Ithaca College’s dark room designates areas to be wet only – for prints made in the dark room. This area is left completely untouched this Tuesday, October 5th, 2009, but behind the wet area is a table where a student has a laptop open to work on digital prints.
Dark rooms are no longer considered necessary in many colleges. College photography students are now being immersed in the wonderful world of digital photography that is becoming more and more readily available.
Four years ago, it was universal for freshman photography students to walk into college their first day and immediately be submerged in the black and white dark room. For almost 200 years, photography has been a practice meant for the passionate, the artistic, and the crafty. Dark rooms have satisfied all of these drives, allowing one to completely work in their own space to provide the desired effect.
However magical the dark room is to students, the costs of maintaining a dark room exceeds many schools budgets. Because of the trend towards digital, the chemicals, involving stop bath, hypoclear, developer, photo flo, and fixer, are all becoming much more expensive.
Equipment to develop your own film is left out for students at Tompkins Cortland Community College.
Here at Ithaca College, Intro to Photography was just two years ago an all film class. Freshmen were required to own a 35mm camera and learned how to load, shoot, and develop their own film and make prints, using the chemicals in the dark room. Their final portfolio consisted of all black and white, 35mm negative prints.
Ahndraya Parlato, an Intro to Photography professor at both Itthaca College and Tompkins Cortland Community College comments on students learning film first: “When you're shooting film, there's a sense of importance - your negatives have to be developed and printed, they take up physical space in the world. I think the combination of these things often makes students slow down and shoot more carefully than when they're using digital cameras.”
Last year, they introduced digital photography into Intro to Photography, but only in the last few weeks of the course. However, as times are changing, so is Ithaca College’s Intro to Photography class. Janice Levy, photography professor at Ithaca College, says “all intro students are now required to own digital SLR cameras. In the past, they were required to bring in film cameras, but that was presenting all kinds of mechanical problems, what with very old film cameras that were handed down to them. They were constantly spending money having to fix them.” Levy says that SLR digital cameras are current to this day an age, however, so students will be buying new ones. “I will work hard to keep film alive as long as possible, and that’s why it is important to me that they learn both mediums,” Levy says.
Marianne Dabir, a junior journalism major at Ithaca College, is a photo lab monitor for the school. “When I set up in the morning, I only put out one tray of chemicals. I’d say in an average day only four people use the actual darkroom. When I dump all the chemicals at the end of the day, almost all of the chemicals are going down the drain.” Dabir says she thinks that it is sad that it is turning so film-based, but she has “a great appreciation for digital as well. It truly is the beginning of another era.”
It has been a dispute for many colleges. The Metropolitan Community College decided in May of 2007 that they should empty their photography department of dark rooms. They believe it simply to be impractical to keep the medium going.
Drawers are available to rent for photography students at Ithaca College. These hold negatives and paper for both film and digital photography equipment.
Tompkins Cortland Community College remains true to keeping their Intro to Photography class purely film. Eric Merkalein, 25, a third semester student, is a graphic designing major, taking Intro to Photography because it is required for his major.
Eric Merkalein studies his contact sheet to pick a negative to make a print from in the dark room for his class that afternoon.
“I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about photography, but I am loving it more than computer graphics.” Merkalein isn’t sure if he will pursue photography after this year, but Tompkins Cortland Community College offers separate digital photography classes to learn that specific medium in detail.
Merkalein finds the negative he is looking for so he can put it in the enlarger.
Trends are changing to make photography a digital world for means of advertising, photojournalism, wedding photography and portrait photography. In a world where photography is a business, digital provides great potential to produce millions of with a snap of a camera. However, many colleges do see the authenticity of film. Fine art photographers will continue to use film to achieve effects that are limited with digital photography. The education of both at Ithaca College as well as other colleges in the world leaves the student to make the decision.
