Real Life Bites: Photographer Nicole Ngai on the Tests and Trials of the Darkroom
Words & Images: Nicole Ngai
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Come with me on a trip to the darkroom. These sessions are one of my favourite parts of being a photographer and a very crucial part of my practice. I find the process very therapeutic and I enjoy the physicality of it - it keeps me grounded.
I actually don't personally develop my negatives anymore, I work closely with Moderne Lab where I've been going for five years now - they're the best! After I get my negatives, I go in to work on my handprints, which are the final images.
In these pics, I’m handprinting an image from the new Ai Mei Li spring campaign I shot a week before. I love working with Ai Mei Li, I photograph their campaigns every year. This image features musician Natanya - she killed it in the pictures. Emily, the designer behind the brand always does a great job at casting the most fab girlies that embody the sweet and confident attitude of her designs.
You can see my darkroom setup here, but I have the flash on for this Polaroid picture shot on my Polaroid Go so imagine it pitch black! The enlarger projects the negative onto the easel, and ultimately the light sensitive paper. At this stage you would decide your crops, exposure settings and colours. There's also a preflash enlarger to the side that I sometimes use if my highlights need work. It takes a couple of adjustments to get it perfect so it requires patience and resilience.
There is typically a lot of waiting around. It takes about four minutes for a handprint to run through the processor - it goes through various chemicals and stages such as the developer, fixer, stop bath and dryer. A Polaroid film is basically a condensed version of this process – it's amazing how I'm also able to have a little darkroom in my pocket. I personally feel that film and the darkroom are the heart of photography, so once you understand these analogue processes you'll have a strong foundation for your practice.
In these self portraits I was waiting for my prints to come out of the machine. I was pretty frazzled in the morning - had an absolute mare with the buses! But I soon got into the flow of things and it was all fine. While I was waiting, I was playing around with the camera's double exposure mode. It's handy with a Polaroid camera as well because you can check on the compositions almost immediately. Here, I've created a self-portrait using that technique.
Typically with double exposures I like to layer a texture – for example in here its hand prints of waves and sand – with a subject, myself. I love shoegaze music and I'm really inspired by the ethereal and distorted layers in the music that you can similarly visually achieve by experimenting with photography and lighting.
At the end of this darkroom session, I was pleased. It's usually always a really productive day and I've made loads of new images by the end of it. I love photography! I'm very knackered though as it takes a lot of mental focus so I'm off to have me dinner now!