Michel Campeau: Untitled, from the series Darkroom, 2005-06

"For a photographer like myself, who in fact has not worked in a darkroom for more than twenty years, these images are horribly familiar. Those fix stains in the sink, the eerie red light, reminiscent of a brothel, the wonky enlarger, and a profusion of different tapes holding the whole thing together... I feel lucky to have escaped and yet there is something very alluring about these images..." —Martin Parr Untitled by the Canadian artist Michel Campeau, featured on the cover of Aperture magazine issue #188 (Fall 2007), depicts the topography of the private spaces that comprise his series Darkroom, 2005-2006. In Darkroom, Campeau photographed over seventy-five darkrooms in his native Canada at close range. Campeau evokes the feeling of intimate nostalgia for the photographic processes and the spaces in which they were practiced. The resulting images are simple yet striking depictions of an increasingly disappearing environment. The artist notes that this series of work shines a spotlight on, "the bric-a-brac of plumbing and electricity, the ventilation-system engines, the posted iconography, the weirdness of 'planets' envisioned at the bottom of chemical trays, the splattering of silver salts, the wear of equipment and the countdown of timers that defies the disappearance of the panchromatic spectre." As these spaces give way to the rise of digital photography, the images of Darkroom capture a kind of endangered species. Here, we see a detail from the darkroom of the photographer Michael Flomen.