I have just borrowed an excellent book from the library on darkroom techniques. It is called Darkroom 2 (1978) and is published by Lustrum Press of NYC and it appears as if none other than Ralph Gibson was involved in it's publication. It is comprised of 10 photographers talking, in a fair amount of detail, about the entire process of their image making from exposure to print. The contributors include the likes of Judy Dater, Emmit Gowin, Aaron Siskind (my hero), Lisette Model and Cole Weston. Along with the technical details they also reveal alot of their philosophy on photography in general and it has been a fascinating read. Some of the insights have been that some of them reject the concept of pre-visualization and put printing on equal creative footing as the exposure (hooray!)and that 50% of Edward Westons prints need dodging and burning - a shock to most 'Westonians' as his son calls them. You can't lose with this one (I assume that there is also a Darkroom 1).

-- andy laycock (agl@intergate.bc.ca), December 23, 1998

Answers

Sounds Cool!

Sounds very good. I am happy that there are people out there who thinking that the darkroom process is as much a part of the art as shooting the negative. Its also nice to know that even the most famous of photographers are just people to, and not perfect.

-- Andrew Kaiser (akaiser@rushorder.com), December 24, 1998.

Unfortunatly both Darkroom I and Darkroom II are no longer in print. I have been searching for copies for 6 years. If you find any for sale let me know, they are great books.

-- Kirk Eck (eck@twsuvm.uc.twsu.edu), January 06, 1999.

I have always found it quite odd that some people would equate pre- visualization with meaning that printing would be considered as being secondary at best, or even less. I don't think that the majority of "pre-visualizers" have a straight print as a goal, but rather to produce a negative which has useable information for the print. I think that I would be bummed if I didn't get to create in the darkroom!

As for ol' Ed I would bet that there were more than 50% to dodge and burn (nothing wrong with that).

Where do these odd ideas come from anyway?

It does sound like an interesting book by the way.

Mark Lindsey

-- mark lindsey (lindseygraves@msn.com), January 12, 1999.

Powells has Darkroom 2 I don't remember the isbn but if you go to my books page http://www.ope n.org/hughesa/books/techniques.htm you can jump directly to it.

I hope this helps.

-- Andy Hughes (andy@darkroomsource.com), January 20, 1999.