PhotoResearcher no. 41 – The Darkroom: Chemical, Cultural, Industrial is out now, guest edited by Dr Sara Dominici, scholar of photographic history and visual culture.

“The Darkroom: Chemical, Cultural, Industrial is the first edited volume to explore the darkroom as a topic of analysis. Its aim is to examine the darkroom as a generative space, looking in particular at how its changing material constitutions, social settings, and the experiences that these factors enabled and constrained, impacted on the wider discipline of photography. In doing so, this special issue begins to unearth those histories of ecological transactions between people and their physical and chemical environments, of labour, of class, gender, and racial inequalities, but also of collaboration, that subtend our global photographic heritage, and to start a critical conversation on the place that the darkroom has occupied in the wider history of photography“.

PhotoResearcher no. 41 originates in the international conference “In the Photographic Darkroom”, which Sara Dominici convened at the University of Westminster (London) in June 2023. The conference brought together artists, writers, theorists, researchers, and scholars to contemplate the photographic darkroom as a somewhat overlooked space in the histories and theories of photographic image-making. 

The journal contains contributions by Jennifer Tucker, Junko Theresa Mikuriya, Michelle Henning, Michael Pritchard, Franziska Lampe, Núria F. Rius, Kelley Wilder and Uschi Klein, and closes with a case study in the form of a conversation between CREAM doctoral researcher, Lucy Rogers and three members of the London-based collective The Gate Darkroom, Carô Gervay, David Whiting, and Jonathan Blower.

Find out more here.