Article: A room where you can never see the light

DAVID BRAUNER
Jerusalem Post
03-12-1995
LIKE everything connected with photography, darkrooms have come a long way. Working in the earliest darkrooms of the 1840s must have been like laboring in hell.

To process a daguerreotype, "The room was darkened. The [exposed copper] plate was placed in a box above a pan holding mercury which was heated up to 47C. The mercury vapor rose, combined with the silver iodide [coating on the plate], and the image was slowly revealed; the process could be watched through a peep-hole," Eric de Mare writes in his book Photography.

The next advance, the collodion wet-plate process, which lasted well into the 1880s, had many advantages, but convenience was ...

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