A brief life in analogue printing, where blindness and pragmatism shaped the image
Printing in the Dark
Once, I was Head of Manual Work at a photo lab in Utrecht.
It sounded official enough, until you said it out loud. Then the meaning shifted.
We worked in darkness. Rows of machines, the smell of chemicals, paper feeding endlessly from a roll. You placed a negative under a small light, chose one of five contrast settings, pressed a pedal, and moved on.
It was simple work.
The problem began in the light.
Judgement in the Light
The job was at UFAC, the Utrecht Photo Printing Centre. Long before photography became immediate, before images appeared the moment they were taken, there was this: paper on a roll, negatives held against a single point of light, and a decision reduced to five buttons. Contrast one through five. Soft to hard. Subtlety reduced to choice.
Most of the work happened in darkness. Machines hummed. People spoke softly or not at all. You developed a rhythm with your hands and your feet. Slide the negative into place, choose the contrast, press the pedal, move on. It required attention, but not thought. Or so it seemed.
The thinking happened elsewhere
Every print was judged in a brightly lit corridor by the owner, an old man who could no longer see properly. He suffered from cataracts and refused to acknowledge it. High contrast prints satisfied him. They appeared clear, decisive, visible. Prints with tonal nuance were rejected without hesitation.
You adjusted accordingly.
There was a woman in our department who understood printing far better than anyone else. Her images were balanced, delicate, precise. They were also consistently rejected. We would hear her cry, briefly, and then she would begin again. A new roll, another attempt.
In the evenings, after the old man had left, his son would take over. He saw clearly. Under his supervision, her prints passed without issue. That was how she managed her workload. Skill, persistence, and unpaid time.
I chose a simpler solution.
After my first encounter with the system, I printed everything at the highest contrast. The old man approved every image. Occasionally, his son would suggest I reduce the contrast slightly.
I agreed, and continued exactly as before.
Pragmatism is rarely admired, but it is often effective.
My promotion
My promotion followed quickly. The old man called me into his office and formalised my title. I was given a small darkroom, which I shared with an assistant nearing retirement.
The space was cramped. We could hardly move without touching. The air was thick with chemicals and heat. Hygiene, for him, was optional and infrequent. You adapted to the smell. What you could not escape was his voice.
By then, a new kind of work had begun to arrive. Guest workers who had been in the Netherlands long enough to travel home would take inexpensive cameras with them. Entire families gathered in harsh sunlight for group portraits. The cameras offered simple exposure settings: a cloud, a shadow, a sun.
The sun, unfortunately, belonged to a different climate.
Under North African light, intensified by sand, the negatives turned almost black. When you examined them under the dim green glow of the darkroom lamp, you saw little more than fragments. Printing them required patience. Minutes instead of seconds. Sometimes much longer.
My assistant resented these images immediately. Even the names on the envelopes irritated him. During the long exposures, he would mutter continuously.
“Come on. Come on. Come on, damn it.”
It was not directed at the image. It was directed at time itself.
Listening to that for hours creates a particular kind of fatigue. Not physical, but mental. A slow erosion.
We disliked each other, and for good reason. He was assigned the work he hated. I was not. As Head of Manual Work, I handled newspaper assignments and the occasional private commission. Some of those commissions were curious. One client, an older man, seemed intent on preserving what he knew would not last. He photographed his wife repeatedly, sometimes clothed, sometimes not.
In the darkroom, such images lost their charge. They became surface, texture, paper. You looked at them without looking.
That, too, is something the darkroom teaches you. Distance is not always created by space. Sometimes it is created by repetition.
The changes came gradually, and then all at once.
When the System Changed
One morning, technicians arrived. The machines were altered. Light entered spaces that had always been dark. People who had worked together for decades suddenly saw each other clearly. Conversations changed. Conflicts followed. A long-hidden relationship ended within days. One of them left.
Our process changed as well. The trays of chemicals disappeared. In their place, a narrow slot in the wall. We fed the exposed paper into it.
It came back fully processed.
The machinery was hidden. The chemicals were not. Their fumes were redirected into our workspace, away from management. Efficiency had improved. Conditions had not.
My body reacted before I could form an opinion. Itching, irritation, eczema. Symptoms that seemed random but were not. The older workers called it darkroom disease, as if the name itself explained enough.
Before I could decide what to do, the decision was made for me.
The Labour Inspectorate arrived without warning. That was still possible then. Work had not yet become something that existed solely for its own sake. It could still be questioned.
I was removed from the workplace and brought before a panel of older men, trade unionists with a long memory and a clear sense of proportion. In a room thick with smoke, they reviewed my situation and reached a conclusion that was both simple and surprising.
My working conditions had been unhealthy.
I was entitled to compensation.
The amount exceeded my previous salary. That fact revealed something else I had not fully understood. I had been underpaid.
A cheque followed. Official, precise, undeniable.
I remember less about the numbers than about the sensation.
For a brief period, I received more by doing nothing than I ever had by working.
It is a strange lesson, that kind of clarity.
But then, the darkroom was full of those.