Category: Art/Photography

A Sustainable Darkroom?

by Kristýna Poláchová

As a person interested in analogue photography but also caring for the environment, I often asked myself: can a darkroom ever be sustainable? Through these reflections, almost as if I manifested it, I had the opportunity to attend a workshop on this specific topic last summer. This article will thus be an hommage to this workshop and to all the inspiration I gained from it as well as a ‘cookbook’ which came together afterward. I am thankful to Michaela Davidová for sharing these moments of experimentation and discovery with us. 

Making the whole process of photographic development sustainable is not an easy task and the inclusion of a question mark in the title of this article serves partially to encourage reflection on the process as a whole. This question is not purely material or processual but also philosophical – do we perceive photographic material simply as a means for realisation of our ideas? Isn’t the darkroom itself an organism transforming and digesting materials? Let us ponder these questions further while we proceed to a practical application of this approach exploring ‘recipes’ for DIY film developers from less toxic materials. 

For black and white negative processing, one generally needs a developer, an acidic stop bath, and a fixer to transform the taken latent (invisible to the eye) image into a visible one. Commercial developers are generally based on organic compounds derived from benzene. For plant-based DIY developers, we need to use ingredients containing phenolic acids (phenolic compounds structured on a benzene ring). Those can include coffee, mint, wild thyme, or urine. Phenolic acids can be extracted from them by, for example, pouring hot water over them and letting them cool down, boiling the plants in hot water, or by cold extraction through maceration (storing in an air-tight container in a liquid made of water, oil and alcohol for 3 days). The second ingredient needed is alkali since the developing process can only occur in an environment with pH>7, and alkali helps to achieve higher contrast and more grain in the final image. The most commonly used option is water-free sodium carbonate (= washing soda). The following ingredient is ascorbic acid (vitamin C) which helps to reduce the developing time. By mixing vitamin C (pure ascorbic acid) with sodium carbonate, we get sodium ascorbate. The final ingredient needed for a DIY developer is water. 

The stop bath needs to be an acidic solution in order to interrupt the alkali-developing process. As a more accessible substitute for a commercial stop bath, we can mix water and white vinegar. Lastly, to make the image permanent, we need to bathe it in a fixer. There is not a perfect substitute for a conventional fixer (hypo or ammonium thiosulfate), but it is also possible to use salt-fix, although it serves more as a stabiliser and doesn’t have such long-term archival qualities. 

0,5L Caffenol-C (coffee-based ‘soup’) recipe:

Ingredients:

– 20g of water-free washing soda dissolved in 1/3 of 0,5L of water

– 5 g of vitamin C dissolved in 1/3 of 0,5L of water 

– 20g of instant coffee dissolved in 1/3 of 0,5L of hot water 

(source: Blog – Plant-based/DIY developers – michaela davidova)

Directions:

We start by mixing the ingredients in separate containers with water at 24°C. First, we mix the solution with soda, then the solution with vitamin C, and lastly the solution with coffee. 

We let the mix develop for 12 minutes, agitating during the first minute and then 10 times each following minute. 

Film roll used: Fomapan ISO 100
Remarks: Pictures have quite high contrast, however the film is slightly over-developed. It is possible that 10 minutes of development would have been sufficient.

One-week-old Caffenol-C developer:

Oregano developer

For more information, visit: 

Festival Ono’u: A Meeting of Colours

Edouard Pack from our editing team writes about an important festival happening in Tahiti this month and what it means to him.

SETH and HTJ

I didn’t grow up in a particularly cultured household- we didn’t go to museums or exhibitions every weekend nor attend the opera or theatre on Friday nights. But art does exist around us, and learning how to find it and appreciate it under its different forms is enhancing and satisfying to me. Through the tahitian festival Ono’u, I had the chance to discover street art while seeing the face of Papeete being modified progressively year after year.

The name of the festival, “ONO’U”, is inspired by the fusion of the two Tahitian words “ONO” (action of joining one thing to another) and “U” (colors) to express the action of connecting a color to another and “the meeting of colors” in Tahiti through the art of graffiti.

The festival was created in 2014 by Sarah Roopinia, a young Tahitian entrepreneur who discovered Street Art while studying in Paris and Berlin. After four editions and dozens of international and local graffiti artists, Ono’u has become an important event in the world of graffiti. It is also a popular festival that has helped change the somewhat sad face of Papeete, turning the city into an open-air art gallery.

ASKEW

Since 2014, the festival has attracted numerous artists each year, but also a charming crowd; gathering workers stopping by during their break, students coming after school, or simple passerbys. During those ten yearly days of reshaping, the festival has often turned into a seeking game for my friends and I, walking through the city to witness the new pieces that pop up around corners, on the shop walls, or near our high school.

