The Darkroom -- Part I

What if

Photo by Jordan on Unsplash

It happened again. Besides the usual open meadows, gently sloping up toward distant hills covered with pine trees, besides the usual white house nestled at the end of an unpaved winding road about midway between the fields and the hills, at a distance that might have been a few hundred meters from where the black and white shot had been taken, this time there was an old couple standing near a car, its color maybe red or blue, certainly not white, parked right next to the main entrance to the house. The sky was its usual overcast gray, and there was no snow left on the peaks in the background. He was much taller than her, white-haired, big-nosed, wearing a checkered shirt with rolled-up sleeves, suspenders, holding a cane in his left hand, embracing her shoulders with his right arm. She was petite, wore a sleeveless white dress, and held something in her hands -- a box, perhaps. Both of their gazes were directed toward the right side of the picture, focused on something off-frame. The distance didn’t allow for more than an approximation of details, some of which had to be assumed or imagined. 

One night, someone in a dream said that I should get into film photography. Start as soon as possible, he said. Why as soon as possible? Is there a deadline to meet? I need time to get into things, I thought. I need to start with an idea to caress, one that becomes more interesting the more I caress it. Then, I have to study the situation, understand everything clearly, and leave as little as possible to chance. Only when all the planets have aligned properly do I begin. Until everything is perfectly in place, I won’t start anything new. Leave as little as possible to chance, I say to myself, even though, in reality, chance is something you can’t control. It’s not up to you how much you leave to it -- it’s chance that decides how much to take. And even when you think you’re a hundred percent sure, when you’re convinced that you have everything under control, chance shows up and sets things straight: I’m the one in charge, not you, she says. This is something I’ve learned over the years: if chance is the one in charge, then why wait to have everything under control, when control is nothing but an illusion?

And so I retrieved the old Pentax that my folks gave me when I finished junior high and brought it to a shop where they cleaned it up. But then I kept it there, on a shelf, for months, as I had to learn everything there was to know about film. What are you waiting for? said my friend Viviana. Just buy a roll of film and start shooting. I replied that there were a gazillion different films out there. Sensing that it might take me months, she decided to buy me one. Here, she said, this one’s on me. It took me quite a few rolls to produce something vaguely acceptable, but I loved it. I remember when digital photography came out; I was thrilled at the idea of seeing a photo right away on display, deleting it if I didn’t like it, and shooting a hundred more in a matter of minutes until the perfect one materialized. Now, I was thrilled at the idea of not being able to see the photo until development, of keeping everything under a veil of mystery, as if wrapped in gauze.

Some time passed, and I dreamed of that guy again, and he told me that I should learn to develop photos myself, his voice calm and reassuring. So I read and watched videos and asked around. Then I bought the right tools and a safelight, and turned a windowless space at home into a darkroom. And I learned. It was like magic. When I told Viviana about the dreams, one spring afternoon at that coffee shop on the corner of Via Vincenzo Monti and Largo V Alpini, she sat silent for a while, sipping her white tea. I heard a guy on a podcast a few weeks ago, she finally said, a famous psychologist, who has this theory about transducers. I was paying superficial attention while checking my phone. They take signals from one medium, and send them to another medium, she continued, that’s what they are. Like a microphone, for example -- it takes a signal when we speak in front of it, which is just vibrating air, and converts it into an electrical signal which goes through a wire, into an amplifier, and out through some speakers. Not a super sophisticated definition, I know, but that’s the way I understood it, she said. And? I prompted, looking up from the phone screen.

And he said that our bodies, in fact the bodies of most organisms, are encased in transducers, she went on. The eye, the ear, the nose, and the tongue are all transducers. They take electromagnetic radiation, vibrating air, airborne chemicals, and liquid-borne chemicals, and turn them into neural signals. The skin, too, is a transducer. It converts temperature, pressure, and texture into neural signals. I don’t understand where you’re heading with all this, I said. Well, what if we have transducers on us that we don’t even know we have? she said. What if, over billions of years, we as a species have developed tools we still don’t know about, let alone how to use, but they’re there, they’re already part of us? And what if these unknown transducers allow us to receive information from different universes or domains or dimensions, and communicate back? This was getting interesting, and I laid my phone on the table. Gosh, it’s late, she said suddenly. My point with all this is, she continued, standing up and already slipping on her coat, where do dreams come from? Might they be things happening in a different dimension, or information from another domain sent to us, received by our brains through a special transducer that we haven’t yet learned how to use? And with that, she was off.    

It was after that conversation that I started developing photographs I hadn’t taken. At first, I thought they were shots I didn’t remember, buried within the dozens of rolls I consumed every week. But they depicted places I had never been, places I didn’t even know existed, and people I had never seen in my life. Once, still in the early stages of this strange phenomenon, I shot an entire 36-exposure color roll of one subject, as proof that I wasn’t going crazy: my home bookshelf. I then immediately went to the darkroom and developed it. The results were unsettling. They were all landscape photographs of a peaceful place, somewhere in a valley at the foot of pine-covered hills, with mountains in the background. An unpaved winding road led up to a white house, nestled midway between the valley and the hills. The photos were all taken on an overcast day, all in black and white. Another time, portraits of unknown people slowly emerged in the chemicals, always in black and white. A photo of a five- or six-year-old child blowing out candles on a birthday cake appeared once, while the rest of the roll was blank. This one was in color. But the culmination came when I developed a photo of three moons in the night sky over a vast stretch of water.

I kept it all to myself for a few months, until I told Viviana.

[To be continued] 

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