The other day I received an interesting email from my grandmother in response to my recent darkroom post. It began: “I just read your web site and was interested to learn about your development of a darkroom.  We had a darkroom in our back basement in the 1960's.” In fact, as I told her later, my father recently gave me the very enlarger he and my grandfather used years ago. While not new information, her email reminded me unexpectedly of the art school cliché, “you don't create art in a vacuum.”

While I typically heard that phrase in the context of reading ArtForum and visiting New York regularly, this time I thought of it differently. I envisioned my grandfather, much younger than I ever knew him, tucked away in the back basement with duct tape sealing out the light. So he crept down to the basement darkroom, too, latching the door behind him and making prints in solitude under the red-orange glow of the safelight.

I wonder about this darkroom and what he developed down there. Did he just love the darkroom process? Was making your own photos more common back then? Or did I just get a glimpse into another branch of the visual artists in our family?

I also remember, during my time studying painting in college, when my little sister said she “wanted to be an artist just like [me and our father].” At first I took offense, as if she had taken away some of the individuality of choosing your own path. However, a few years later I appreciate the interconnectedness of it all. Maybe she will become a painter, maybe she won't. Maybe she will become a world-class musician, accomplishing everything I ever wanted. Maybe she won't.

Before I start sounding like that Baz Luhrmann recording, let me get back to the point. Despite all my efforts as a youth to be unique and different, distanced and indecipherable, now I value sharing common ground with my relatives. My work doesn't always need to be out in left field. At times, it can be a legacy, a process I share with those before me.

This weekend I light proofed the darkroom. And just how does one lightproof a room with lots of windows letting the light in? Well, I've discovered it's pretty easy when you're surrounded by clever people to give you ideas. Here's my process so far for setting up a DIY darkroom space.

I originally planned to put the darkroom in a spare basement closet, but quickly decided it would make more sense to use the bathroom instead. Why? It's bigger, has running water, and I don't need to run new wiring. However, the window (and the door with windows in it) in the bathroom presented a larger roadblock in terms of light proofing. Why the bathroom has a window and completely non-private door, or why a bathroom like this exists in the basement in the first place, is beside the point.

Since I still want to use the room as a spare bathroom, I chose to preserve it as is and save the light proofing for when I'm making prints. This is also one of the quickest and easiest solutions. I simply sewed together four layers of black felt and attached it with velcro around the door and window frames. I stitched in from the border a bit and left the edges loose to make it easier to smooth them against the woodwork.

After executing a very quick sewing job and sticking up some velcro strips, I put up my “darkroom curtains,” set an alarm for ten minutes, and turned out the light. After five minutes I started to make out tiny slivers of light at the top of the door and window, so I added more velcro and restarted the timer. A full ten minutes passed and, to my delight, I was still completely in the dark!

At this point I have to stop to point out the importance of spending adequate time in your darkroom before doing something rash like busting open a film canister. For a room to be safe for film, you must be unable to see ANYTHING after being in there for at least five minutes. I sat for ten just to be on the safe side. This is my cautionary word, though: just because a room looks dark for the first couple of minutes after switching off the light doesn't mean it won't fog your film. After five minutes, tiny bits of light and maybe even objects will start to appear magically before your eyes.

As you can see, the darkroom is also outfitted with a super snazzy DIY enlarger table and tray shelf. Before too long I'll paint or sand the top of the table and make a little skirt to go around the bottom. The rack can be tucked away in a closet or tub when not in use.

Overall, this project has been relatively inexpensive and easy. As a bonus, I've maintained functionality of my downstairs bathroom and the whole process is completely reversible when it comes time to move on to a new place. I like to be sensible: a person in their mid-20s might not be in the house she'll live in forever, and not every prospective home buyer will be excited by a darkroom in the basement (and no second bathroom).

The next hurdle, just discovered today: the only outlet in the room is controlled by the light switch. I think that's a funny joke for a darkroom space, don't you?

Ever have one of those weeks when you just can't seem to get ahead?  Unopened mail accumulates on the table, you're out of necessities before you go grocery shopping, dishes pile up, projects around the house go unfinished (or unstarted).  Before you know it, you're cranky all the time, you wake up in the morning feeling like you barely fell asleep, and even your morning coffee isn't satisfying anymore.

Needless to say, creative work suffers under these circumstances.

Last Monday, I finally placed my darkroom supply order.  When a shipping confirmation informed me my package would arrive at the office on Friday, I immediately reconfigured my goals: by the end of the weekend, I would be making prints.

Then the flu hit our house.  While I somehow remained immune to the debilitating fever, headache, and fatigue the virus delivers, I sure didn't miss out on assuming all the everyday household chores; picking up discarded blankets, clothes, and juice glasses all over the house; and caring for my sick husband for six days.  Not to mention a week's worth of restless sleep.  My dreams of a functioning darkroom evaporated long before the FedEx man arrived.

