via npr“Richard Nicholson recalls that in the ’90s, darkrooms were busy, exciting places for commercial photographers in London: ‘There was a real buzz in these places,’ he writes,‘a sense of competition, but also communality.’
About a decade later, he was struck by how much had changed. ‘I came up with idea for this project when printing in one of these hire darkrooms. The buzz had gone. No one else was there. It seemed like a desolate, abandoned place. I was struck by the bulky, lumpen beauty of the photographic enlargers.’
And so began his project, Last One Out, Please Turn On The Light, a documentation of London’s remaining professional darkrooms. A mere five years after starting the project, more than half of the darkrooms in the series are no longer operational.
‘I wanted to capture the darkroom before it disappeared,’ Nicholson says. ‘I choose to photograph the darkrooms of professional printers as these represent the essence of the craft.’ ”
Visit his site here.
