Darkroom Quotes & Sayings

Don't get between me and a really good picture in the darkroom, because then I want to go straight to the darkroom and develop it. But once that's done, I'm fine. — Sally Mann

I thought about the times we'd had in his small garret above Greville's darkroom. And I didn't feel anything. It's strange how strong emotions can be so easily diminished as your life continues; how deepest intimacies become commonplace half-recalled memories-- such as an exotic holiday you once went on, or a cocktail party where you drank far too much, or winning a race at the school sports day. Nothing stirs anymore. — William Boyd

You know what 'FEAR' stands for? It stands for 'False Evidence Appearing Real.' It's the darkroom where Satan develops his negatives. — Gary Busey

It was soon evident in my lodgings that I had become a dangerous lunatic, and there would be nothing left to destroy if strong measures were not taken. So I was turned out of the house, but it was only into the garden, where I was allowed to build a small darkroom of oilcloth. — Henry Peach Robinson

I've been a photographer all these years ... I haven't been in my own darkroom for 10 years. — Graham Nash

It's equally hard and labor intensive to create an image on the computer as it is in a darkroom. Believe me. — Jerry Uelsmann

Something happens between a novel and its reader which is similar to the process of developing photographs, the way they did it before the digital age. The photograph, as it was printed in the darkroom, became visible bit by bit. As you read your way through a novel, the same chemical process takes place. — Patrick Modiano

I fell in love with the darkroom, and that was part of being a photographer at the time. The darkroom was unbelievably sexy. I would spend all night in the darkroom. — Annie Leibovitz

I believe Photoshop is in some way the contemporary darkroom, the creative area that all photographers have available today. — Douglas Kirkland

I find the single most valuable tool in my darkroom is my trash can — John Sexton

Then I thought I was going to be a photographer. I tried a hand at darkroom technician. I played in a band. It took me quite some time to discover that I wanted to write. — Guy Johnson

I am sending back the key that let me into bluebeard's study; because he would make love to me I am sending back the key; in his eye's darkroom I can see my X-rayed heart, dissected body: I am sending back the key that let me into bluebeard s study. — Sylvia Plath

The print was an old one made from a negative taken in the 1960's of her parents in Sydney Mines, dancing with thrilled, excited expressions on their faces, in front of a classic car that had been a wedding gift at the time. Her mother's hair, red back then, was held back by a blue handkerchief, and she was dressed in a billowing skirt and white blouse. Her father's denim jeans and faded t-shirt were streaked with coal dust as he held her hands and spun her around in the front yard of their old clapboard house, yellow grass under their feet and a cobalt-blue sky with white clouds drifting above. Mandy could almost feel the late summer breeze as she gazed deeply into the print, watching the flamboyant colors come to life. She hung it up to dry on two wooden clothespins hanging from a string above her. — Rebecca McNutt

I had gone to nursing school at Northampton Community College in my hometown of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. And nursing didn't feel quite right, and an old boyfriend gave me a 35-millimeter camera just to play with. So, I took a darkroom class. — Carol Guzy

Memory is a fickle thing, a flickering light in a darkroom of possibilities. — Kent Nerburn

My lifestyle is bizarre, but the only thing you need to know is where the darkroom is. — Robert Mapplethorpe

Technology has eliminated the basement darkroom and the whole notion of photography as an intense labor of love for obsessives and replaced them with a sense of immediacy and instant gratification. — Joe McNally

Life is like a darkroom, says Kristijan. You never know who will screw you and how, or whom you will screw and how. But it is too exciting for you to just walk out. — Rujana Jeger

I told myself, 'When I grow up, I want to make pictures that can inspire and nourish people.' Immediately, when I was 10, I started photographing nature. I built a darkroom. My first really good darkroom, not just down in the cellar, was when I was 14. — Bill Atkinson

Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White is remarkable for its truth-telling about two important issues concerning Alabama's past and present: the civil rights movement and immigration. These stories, rendered through the words and eyes of a young Latina girl who came from Argentina to Marion, Alabama, are made vivid and immediate through Weaver's highly accessible drawings and dialogue. This is a book-about maturation, family, education, and social change-every schoolchild, parent, and citizen should experience. — Sena Jeter Naslund

He tends to trust pictures more than he trusts words. Not because pictures cannot lie but because, once they leave the darkroom, they are fixed, immutable. — J.M. Coetzee

People need foundation myths, some imprint of year zero, a bolt that secures the scaffolding that in turn holds fast the entire architecture of reality, of time: memory-chambers and oblivion-cellars, walls between eras, hallways that sweep us on towards the end-days and the coming whatever-it-is. We see things shroudedly, as through a veil, an over-pixellated screen. When the shapeless plasma takes on form and resolution, like a fish approaching us through murky waters or an image looming into view from noxious liquid in a darkroom, when it begins to coalesce into a figure that's discernible, if ciphered, we can say: This is it, stirring, looming even if it isn't really, if it's all just ink-blots. — Tom McCarthy

I was digging in the backyard to get my own clay and making pottery. And then I started taking pictures and built my own darkroom. I would go out at six in the morning and just take pictures. — Steven Klein

I've found even after nearly 30 years of doing this, there are all kinds of new surprises that rear their heads at various times and I truly believe that 51% of the images, success takes place in the darkroom. — John Sexton

We pick up our shots and for the first time there's a total absence of sound in the room. From the ceiling, shy silver things blink and wait. Dennis doesn't sit, but hovers at the edge of the table, leaning in with a darkroom perfected slump. His hair hangs like its edges were dipped in lead. Thin spears pointing to the table. I'm looking at his face; we're both serious in a self-aware way, pretending not to notice.

