SAD168: A Horrible Night to Have a Curse

SAD168 :: Nikon F100 :: Nikkor 28mm/f2.8 AF-D :: HP5 :: Spring, 2006

One night I left the house at 10 p.m. and went to the Toe River at Green Mountain. I took the best photos of my life to that point. I spent six hours on the river, chasing trains back and forth between the crossings, and finally staggered home just before dawn. And not only were the photos exactly what I had envisioned in my head, there were enough of them to complete my upcoming exhibit.

The next night I went to the darkroom and developed the film. When I pulled the reels out of the tank after the wash, I squeegeed them between my fingers, as was my custom. The emulsion peeled off in my hands.

Whoever had mixed the chemistry had forgotten to add hardener to the fix.

Luckily, I was paying attention, and only lost a few frames. But I had washed the film in 85 degree water, as was also my custom, because I didn't like being up to my elbows in cold water. Moving from a 68 degree soup to an 85 degree wash reticulated the emulsion beyond repair.



Here, it appears as very course grain. On the wall, you can see the reticulation as transparent worms that appear to be crawling over the photos that would otherwise have been the centerpieces in my show.









I can trace much of my artistic makeup back to that moment. Never, EVER let anyone else have influence over your work, whether it be the critic in the newspaper or the slack-jawed kid running the minilab machine.

I recreated most of the shots, but I could not recreate the moon. I once read about how scientists were able to pinpoint the exact night Ansel Adams shot Moon Over Hernandez by some kind of crazy reverse engineered astronomy. Essentially, the moon will never be in the same place twice in a lifetime. It will be very, very close, but never exact.

Kind of like fixer without hardener. Close, but not close enough.