Digital BW, The Print

In the "darkroom vs. digital" wars a couple of brief, interesting stories:

My father was a photographer in the 1920s. He woke up one day and he
couldn't see. He was blind. This is not a good thing for a photographer. He
had absorbed a chemical in developer called "Metol" through his skin which
effected his optic nerve. (There is "metol" in developers today but it's NOT
the same chemical it was in the 1920s!!!) It turned out that this chemical
was a German product and just by happenstance he encountered a German doctor
in the hospital who was familiar with this type of rare chemical interaction
and knew the antidote! It was nicotine. So, on the advice of his physician,
my father started smoking. Within a day or two his vision was back to
normal. Of course, he died many years later from a combination of coronary
artery disease, emphysema and bladder cancer, all of which are known to be
associated with smoking. Such is the irony of life.

I spent far too much of my youth in darkrooms with my hands in all kinds of
developer/stop bath and fixer combinations, not to mention bleaches,
enhancers and God knows what else. I once inhaled concentrated glacial
acetic acid and it burned the inside of my nose and just about knocked me
unconscious. On another occasion, I was in the darkroom with my father after
shooting a banquet and we were rushing to bring proofs back to sell at the
banquet tables. It was completely dark and my father asked me to turn on the
safelight which hung on a cord from the ceiling. I didn't realize that the
floor was wet, this was before ground fault interrupters, and you can
imagine what happened. This is in a big darkroom, probably 10x14, one of
several in his studio at 8:00 at night and no one else was around. It was
pitch black. He knew from the sound of my quivering voice that I was being
electrocuted and he also knew that if he grabbed me he would be electrocuted
as well and that no one would find us. He literally ran into me in the dark,
knocking me and him into a bookcase with chemicals on it which we knocked
over with chemicals spilling all over and broken glass bottles everywhere. I
won't waste your time with the rest of the story except to say that we made
several hundred dollars that night selling prints though several people
asked me why I had these spots bleached out of my pants and looked like a
polka-dotted clown!

As for me, I hope never to go into a darkroom again. I continued to spend
too many hours in the dark through RIT and graduate school at Harvard and
MIT. I do have to confess, however, that like just about every other
photographer I know, I long to share that mystical moment, when the image
first appears on a print in the darkroom, with my child (now 20). The risks,
however, have to be considered. I'll take inkjet with its costs and
complications anytime.

Rick Colson