I managed a number of accomplishments over the weekend, including a trip out to Home Depot, but I should have realized earlier that it just was not happening.  What began as an exhilaratingly ambitious goal had become an absolute impossibility.  Just like getting this morning off to a positive start because let's face it: starting out a Monday morning dead tired after an unproductive weekend just doesn't bode well.

That brings me to this evening, and just not wanting to post an entry to this blog.  And you know what?  I think it's just fine to be real about it.  I'm done mourning my weekend as if something died because life got in the way of an already-unrealistic goal (yes, I can be dramatic, all the time).  It's time to go to bed at 9:00 and get up in the morning ready to pick it all up again and keep going.  After all, that's what it's about in the end: the picking up and going, not the everything getting done on schedule. 

Tomorrow morning I'm going to wake up and eat my egg and cheese sandwich and go to work with a smile.  Then I'm going to come home and work on light-proofing the darkroom and setting up an enlarger table, and maybe by the end of next weekend, I'll be making prints in the new darkroom. 

Life beyond grade school doesn't afford many snow days, but today we got lucky.  Especially considering March generally doesn't yield much snow in the Mid-Atlantic states.  I feel especially blessed today, though, because I was able to take the time to take inventory and order start-up supplies for my home darkroom. 

I've enjoyed the planning stages for my basement studio space, but nothing rivals making a monetary commitment and getting my hands on the materials to do my work.  Suddenly an idea has become an investment, and I will expect my abstract goals to crystallize.  Of course, I don't advocate buying new equipment to cure artist's block, but I do feel it's necessary to have a "craft space" for photos just like any other art form.  Digital photography has (conveniently) condensed the work space into a single piece of machinery, but this opens a rift between the artist and the craft.

To develop visual art, the artist must dedicate space, time, and resources to the creative process.  There are no shortcuts.  The easier work space and materials are to access, the better.  If I'm feeling inspired at 10:00 at night, how does it affect my process if I can just sneak down to the basement and shut myself in the darkroom for a couple hours?  Digital eases the draw on resources, but not without cost.  If I sit at a computer in the office all day, how do I feel when I come home, sit in the middle of the house, and scan my pictures from the color lab?  Does my digital art-making become less craft, more assembly-line calculations?

The truth is, I don't know.  I don't know how all-digital photographers feel when they plug in their cameras and pull off the week's photos.  For the most part, I need to retain a connection with the craft of image-making whenever possible.  Clearly doing event photography for my job is neither the time nor the place, but there is no reason for all my 110 prints to come from a mail-order lab.

Often, I feel like a dividing line exists between "fine arts" and "crafts."  We shouldn't forget, though, that both are all about creating a work of art with our hands.  I have to imagine the way a crafter feels making jewelry is similar to how I feel when I'm making prints in the darkroom.  And just like having a jewelry-making corner/table will lead to more and better work, so will setting aside a space to make my photographs.

Creating a dedicated art-making space in my home is going to be great, I can tell.  The process today proved much more time-consuming than I expected, but isn't that what snow days are for?  Now it's done, and all I have to do is wait.

As most people in the developed world must have heard by now, I've been enjoying film photography a lot lately. Specifically, I've been shooting expired 110 cartridge film. I am proud of my digital work, but at the same time the past couple years have made me realize I cannot abandon film for digital.

Lately I've been disappointed to see my photos languishing on my hard drive, and I haven't been feeling good about the change in “darkroom” environments, either. The darkroom easily ranked as my favorite place to work in college. I loved it for the solitude, the dark, the running water, the everyday magic of images conjured from silver and paper. Sitting in front of a computer screen offers no such meditative experience.

After giving it some thought and buying an ancient SLR on eBay, I am determined to bring black and white photography back into my life. Some Googling uncovered a public darkroom within walking distance of our house, but a conversation with the folks at the camera shop down the street taught me the place closed down in 2001. Baltimore now has no public darkroom space, which I find sad given all my praises of the city's amenities.

The lack of ready darkroom availability discourages me. However, if I'm going to keep experimenting, I need to shoot film. The tactile nature of the process is integral to continued discovery and critique. Hopefully enough photographers feel the same way that this won't become a lost art in coming years.

So the public darkroom is long gone and I'm not even close to being in school. What to do? Well, I'm going to build a darkroom in my basement. Honestly, it can't be that hard, can it? I already have a promising spare closet down there, and turning the basement into a photo work space was already in the plans. That I could get all the start-up supplies I need for a couple hundred dollars doesn't hurt, either, especially considering the price of negative scanning these days.

