In the Darkroom: Photography Before the Digital Age is not art for art’s sake. Rather, it’s art for the sake of education—an appreciation for the history and scientific complexity of the method that has been lost at today’s world of Wal-Mart printout stations and Facebook albums. But while the exhibit, now on display in the National Gallery of Art, boasts more than just pretty pictures, its dense exploration of the technical comes at the expense of the photographs’ intended artistic value.
The exhibit is organized chronologically, with pictures grouped according to their means of development. With each photo comes an engraved paragraph-long placard explaining precisely which chemicals and light-sensitive materials were used in the darkroom and the unique effects that they have on the final product. The specimens span more than a century, starting with the earliest camera-less prints and proceeding all the way to the Polaroid method that some of today’s Luddites still prefer.
Although interesting in concept, the exhibit quickly begins to feel more like a chemistry lecture than a display of fine art. Most pieces in the exhibit, especially those from 19th century photographers, are of smaller proportions; many are dwarfed by the explanatory writing hanging next to them. The science and history lessons grab the viewer’s attention first, and when that attention is lost halfway through in-depth discussions of iodine reactions, the accompanying pictures are overlooked.
This weakness is most apparent in the mid-20th century’s medium-sized gelatin-silver photographs. In this segment of the collection, the photographer begins to experiment more with conveying emotion rather than just translating an image. The exhibit, unfortunately, does little to emphasize that emotional component. In Garry Winogrand’s “Untitled,” a thought-provoking portrait of a laughing man in what appears to be a soldier’s uniform, the gravity and possible political statement are lost on the viewer, whose mind is too clouded with scientific jargon to appreciate to subtext.
The strong aesthetic impact of the larger photographs offers some compensation. Perhaps because they are bigger in size, the exhibit’s heavy-hitters possess passion and technique that demand the viewer’s attention. Most of these come from late 20th century photography, when, as the inscriptions explain, advanced darkroom techniques became more capable of effectively portraying artists’ sentiments. Here, the explanations reinforce the photos rather than overshadow them. In Richard Misrach’s haunting “Dead Fish, Salton Sea, California” and David Levinthal’s disturbing “Untitled (From Mein Kampf),” where toy soldiers blurrily reenact Nazi war crimes via the Polaroid method, the photographs stand out as the main attraction, with their development processes helping to explain the overall effect.
On a whole, though, the competition between chemistry and aesthetics is distracting. The viewer doesn’t leave In the Darkroom with a deep-seated scientific understanding of the photographic process or an immense appreciation for the potential of photography of an art form. Instead, the exhibit is a hodgepodge of a confusing chemistry lecture, a dense history textbook, and a few resonating images of photographic brilliance.