At a first glance, we used to gaze these ten meter high walls with artists lifted in front drawing some abstracts forms. But as days went by, the advancing street art started to take shape, the pieces of the puzzle coming together until the final work is completed. The initiative of the festival was very controversial at the beginning, with the local population being afraid of the normalisation of graffitis that would allow small “gangs” and youngsters to draw freely wherever they feel like.

TNG

But one of the announced objectives of Ono’u? To bring a form of well-being, joy and poetry into the everyday lives of Polynesians through art- a gentle escape that takes them out of their sometimes dull immediate environment and routine.

The challenge for the 6th edition of Ono’u, specially created for social housing in partnership with the Polynesian Office of the Habitat, is to transform one thousand square meters into works of art in less than 10 days. Four social residences are involved in this operation which takes place from October 15th to 25th 2019 and will allow the transformation of 7 large social housing wall façades with a selection of 9 international and local artists.

Students residence “Paraita”, by OKUDA & RIVAL

Comparing the festival Ono’u to “un été au Havre”, I am thrilled of the ephemerality of both events, attracting people because of their limited presence, but at the same time leaving the remaining works of past editions which continue to adorn the cities, giving a charm to them.

On the occasion of the celebration of Le Havre’s 500th anniversary in 2017, Jace, a Le Havre-borned street artist called on Thai artist Alex Face to create this collaborative work. The piquant meeting of two emblematic characters of street art, the gouzou and the famous childish character in the costume of rabbit and the third eye.

During the floods in Tahiti on January 22th 2017, one of the graffitis has been photographed flooded, gaining a mystical yet realistic perspective, giving life to the Va’a (Polynesian canoe, ndlr) and the Vahine who navigates it.

SETH

The festival Ono’u is first and foremost a place of sharing colorful international artistic exchanges, and more importantly, a place of opening on contemporary urban art and culture in the heart of the South Pacific. I like to think that street art is crystalizing the essence of art, adding a more accessible aspect to it by mixing them with the architecture of the city.

KOBRA

The City With Red Doors

[From the print] Our correspondent relates the experience of an anonymous prostitute on the streets of Kolkata.

Source: Sandra Hoyn

Society has always viewed prostitution as a universal evil and the people associated with it are vessels that harbour an unimaginable form of sin. Society has certain names for us, names that are meant to demean, for the purpose to abuse and shame. People in the sex industry can never escape the tag of their profession, I often feel as if there was a tilak (mark) on my forehead. Everyone I know, knows who I am and what I do. Most of them do not know my name but that does not matter because to them, I am a whore.

I was named after the Hindu Goddess of Wealth, Lakshmi. In the dichotomous framework that India finds itself in, Lakshmi was both a goddess said to bring prosperity and fortune and a prostitute with broken dreams and nowhere to go. Amma, the woman whom I was sold to by my trafficker refused to have one of her ‘girls’ be called after a goddess, whose legs were open like one of Lakshmi’s lotuses. Amma was a pious woman and her tolerance towards blasphemy, freedom, and justice was an incontestable nil.

For years, the only escape, I had was my tiny window with an ineffective mosquito net and broken dreams. I would take refuge in the dream of going back to my village but quickly shook away the thought. I was one of them, a whore, a sex worker. My village would never accept someone with that label.

So, eventually Lakshmi was forgotten and Munni was born. There were three other Munni’s where I worked. They all probably had stories similar to mine but we never asked one another. Our name had no character, no significance, a perfect fit for the profession. A prostitute was a person with no stories, to be used as an object to please and fulfil fantasies. If my client replaced my name with another, it did not affect me. I was an artificial host of the dirty and unmentionable, who was less than the rest and society had chosen her to be the sacrifice of its community.

Source: Bernard Henin

The words used to describe my kind are considered vulgar and offensive in almost every spoken language in the world. From Bengali to English, prostitution has negative connotations. My profession itself was an offence. A whore, slut, prostitute, hooker are words that are meant to bring shame to the person who is called one. Language, often provides, a good insight on society. For instance, the tone and language used for prostitution tells you just what the community feels about it: filthy and immoral. When one joins my former profession, it is near impossible to escape from its clutches. Where do we go? Everywhere we try to run or hide and all they can see is a woman who has lost her morality and ergo her identity. If you were to go to any sex worker their thoughts or educate them on societal labels. They would laugh at how little the world knows. How little the world knows and how much the world hides. The slurs that were thrown at me stopped bothering me after a while because they had helped erase all that made me human.

