i like to tell stories

The Notebook

I use to spend hours in darkrooms. Some of the happiest and most painful moments of my life were spent here. If you have never punched a wall, screamed with joy or sat on the floor crying under the sink, this won’t mean much to you… Or maybe I am just unique this way, yet I really doubt it.

At some point, I started keeping a random log of every print: the color settings, exposure times, darkroom number and which of the 2 enlargers I used as I always printed on two enlargers simultaneously. The last time I ever printed black and white fiber prints in San Francisco, my last prints in F series at school and some of my last days printing color at Print Space, its all here and wow, are so many more simply unrecorded. From the old notes I can vaguely understand I myself wrote there are 1042 just from one 9 week stretch in the summer 1997. I used over 5 cases of 11×14 C print paper that summer for 2500 sheets. I was trying to understand the math of this as I wrote this story and wondered why it was basically 1000 prints off. It only took a few seconds to remember… After I was done printing that summer, I gave a duplicate set of one of the portfolios of almost 700 prints away as a gift and the others are being stored still to this day, mostly unshared.

I found two prints in this notebook, several 5×7 of someone once very close now married to another and an image I made for TIME on assignment just after 9/11.

I don’t think I have open this notebook in maybe 7 years until tonight.