What InMyDarkroom is
InMyDarkroom is a collaborative census of professional and amateur darkrooms around the world, made to celebrate the art of analogue photography and to inspire anyone who wants to start out on this path.
Show your darkroom
Do you have a darkroom? Big or small, add it to the collection. Three photos and a few lines are enough to tell its story.
Every darkroom helps count how many still exist, and might convince someone to build their own.
Who's behind it
I'm Francesco Mussida, a darkroom printer and educator. A few years ago I read an article in the Guardian about historic darkrooms that had fallen out of use, and about the printer's craft. I was so struck by the calm and beauty of those darkrooms that I decided to create a whole project to celebrate not only the analogue printer, but also the place where printers work: the darkroom.
The darkroom is at the centre of my everyday work. For over a decade I've been agitating developing tanks and mixing chemistry, turning film into silver gelatin prints. I work with vintage cameras, film and fibre paper, using no digital intervention. Printing, for me, completes a point of view that taking the picture only partly expresses, and I consider each print a physical extension of the subject it portrays. In my personal work I photograph the relationship between humans and the plant world: I aim to reveal not only what nature looks like, but how it feels.
Over the years, my passion for these places has led me to build several darkrooms, for myself and for other photographers. I know them well from the designer's side too, and I know how much care and how many decisions go into every room, however small.
With InMyDarkroom I'm trying to show darkrooms as they are today, in a present that, sadly, is always at risk of being lost to the entropy of technological progress. Placed side by side, these rooms tell the story of a craft, and stories that I think are worth listening to.