The Return of the Dark Room

A return to film photography refocusses thinking on new technology - particularly as artificial intelligence offers to take the legwork out of "creativity".

Some of my ewe lambs - taken with a 1970s Soviet ZENIT camera…

It took me a while to find my old camera. It was buried under a pile of old notebooks and folders of writing from my teenage years. Even as I dug, I rediscovered mounds of tear-stained pages full of angst and intensity and rage, laboriously hand-written in wrinkled pads which lay feet-deep in heaps in the roofspace of my parents’ house. And there it was at last, dusty and half-open, the lens clouded with the backswept crud of a spider’s nest.

I bought this camera in 2001 from the pawn shop in Dumfries. It cost forty pounds, which was quite a sum for me in those days. I needed it because I’d signed up to do a photography course at school, and while cameras were available to borrow from the art department, they were never free when I needed them. Besides, much of what I wanted to do with photography was based upon an aesthetic of mud, blood and rainwater. If I was going to wreck a piece of expensive equipment, it made sense for me to ruin my own.

The camera is a Zenit TTL, an extremely basic Soviet model with a very simple light-meter. Manufactured in the 1970s, it does no more than what it says on the tin. But even as I was studying for this course and relishing the red-lit aesthetic of an old-time darkroom, film photography was dying. The year after I finished this course, the photography department bought itself a set of digital cameras. The dark room was replaced by a computer lab, and despite protestations from the art teacher that it was still useful to learn photography through traditional techniques, film cameras were utterly gone within three years.