From: Katharine Thayer (kthayer@pacifier.com)
Date: 09/07/02-11:31:35 AM Z
shannon stoney wrote:
>
>
> I thought it would be interesting to learn how other people made
> darkrooms for themselves at home or elsewhere.
Hi Shannon,
I've set up three darkrooms/gum printing workshops in rented houses,
which means I either wasn't allowed to or wasn't willing to put money
into permanent alterations, so I've had to be pretty flexible and
creative.
The first was in a room in the basement of a big old house. The room
had concrete on three sides. I just had to cover a window and an old
coal chute with black plastic, and hang a black plastic curtain over the
door, and I was in business. Oh, I also had to staple black plastic
across the joists overhead because there was some kind of insects eating
the wood and until I put up the black plastic, I would come down every
morning to find sawdust all over my equipment and worktables. The washer
and dryer and laundry sink were in the room so it was already plumbed. I
had three small workbenches/tables, one for the paper cutter and paper
storage, one for the enlarger and its accoutrements, and one that I used
for the coating table when I was printing gum and for the trays when I
was doing darkroom work. It was right next to the sink, which was handy.
I used the tops of the washer and dryer for additional work surfaces,
and heavy plastic concrete-mixing tubs, lined up on a handy brick ledge
jutting out from the chimney, for gum development. There wasn't room in
the basement ( the rest of the basement was filled with old boilers and
furnaces that had been replaced but never removed) for my mat-cutting
table or the print-flattening table, so they lived in the living room
and dining room upstairs.
The second workspace was a large basement/garage with many windows. I
tried several makeshift ways to partition off one little part for a
darkroom and none of them worked, so I finally had to cover all the
windows, including the one at the top of the stairs, and make the entire
huge space dark. I hated that basement with supreme passion; it was cold
and dank and had low ceilings (very claustropohobic) and smelled of cat
pee and mold. And my car lived in the space too; I didn't like having my
car next to my mat-cutting table; it seemed kind of... low-rent, so to
speak.. (I couldn't park it on the street for reasons that aren't
important here.) The space had a river running through it in the rainy
season (3/4 of the year) with its own delta; it would actually deposit
mud as it swirled through. I had to dress in a parka and boots to work
down there, and it tested my character every day to make myself go down
there at all. There was plenty of space; I had a separate workspace for
every possible function. I had a table just for gum coating, a
formica-topped workbench for my trays of chemicals, two tables for the
dry side of the darkroom, the mat-cutting and print-flattening tables,
even a separate table for putting frames together. I bought four plastic
laundry sinks for gum development and had them plumbed in a way that was
removable when I left. In spite of all the space, I was glad to shake
the mud of that place from my feet and move on.
In my present situation, my darkroom and my gum-printing workshop are
separate. The former owner of the house was an artist and built a studio
in the back yard with a wall of north-facing windows. It makes a
wonderful gum studio. It's small (12x16) and very compact. It works
well except when I'm putting a show together and I really need more
dedicated workspaces; it's annoying to be continually clearing off one
task so that I can do another task, and back again. But most of the time
it's fine. My plastic sinks take up one wall; another wall is taken with
bookcases with all my art books; a third wall has the mat-cutting table,
an extra workbench for miscellaneous tasks, and the printing platform.
Above all this is a small loft with a removable ladder, which I use for
storage of things I don't need to access all the time. Under the
mat-cutting table is a five-drawer flat file which holds paper, large
negatives, and other such stuff. The fourth wall, under north-facing
windows to the 14-foot ceiling, has the coating table and the door to
the outside. (There are blinds I can close if there's too much UV coming
in through the windows.) There is a small bathroom in the studio where
I have installed several clotheslines for drying prints.
The darkroom is in the house, in a bathroom/utility room. It has two
French doors which I've curtained with white blackout cloth (which is
totally opaque but doesn't make the room look like a cave) but no
windows. The space is very tight; the only way I could make it work was
to put the enlarger table on casters so it can be wheeled out of the way
when I need to open the dryer door. I have an eight-foot length of
plywood, 2 feet wide, that I put across the washer and dryer and a
pedestal sink, to give me an 8-foot table for my trays. I cover this
with black plastic so chemicals won't get into the wood. When the room
is not acting as a darkroom, I store the plywood vertically in a space
between the toilet and the water heater, and the trays and chemicals on
shelves that I built over the washer and dryer. There is an outside door
that leads directly out toward the gum studio, but I don't need to go
back and forth much, or at least I won't when I finally get two of all
the things I need in both places.
You asked...
kt
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