shades in between. Plucking a moment from the jaws of time, the combination of optics and chemistry fixed it forever.

For the next twenty years, I made countless black and white prints. Around 2002, I switched to digital photography.

But I still miss the silver magic of black and white photography and working in that orange room.

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