Alchemy

For perhaps ten years, I spent hour upon hour in the darkroom, printing.  Digital photography was just emerging, but the quality of the prints could not rival silver gelatin renditions of negatives even from my basic Pentax K-1000 camera.  It was enjoyable, meditative and purposeful to spend measureless time gently agitating the trays filled with chemicals and moving sheets of photo paper through the processes. Printing and developing, I felt like part of a secret society that used alchemy to create beautiful representations of the world.  But with the advances of digital technology and the ubiquity of cell phone images, the “secret society” is now the entire population, and my darkroom skills are virtually obsolete.  I still have my archive of silver gelatin prints, however, this picture being just one of many.  And in person they still look at least as good as any digitally produced images I have seen.