I don't own a darkroom. I do, however, have the tools to develop film up to 4x5. I also have the means to make a room light tight. This week I experimented, not for the first time, with making contact prints.
This is where you place a negative on top, and in direct contact, of a piece of photographic paper. Expose this sandwich to light and then develop the photo paper to form a finished positive image.
4x5 negatives are a perfect size for contact prints, neither to large or too small. In the early days of photography, contact printing was the only way of making a photograph that you could hold.
I have to say that every time I make a contact print and hold the finished dry photo, there is something about having a physical object that is wonderful. More to the point there will have been no jiggery pokery because the negative has simply been placed on the photopaper. A contact print is a thing of beauty and something that I really would like to get better at.
One thing that I have never done is made a contact print of a glass plate negative on another glass plate. So I had a go and OMG! (to quote the young uns). A positive on glass is amazing and timeless. Something that will be treasured.
In a world that is disposable, a glass plate contact print feels permanent.
While I have no issues with digital cameras, the lack of physicality of digital photographs somehow undermines their perceived value. A digital photo will languish unloved as zeros and ones on a hard disk until the tech fails and then it is like it never existed. Even peoples memory of taking the digital image fades quickly in the blur of taking a thousand photos on a day trip.
I love using my handheld 4x5 Chroma camera Snapshot. Each photo is an event that is memorable and a contact print unique.
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