By Eric Rudolph

That a great darkroom held a place of honor at the pricey Manhattan offices of the world’s biggest photo magazine, Popular Photography, isn’t too surprising.

That this lovingly-appointed darkroom had become a storeroom also, sadly, rings true.

Here’s the good news: the dormant darkroom at Pop Photo’s Manhattan offices was enthusiastically revived in 2005 by the magazine’s youngest staff member, a 23-year-old newly-minted B&W film devotee.

And while the darkroom closed for good (when the magazine moved) after a five-year revival, it lives on in another slightly diminished form, thanks to this same young woman.

A 23-year-old spearheading the reopening of a B&W darkroom amidst the digital juggernaut might seem highly counterintuitive. Making photographs by painstakingly projecting light through film negatives onto light-sensitive paper, then bathing them in smelly chemicals? And taking all that trouble just for B&W?

After all, young people are only into things digital. Who has time for a darkroom (or anything else) when you have a smartphone filled with games and (retro-photo and other) apps? And at the world’s leading photo magazine, the latest digital goodies are sitting around, ready to provide a world of distraction.

Well it turns out that photochemical processes have a lot of fans among the young digerati says the Pop Photo darkroom’s champion, Assistant Editor Lori Fredrickson, now 28.  Her contemporaries are strongly drawn to B&W, darkroom work and film cameras, she attests.

Fredrickson was only 23 when she started as an editorial coordinator at Pop Photo. She soon began studying photography (for the first time ever) at ICP: the opportunity to be immersed in photography was one of the job’s attractions.

Fredrickson quickly found that while digital photography was a great primer, “I became more inspired to photograph once I began learning how to shoot B&W film.

“It took using B&W film for me to find my photographic niche. In digital I hadn’t found the place where I was passionate about photography. The B&W film aesthetic – (which for me is) high ISO, grainy city photography, that’s one of my main things. Darker, more mysterious things appeal to me. I became really passionate about that look in particular.”

Resources abounded at Pop Photo. There were a wealth of working film cameras and lenses, waiting like wallflowers to be asked, once again, to dance. Senior staff members enthusiastically helped Fredrickson get up to speed with the unfamiliar Minolta and Olympus cameras (one, the highly-regarded OM-4, is a manual focus model). Once she got going there was no stopping. “The whole process of shooting B&W film made sense and I felt inspired for first time,” she explains.

Part of it was taking the ICP class and understanding of the basics of photography, and understanding B&W’s power to abstract and transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. “Color feels too obvious to me. Learning about B&W and seeing in terms of contrast and shadows, and how to make a different picture of something I saw every day, that drew me deeply into photography.”

The darkroom work at ICP became a passion. “I work so much with digital, but it doesn’t feel as glamorous to me – being alone in darkroom and seeing the image magically appear in a tray… I’m so much more involved in the process when it’s physically tangible. And B&W film was what I enjoyed working with, and I do think of shooting and printing your own B&W film as being a specific medium” within the entire realm of photography.

She was hooked, and wanted to do printing on her own, not just at ICP. So she asked senior Pop Photo staff members to help her revive the darkroom.

Was she concerned that her bosses might think this was truly odd, that their youngest staff member was, ironically, out of touch with what was really going on in photography in the 21st century?

“They thought it was a bit funny, that the youngest staffer was interested in darkroom work. I think some of them found it kind of cute, that instead of taking out the newest Canon and doing digital stuff, I wanted to use the darkroom and do B&W. It became a little bit of a joke. But they were very supportive.”

The senior editors, in fact, enthusiastically advised her on getting the darkroom running.

The room had been built more than 20 years ago (Pop Photo, nearly 100 years old, has moved offices several times over the decades, and several darkrooms had come and gone.) The magazine was housed in a modern skyscraper, and the darkroom was built in an interior, windowless portion next to their camera-and-lens testing lab. The darkroom had only been totally dormant for a few years; another young staffer had used it a once or twice.

So it was still more of a darkroom than a storeroom, and it only took a weekend to get it back to working order; mostly Fredrickson had to move boxes out into the testing lab.

