The Dying Art of Darkroom Printing
The comparison images above show photographer Dennis Stock’s iconic portrait of James Dean in Times Square. The test print on top shows all the work Inirio put into making the final photo look the way it does. The lines and circles you see reveal Inirio’s strategies for dodging and burning the image under the enlarger, with numbers scattered throughout the image to note different exposure times.
Sarah Coleman of The Literate Lens wonders whether the magic of seeing this process will carry over at all into our new digital age:
Over the last fifteen years, almost every photographer I’ve interviewed has waxed poetic about that “magical” experience of seeing an image develop in chemicals for the first time. You have to wonder whether today’s young photographers will rhapsodize as much about the first time they color-calibrated their monitors.
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