"It doesn't even feel like I left. God, you look fucking terrible. But it's a terrible face that drinks tequila well. Down. And cheers."

We force a dull clash of cups and pour everything down at once. The hard tequila shudders that never happen in the movies. First your head feels light, then it starts receiving the distress signals from throat, lungs, belly. Your shoulders jerk to shake off the snake that wrapped around you and squeezed. It burns. The good burn. — Laurie Perez

More pathetic than the digital age is the people who love it. They buy right into the "newer is always better" ideology and they can't seem to grasp that the fun of VHS tapes, super 8 film, darkroom photography and vinyl records is far more worthwhile and human than the cold, high-tech atmosphere of everything being digitized. As the 21st century progresses, yeah, we'll have our Netflix and our cellular phones and our artificial intelligence and our implanted microchips - and future generations will have lost something valuable. Sadly, they won't even know what they've lost because we're taking it all away from them. — Rebecca McNutt

I'm not against digital photography. It's great for newspapers. And there are photographers doing great work digitally. When they use Photoshop as a darkroom tool, that's fine, too. But at this point of my life, after so many years, I don't really want to change, and I still love film. — Mary Ellen Mark

There's something magical still about it when I get in a darkroom, and you've shot a roll of film and you develop it and you look at your negatives, and there's, like, imagery there. That always stuns me. — Jessica Lange

As Tristan left the darkroom he heard Lacey's soap opera voice. "And so our two heroes part," she said, "blinded by love, neither of them listening to the wise and beautiful Lacey" - she hummed a little - "who, by the way, is getting a broken heart of her own. But who cares about Lacey?" she asked sadly. "Who cares about Lacey? — Elizabeth Chandler

When I'm about ready to press the cable release on the View camera, I've tried to anticipate some of the challenges I'm going to encounter in the darkroom. — John Sexton

The darkroom is just the means to an end. — Kim Weston

The inner chambers of the soul are like the photographer's darkroom. Like a laboratory. One cannot stay there all the time or it becomes the solitary cell of the neurotic. — Anais Nin

The slumber party took place in what the Methodists called a family room, the Catholics used as an extra bedroom, and the neighborhood's only Jews had turned into a combination darkroom and fallout shelter. — David Sedaris

Now there are elements of our dynamic coming slowly into view, like a photograph in a darkroom. — Caroline Kepnes

Pleasure in this respect is like photography. What we take, in the presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative film; we develop it later, when we are at home, and have once again found at our disposal that inner darkroom, the entrance to which is barred to us so long as we are with other people. — Marcel Proust

Worry is the darkroom in which negatives can develop. — Wanda E. Brunstetter

It was amazing to watch him in the darkroom at an advanced age, still get excited when the results were pleasing. He still struggled like we all do in the darkroom and he struggled behind the camera, and when he had a success he was beaming. — John Sexton

I never stopped photographing. There were a couple of years when I didn't have a darkroom, but that didn't stop me from photographing. — Imogen Cunningham

For me the printing process is part of the magic of photography. It's that magic that can be exciting, disappointing, rewarding and frustrating all in the same few moments in the darkroom. — John Sexton

I was on the yearbook staff, so I would take out film cameras and Nikons and take photos around school and at sporting events and things like that. We had a darkroom as well. I just loved it. I also saved up for a video camera to video my friends and cut and paste the videos together and I gave them to all of my friends for graduation. — Dianna Agron

If I've learned anything in Kabul, it is that human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries. But I find comfort in it, in the idea of a pattern, of a narrative of my life taking shape, like a photograph in a darkroom, a story that slowly emerges and affirms the good I have always wanted to see in myself. It sustains me, this story. — Khaled Hosseini

Fear is the darkroom where negatives are developed. — Zig Ziglar

Darkroom work had, after all, never interested me except as a means to an end; the place I wanted to be was outside in the light. — Robert Adams

It's more fun if you can control things like lighting and make special effects in the darkroom. — Lacey Chabert

A photographer needs to be a good editor of negatives and prints! In fact, most of the prints I make are for my eyes only, and they are no good. I find the single most valuable tool in the darkroom is my trash can - that's where most of my prints end up. — John Sexton

I read like a crazy person, I play the piano, and I'm a photographer. I always say my photography keeps me sane. I spend a lot of time in the darkroom. It's a very solitary, quiet life when I'm not working. — Alaina Huffman

My father taught me photography. It was his hobby, and we had a small darkroom in the fruit cellar of our basement. It was the kind of makeshift darkroom that was only dark at night. — Sam Abell