Digital BW, The Print

John,

> Back in the 70's  I worshiped Weston. When I was working at the Center in
> Tucson I saw a series of portraits that Wynn Bullock did of him as he was
> dying of Parkinsons. They were so sad. Edward used the extremely toxic
> developer Pyro for his negatives and the equally nasty  Amidol for his
> prints.
> His hands turned black from using this stuff and it eventually killed him,
> destroyed his nervous system, long before he should have left this earth.

I had never heard the Pyro and Amidol were implicated in his Parkinson's
disease.  

When I -- perhaps foolishly -- indicated on my house plans the spot where a
darkroom would be, the city would not OK the plans without knowing more
about what I was going to use.  I gathered all the Material Safety Data
Sheets and gave them to the city (of Solvang, CA).  Oddly, it was the
Microdol X that bothered them the most.  I had to agree to develop no more
than 3 rolls per day.  They felt some chemical in the developer posed to
risk to their sewer and water treatment systems.  Apparently a big reason
for Xtol is that it is environmentally much more benign than the older
developers.

> Chemicals also eventually killed my teacher Todd Walker and put another of
> my teachers in the hospital with liver poisoning.  Todd named each of his
> tumors after the various processes that he specialized in.

As an aside, my Dad grew up with Walker.  They were ham radio and darkroom
buddies through high school and until Todd moved to Tucson.  (They lived in
Southern California at the time.)  Unrelated, my Dad's old childhood house
address in Tucson is now a parking structure at the U of A, very close to
the Center for Creative Photography.

Paul
www.PaulRoark.com