“The staff didn’t use the darkroom anymore, but it was something that had been close to their hearts for most of their lives. They had spent a lot of time in the darkroom, and they were a wealth of knowledge in getting it running,” Fredrickson says.

Once it was back Fredrickson was thrilled to see what a gem she had uncovered. “It was a great darkroom, awesome, way cooler than at ICP.” It featured a major Omega ProLab D6 4x5” large-format enlarger bolted to the wall, with a Beseler color head that she used with variable contrast B&W paper, and a big sink that could hold large processing trays; making big prints was a breeze.

Goodies abounded. “People had been leaving behind gear for years. There were all these old kinds of paper, still good. Staff members would find old darkroom tools and give them to me, and newer things like fancy toner from Japan.”

The draw became irresistible. “I spent a lot of time there; it was my little second home in the office building, that no one else went to.”

Fredrickson became something of a darkroom zealot. “I would even sleep there occasionally – I would start after work at 7pm and could work for six hours, completely losing track of time, listening to music. I’d often go past 11.30pm or midnight, and didn’t want to take the train home or spend money on cabs – so I’d take my coat and curl up in there.”

She would truly get lost in this little dark, isolated space. “I’d be in there on weekends, singing out loud to myself, thinking I was alone, and find out later that staffers had come in and heard me singing. They’d tease me about it.”

Sadly, the Pop Photo office darkroom is no more; the magazine was sold in 2009 and it is thriving at the darkroom-free offices of its new parent company.

“I was quite sad, I was so fond of that darkroom. However, there were other things going on at the time, moving into new offices and adapting to a new office structure required a lot of transition, and so the loss of the darkroom was just one thing in the midst of that turmoil.”

But the darkroom lives on, in Brooklyn. Much of the gear is being actively used in Fredrickson’s apartment bathroom/darkroom.

“I’ll never be able to make a darkroom quite as cool in my bathroom, but the silver lining is that I could take a lot of the gear home and keep it going,” Fredrickson notes, with pride.

The big Omega D6 4x5” enlarger wouldn’t fit in her large-ish Brooklyn bathroom, but her newly purchased Omega C760 medium-format enlarger fits quite nicely. (See photo)

“There is room for a pretty long desk to hold the enlarger. My tools are all on the desk; the safelight is on a shelf opposite enlarger. I turn the showerhead into a hose and keep it running with a water tray in the bathtub, for film and print washing.“

She doesn’t think there is anything unusual about someone under 30 being so powerfully drawn to B&W analog photography. “Film photography remains compelling to many creative people, and I have several friends working in the arts who continue to use it as a medium. And there are others who appreciate darkroom work and the whole mysterious chemical process.”

Her darkroom experience has even helped her in her magazine work. “Photographers I interview really respond to hearing about the darkroom. A lot of photographers are using film and are passionate about it. So it is helpful to have that kind of dialog a when talking to people.”

What she’s learned is that photography is a big, varied field. “I continue to work in the darkroom partly because there’s magic to it, partly because it feels like an element of evolving as a photographer that is quite important: printing and examining images. The more important part for me is developing my B&W work as a whole, and improving myself behind the camera, refining my ideas about what I want the work to be. I like to think that I have evolved since then as a photographer. I work with a DSLR now also on other subjects, one of which is a documentary project, but I continue to work in B&W film because I like it as a medium.

“Everything about digital is awesome; you can do so much more than you could 10 years ago; but I don’t think other things, like film photography and darkroom printing have to go away; you simply have more options today.”

--ENDS--

POP PHOTO ASSISTANT EDITOR LORI FREDRICKSON IN HER HOME DARKROOM, with Omega C760 enlarger and an Olympus OM-4 manual-focus 35mm SLR. Fredrickson revived Pop Photo’s darkroom for five years, and when the magazine moved and the darkroom had to go, much of it went to her NYC home, where it continues to be used for B&W printing. BELOW: Some of Fredrickson’s B&W work (All photos Copyright 2010, Lori Fredrickson, All Rights Reserved.)