Darkoom

When I was at university between 2003 and 2006 I was a member of the photography society, which had its own darkroom. Digital cameras were just starting to come in at this point, and there wasn’t much interest in using the darkroom, so I essentially had it to myself. All the equipment you could wish for was in there, you just had to bring your own chemicals and paper.

The University of Reading has a large campus with a lake in the middle. The far side of the lake has some modern buildings but also a whole series of low-rise 1950s prefabs. I had assumed they would have been demolished and redeveloped by now, but they’re still there on Google maps. In my time the art department occupied one row of these buildings (where they had their own darkroom), but the other side was little used. The photography club dark room was in one of these sparsely used prefabs, which was apparently a lab of some description. There were some healthy looking houseplants in the corridor, but you rarely saw a soul in there. It was a strange and lonely place, that always made me feel like I was going back in time to develop my films.

I don’t know why I took these photos, I must have been testing if a camera worked properly. I found them while scanning some other films in lockdown, and never got around to posting them. I remembered their existence because I was writing something about Kraftwerk’s Radioactivity album for my book. There was a tape player in the darkroom, and that album was one of the tapes I left in there. The album is permanently associated in my mind with this lonely Cold War bunker feeling place where I had time and space to experiment with photography.