Becoming enlightened in the darkroom
 It’s become a common refrain that photography isn’t what it used to be. Film is mostly a fossil; cell phones can be cameras; computers are the new photo labs. So what’s a school to do with a traditional darkroom that the world seems destined to declare obsolete? At Chapin, students use it.
Film-based black-and-white photography still has a place in Chapin’s arts curriculum. “It really helps the girls learn digital photography,” teacher Duane Neil said, explaining that using film gives them a grasp of photography’s fundamentals. He stood in the darkroom, which will remain in the building even after the renovation project is complete, as his Class 7 students made their first black-and-white prints. Their shooting assignments have recently focused on parallel lines and shadows, among other things, and they are also printing four images that they can use as a storyboard in a foreign-language class.
“Look at how cool this picture is!” one student said to another, and she hadn’t even printed the picture yet — she was looking at the negative. It was a reminder that there is something magical about traditional photography’s tonal reversals and alchemy, and the way a beautiful picture must, by necessity, emerge from the dark.
Mr. Neil also views working in the darkroom with a practical eye. “It teaches the students patience and how to take a process one step at a time,” he said. The girls make test strips to determine their print’s proper exposure time and then run the print through the developer, the stop bath, the fixer and the wash. Only then do they get to step outside into the light to see what fine things they’ve wrought.
If the black-and-white process at first seemed cumbersome, the number of times that the girls asked each other, “Now what are you going to make a picture of?” made it clear that nonetheless, they had embraced it.
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