Source: Prateek Jain

The Sonagachi red-light district in Kolkata, my former home was and still is a favourite amongst men, the kind that always had narcotics with them and greeted us with slurs. It was also the home to men who had large bungalows in the affluent localities of Alipore and Park Street . They were awful, they saw me as nothing more than the products of their sick twisted fantasies. These men were responsible for Sonagachi’s prosperity but refused to acknowledge their acquaintance with the place. Sonagachi is known for a lot of things in the city of Calcutta but it is most certainly not known for its justice. The Government of India has failed miserably to rehabilitate sex workers. The promised voter cards have been given but we can’t do anything. The powerless do not give the powerful power, it is taken away from us. Sonagachi is a label that never goes away. Your identity revolves around it and society only fixates on that.

Yama, the Hindu God of Justice, was always a busy person and rumours spread that he had a bigger disdain for prostitutes than the society we lived in. We never saw him, he had become a myth, a legend, that would help us fall asleep but he never showed up. The police, the ‘protectors of justice’, turned out to be regular customers. So, as quickly as we had thought of Yama, he had given up on us and we were once again alone and still whores.

After all these years, it is very easy to vouch that a life of a prostitute in India can never truly escape the experiences of physical and mental displacement, feeling unrooted, and unlearning and relearning their identities. A prostitute can never forget staring at another sex worker’s eyes because the lifelessness of her eyes mirrors hers. One learns the truly understands society when one works in an industry that feeds on exploitation. Even when you have escaped the label, the profession, you can never forget the language and its meaning. Society and taboo, both do not believe in a fair trial. A name is enough.

This letter is in no means for sympathy but serves as a reflection on Indian society. The pride that we hold so close to us about the balance of the ancient and the modern is nothing more than a nicely wrapped fallacy. Oppression has not been moderated but has merely transformed into other forms, just as bad as its predecessor. We live in our own cocoons that keeps us ignorant to the grave injustice, millions face right outside our doors. We turn our heads away from taboos because of the blasphemous and licentious stamp stuck to it. Taboo is blasphemy and all the greatest truths start as blasphemy.

If you want to learn more about the lives of sex workers in Kolkata, you can give this short video by the Youtube channel Ross Kemp Extreme World.

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Edited by Pailey Wang, Philippe Bédos and Maya Shenoy

The Le Hood Chronicles: Oh Lord, Not the Board

I was free. The crisp, fresh air of Normandy nipped at my face and rushed along my thick down coat as I sped along the boardwalk of Le Havre. Locals tried not to stare as they saw such a big boy show such mastery of a skateboard so small, but I’d gotten used to the fame by now. It didn’t phase me anymore. Last time I’d been this far, I fell down by the hair salon I now visit twice a month to keep my hair just long enough to cover my eyes without blinding me completely. Now, I raced down that street without blinking once, confident as I rode over the very spot I fell on months ago. I was a tank moving over the rubble of my failure, crushing every piece of disappointment as I found my way back to my dignity. I gained more and more speed, my heart racing at the thought of falling with nothing but my $100 Canada Goose toque to protect my fragile head. Suddenly, I was whizzing past La Petit Rade. I’d never been this far before. I slowed down as kids skated by me on the new multicolored Pennyboards they had gotten for Christmas. That’s when I realized I wasn’t the only skater in this part of town. A boy of about 12 years of age raced by me, looking back to grin at the man twice his height lagging behind him. A deep sense of shame began to churn inside of me, but I wasn’t going to let it get me down. Not this January 4th. I continued along at my own pace, not faster than a jog, when, suddenly, it happened.

My back wheels got stuck in a crack but instead of the board stopping and throwing me to the ground again, it sacrificed itself and split in two!

It was a truly noble act which I may never be able to repay. Heartbroken, I picked up the two pieces of my board and set them next to me on the ledge looking out to sea as the sun set behind us. An elderly couple walked by and asked “mais qu’est que s’est passé” to which I replied “C’est triste, mais ça va”. But it wasn’t ça va. I grabbed my two pieces of plastic polymer and walked down the path that I had just gleefully skated down minutes before. People stared at me once again, but this time not in awe. As they watched the funeral procession of one, they looked at me with sorrowful eyes. Maybe they too were once skater bros like me and had lost their board to the fury of the natural world. Or maybe they saw the broken heart of the skater boy who lost his very identity in the simple snap of Chinese manufactured plastic. Either way, they wouldn’t understand. But when I got back home, I put the pieces of board on my table and smiled. Maybe the journey with my red-wheeled board was over, but my own journey as a skater boy wasn’t. So I sat down, got out my laptop, and ordered my first pair of checkered Vans. As soon as I confirmed my order, I felt the rush of rolling over concrete come back to me and I knew my life had found its path again. Once a skater boy, always a skater boy.

Leon is an enigma.