'What I love about this darkroom is the fact that it's full of strange things ? a quill, a parrot, a clay shoe'
I shot this in 2006 for a series about disappearing darkrooms: at the time, they were closing down in quick succession as the photographic industry switched to digital. This one belongs to a professional printer called Roy Snell. It's my favourite in what I guess was a swansong for camera film.
Most of the photographers I knew had already gone digital. But I was still shooting on film, and I always printed my own work in a hired darkroom. Just 10 years previously, darkrooms had been busy with young photographers printing work for magazines such as Vogue, Dazed & Confused and the Face. But by 2006, they had turned very quiet.
I was in a darkroom on my own one day when an enlarger suddenly attracted my attention. At first, my primary concern was to simply document the machinery: an enlarger is an example of beautiful modernist design. But when I started shooting other darkrooms, like this one above, I soon realised that my project was about more than that: I was documenting people's personal workspaces.
Roy's darkroom is particularly intimate. Those boxes contain all sorts of photographic paper, stuff you can't get hold of any more. Then there are Roy's own strange things: the clay shoe and quill, the parrot. And that portrait on the wall is of Van Morrison.
What I love about my picture, though, is its geometry, all the great shapes it contains, including those two tall enlargers. The room's a bizarre colour, too: Roy painted the walls blue-green, since he has a theory that the red "safe light" used in darkrooms is very intense and oppressive. This colour is meant to counteract that effect.
In keeping with the spirit of the place, I photographed it in the dark. I used a tripod, switched off the lights, opened the shutter for 60 seconds, and moved around the room with a flashgun, firing it lots of times. It's a technique that lets me bathe a scene in light. Normally, darkrooms are gloomy places. I like to think I am highlighting things that even Roy had forgotten were there.
CV
Born: Liverpool, 1968.
Study: Philosophy at university, then film school.
Inspirations: Stephen Shore, Jeff Wall, Andreas Gursky, Lynne Cohen, Taryn Simon.
High point: "When I got around to buying a digital camera. I'd been digging my heels in, but it was an amazing discovery."
Top tip: "Look behind you: there may be something better to photograph in the other direction."
The photograph above features in the exhibition Analog: Trends in Sound and Picture, at the Riflemaker Gallery, London WC1 (020-7439 0000), until 5 March.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jan/12/richard-nicholson-best-shot
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