The Darkroom

The interior of my Nova tent, with the 8x10 Quad on the right. Shot with a 14mm Sigma lens on a Nikon F. Photos © 2002, Frances E. Schultz, All Rights Reserved

A good darkroom is a joy to work in. A bad darkroom can be so inconvenient and uncomfortable that you find excuses not to use it, and at its worst, it can even endanger your health.

Ten years ago, my husband Roger Hicks and I built our first permanent darkroom. We were initially well pleased with it, but over the years we have found its faults. Now we are moving. This means at least two more darkrooms: one temporary, in the house we are renting while we look around for a place to buy, and then a permanent one. Or two. Or maybe three.

The temporary darkroom is easy. I shall go back to my Nova tent, which is just 42" (110cm) square, and slightly under 7 ft (2 meters) high. Everything is in easy reach and I used to work for 8-10 hours without fatigue, sitting down. In the bigger room I have to stand most of the time, and walk back and forth to the sink, which is much more tiring. This in itself gives me some ideas about my dream darkroom.

I don't think I'd want somewhere quite that small in the long term--there's no real room for separate wet and dry sides, and there's only room for one enlarger--but the distance between the wet and dry areas does not need to be great, just as long as they are separate. An idea I quite like comes from The New Darkroom Handbook by Joe DeMaio, Robin Worth, and Dennis Curtin: Aaron Siskind's darkroom, where everything can be reached and used efficiently from a sitting position.

This would be too small for two, but even a fairly small room could be divided to give us a darkroom each: this may well be the route to take. But I'll come back to that in a minute. Logically, the first thing to do was to make one list of what is wrong with the old darkroom, and another of what I would want in the new one. Your lists may be different, but mine should give you some ideas.

Our old darkroom: wet side. You can see how things had begun to accumulate in the corner under the sink (beneath the window, which is blocked with a sheet of MDF) even though this was shot only a few weeks after we had started to use the darkroom. This was taken on Kodak TMZ P3200 by safelight.

Space Efficiency
To our surprise, the current darkroom is too big: it has too much unused floor space. If we hadn't decided to move, we might have put in an extra bank of counters in the middle. But the point about retouching and handcoloring is also relevant here. The darkroom is not the place to do this. I want somewhere lighter and airier and less photo gear: my study, the planning of which is a whole 'nother matter.

Next comes the sink. Although it is perfectly possible to produce prints in a darkroom with no sink at all (I did it for years), running water is a great boon, and a good, big sink is a wonderful luxury. Unfortunately, our builder did not understand the requirements of a darkroom. He talked me out of a bigger sink with double draining boards--which still would have been too small. Purpose-built darkroom sinks such as those made by TexaSink--shallow, but up to 6 ft long--are much more functional than adapted household sinks. At the very least I want the kind of big old earthenware sink that you sometimes see in late 19th century houses.

Over the sink, we made the mistake of just one faucet for hot water and one for cold. The only thing worse would be a single mixer tap. In my next darkroom one tap will be dedicated to my Nova print washer. There will then be four more taps--one hot, one cold, one for tempered water, and one for purified water using a reverse osmosis unit. If we have two darkrooms, I can live with just two cold and one hot, while Roger's film darkroom will have both the tempered water tap (for color washes) and the purified water tap (much more important with film).

Another big mistake was closed cupboards under the sink. On the dry side they are practical enough, but under the sink they are a disaster. The doors cut out light so it is hard to find what you need, and things tend to accumulate in front of them so they don't open. They become a barrier to putting things away, rather than an encouragement.

The shelves under the sink should be slatted or better yet an open, non-corrodible mesh. That way if something overflows, or the plumbing fails, they will dry quickly and easily. Though I think I'd rather store most of my chemicals on shallow shelves over the sink.

On the dry side, the storage space needs to be better adapted to storing paper and prints, with plenty of deep shelves, though not very widely spaced. I also want a drying rack for FB prints.

I currently have three enlargers, which is excessive: two 6x9cm Meopta Magnifaxes and an MPP 5x7" with a DeVere head. They cut down on my dry-side working space, and I don't use more than two at a time. One will have to go: one of the 6x9s, I think. If I then wall mount the other 6x9, this will relieve much of the crowding. Wall mounting timers might be another option.