The more I think about it, the more a home darkroom seems like both a luxury and the most financially viable option I have to shoot film. I'm excited to see where this goes, and if any of my friends take sudden interest in sharing the space with me. Just because it's a little messier and a little less convenient doesn't mean we need to – or even should – give up the darkroom. Surely, there have to be be some sympathizers out there, and I'm determined to find them in coming months.

Darkroom photo via Kutztown University Fine Arts Department.

Though progress is slow and steady, I've been exceeding goals left and right on my way to creating a basement studio. My reorganization isn't limited to the basement, though. Getting organized involves the whole house. This weekend I finally unpacked my big cardboard box of old journals (the earliest dating back to 1994) and put them on a bookshelf for easy reference. Next to these fabulous pieces of personal history sits a book of a different kind: my Reclamation artist book.

As often happens when I am cleaning/reorganizing, I simply had to sit down and leaf through my handmade book to experience it anew. It totally blew me away. For the past year I've been experiencing my photography on a computer screen or in a paper mailing envelope from the color lab, and I found it inspiring to see my photos beautifully presented and complemented by deckled edges and compelling text. In fact, just now I stopped typing to sketch out a new idea for presenting my new digital work alongside journal texts.

I won't go on (too much) about this book tonight. Know that I could because it's just that awesome. Over the course of two days I poured my heart and soul into it, expending way more money and labor than I ever could have imagined. That weekend I carried it on a trip to Boston, hugging it close on the T so it didn't get damaged. At my wedding, our best man recalled in his toast that trip we made to visit him in Boston, how I sat on the floor of his apartment trimming my prints just so (leaving just enough white so the viewer would know they hadn't been cropped) and carefully installing them in the pages of my book.

In this age of digital convenience, we'd all do well to remember where we started: pulling film off the reel, making contact sheets, and accumulating boxes of 5 x 7 prints. Something is lost when our work isn't tangible. It's too easy these days to process, evaluate, and display photos electronically. They still take on a whole new meaning as prints, and a whole new meaning again as lovingly presented, tangible works of art.

What is the biggest realization you've had about your work lately?  The most inspiring presentation?

In college, studio space was always at a premium, and that's putting it lightly. The reality: one big room to work in, plus a smaller room for storage of paintings and chemicals, struggled to accommodate around 30 upper-level studio students as well as maybe 40+ intro to painting students (according to my somewhat conservative estimates). It was a mess. I feel like work consistently got damaged in the storage room because there wasn't enough space to store half of what needed to go in there, and space constraints pressured us to create paintings that were portable at every stage of the process.

As an upperclassman producing very large (i.e. taller than myself) paintings and spending up to 18 hours per week in that room, I felt some entitlement to my own space. Along with the one other woman making huge paintings at that time, I left my work out in a corner of the studio. This area grew to include with my palette, paints, and lots of sketches and notes tacked up to the wall. Months later we were admonished and forced to end our “homesteading” in the corners of the room because, hey, what would happen if everyone did that? What a buzzkill, what a serious drag on the creative process. The art building has been gutted and remodeled since I graduated, so I hope students are now given adequate space to work.

As I said on Monday, work space is crucial. So, now that I have a place to call my own, it's time to start homesteading again!

After making a handy drawing of the planned studio/work area, I calculated that I'll have 22 feet of hangable wall space. Plus, even though the house is only 14 feet wide, looking at the drawing I realize there is a lot of floor space to be had as well. I guess all the junk sort of covers it up at this point, but hey, it has a lot more potential than that little corner of the painting studio!

I got to thinking a lot about our house during my week away from home in a condo in Vermont. It felt wonderful to exist in a space populated only by the things we needed. My mind was clear, my ambitions strong, my optimism fully out of its shell.

Maybe I could attribute some of these feelings to spending every day skiing and enjoying fantastic scenery instead of showing up at the office. Who knows, but I came home with plans: hold on to your hats, folks, I'm cleaning out my basement.

Once I returned home I immediately realized why I haven't purged the whole house before: it's hard, it's intimidating, it's overwhelming. For someone with ADD like myself, it's impossible to know where to begin. Not to mention the basement is downright cold and dank this time of year. I voluntarily face these realities now not just because my parents will soon drop off a truckload of my childhood possessions, but also because there is another possibility in the works. There is a reward, a dedicated art space at the end of this tunnel.

Freed from the shackles of clutter, I can focus on populating my space with only the things I need. And at this point I've come to realize I do need a place to store, display, and create art. Everyone does. Imagine going to work in an office every day and not actually having your own desk. Or imagine your desk chock full of junk that's never going to help you get the job done. Our creative space is just as important to developing good work.

More on this to come as the project develops, but for now...before pictures, anyone?

On Thursday evening I'll get into my specific plans/wants for the space, so keep following along. If you have a basement, you can do this too! Already have a fabulous art space in your home? Please share!