The Darkroom

Is it not enough that you’ve hung me beside myself from your fraying rope - tendered by graying wooden clips with rubber fingers? Must we really soak on dry until we are sepia toned under-developed photographs, left on fix? Why is it you still feel the need to marinate my every flexed tendon in formaldehyde? Is it the slow bumping up against red glass that turns you on; that you relish? Or simply the come-hither thrill of the bottled hunt? Watching our developing forms (and by ‘our’, I mean me and myself - I left the party half cocked and ready for more long ago) submerged beneath the red tinge of shadow forms split at the wrists - dividing one truth from the next - your tapping, impatient, ready to dance fingers drumming my convoluted tumbler to halves; throwing tomatoes, cabbage and micro- brewed beer bottles at my smiling face as it develops, appearing as every God damn thing you never could do; slowly, quickly emerging hung on the next pin over. O’ how you hate that photo! The one where I’m smiling and you’re not. The one where I know who I am, and you don’t. The one where even though there are two of me; there are, (at last count) 10,000 of you. And if you could see your own face through the wide V darkroom dusk looking back at yourself, you would see that sometimes even the best photographers get it wrong. Sometimes, all there is, is shadow covering up the best parts, leaving no room for light meters, fixer, or dull graying clips clutching white Mickey Mouse fingers, forcing the image still. © Kristin Reynolds 5 7 09