The Last Darkroom

Student Maya Gratch develops a print in the darkroom. Darkroom photography by Scott Soderberg/Michigan Photography

In Isaac Wingfield’s classroom in the Residential College, the words “Why should I care?” are scrawled at the top of the whiteboard, unerased throughout the semester.

The question isn’t flippant; it’s a serious call to make meaningful work. For students who might enroll in photography because they think they can coast through an easy credit, the question on the whiteboard serves as a reminder that they will be challenged in the courses Photography 1, 2, and 3. They’ll build an array of technical skills using analog cameras and working long hours in a darkroom, and in the images they create, they will practice rigorous inquiry and academic exploration. They’ll also, of course, develop photographs worth caring about.

In a Photography 2 critique, Wingfield asks, “What are you showing me that I don’t already know?”

“When the RC was founded in late 1960s, it was actually a top priority to have students working creatively in some way, even if they didn’t plan to become professional artists,” says Wingfield, who directs the Visual Arts program at the RC and teaches a series of three photography courses. But, at the time, the fine arts units—like the Stamps School of Art & Design and the School of Music, Theatre, and Dance—didn’t have room for non-majors from the RC to access their instructors and studio spaces. “That’s where the Visual Arts program came from,” Wingfield says, “wanting to supply RC students with art courses.”

Lucky Coincidence or Persistence?

Wingfield’s students “bring their interests into the darkroom in their approach and design of projects,” he says.

For creative writing major Ally Choi, photography allows her “to work a different creative muscle than writing.” And it’s not always easy. “My brainstorms are written,” she says. “I struggle to translate my ideas from words into photos.” The darkroom process is time-consuming, and with only 36 shots on a roll of film, Choi appreciates “lucky coincidences.”

But those challenges have inspired breakthroughs in her creative practice, and she’s visualizing her writing in new ways now too. “It really taught me the preciousness of limitations,” she says. “And also to release my perfectionism or else I’d be in the darkroom forever.”

Student Ally Choi accessed a new mode of memoir by combining text and image in her final Photography 2 project. This image is taken from a triptych, which reads: “In his childhood during the Korean War, my grandpa ate the inner flesh of pine trees. He peeled back the bark with 8-year-old hands, setting the strips to boil as rice grew scarce. Now, nearly 90, he rolls rice into gim, handing me hundreds of grains bundled into bites, tucked tight beneath his hands, that have grown old, but not weary of doing good.” Photography by Ally Choi

Recent RC alum Katie LeClaire (A.B. ’24) values the problem-solving skills she acquired in the darkroom. “I remember so many instances of trying things over and over again in the darkroom until it worked out—a lot of persistence, frustration, and recruiting the expertise of Isaac and the more advanced students.”

Now, the experience has paid off in her work as a teaching artist with the Ypsilanti-based Youth Arts Alliance, where she recently taught a pinhole camera workshop with youth in a detention and treatment facility in Jackson. LeClaire worked with poets and songwriters to create a month-long workshop that involved building a darkroom inside of a cell and making cameras out of paint cans. Initially, her students were skeptical about paint can cameras, and found parts of the process frustrating. “But later,” she says, “they were so proud of the work they created.”

The Function of Beauty

There’s a special value to this kind of hands-on creative work, Wingfield says, that extends beyond learning new skills. “In the university today it’s very easy to be word- and language-focused, and making visual art is a way to think differently about how we communicate and how we understand and make sense of the world. Visual art forces us to think differently and think critically about the world.

“Most of these students won’t go on to be professional photographers, but all of them will encounter millions of images in their lives,” Wingfield says. “We look at images all the time and get meaning from them. We understand things by looking at these images, but we don’t always break down the thinking about how ideas are being communicated in those images.” 

Student Meleck Ossama Eldahshoury works with an enlarger carrier so that she can size her image.

Maya Gratch, a social theory and practice major with a focus on urban development, says the photographic process has taught her to look at her surroundings differently, enabling her to see and frame beauty. “It was a great thing to learn how to find beauty,” Gratch says. “And functional things are beautiful.

“With each photo, I asked: What is the function? In urban development I look at what’s already there. Now I can ask what I can do to make things more functional, and meet people’s needs in urban development.”

These kinds of rich student experiences demonstrate the value of the visual arts within a liberal arts curriculum, and why the last darkroom on campus is worth preserving, Wingfield says.

“This process allows students to communicate and understand what they see,” Wingfield says. “It’s different from sitting and reading and thinking; it’s active. They learn by doing—manipulating controls, trying something different, and seeing how that changes things.”