In June 2023, 3 members of the Gate ( Carô Gervay, David Whiting and Jonathan Blower ) took part in In the Photographic Darkroom, a conference convened by scholar of photographic history and visual culture, Sara Dominici at Westminster University, London.
Our presentation Light and Time Unite: History and Practice of the Gate Darkroom drew from our personal experiences and was informed by a survey reflecting other members’ perspectives. We outlined the history and current activities of our community darkroom and looks at how we are growing our collective, creative and social practices as an active darkroom in SE London.
We were subsequently invited to be in conversation with writer and artist Lucy Rogers, to be included in the journal PhotoResearcher no. 41 – The Darkroom: Chemical, Cultural, Industrial, which was guest edited by Dr Sara Dominici.
“The Darkroom: Chemical, Cultural, Industrial is the first edited volume to explore the darkroom as a topic of analysis. Its aim is to examine the darkroom as a generative space, looking in particular at how its changing material constitutions, social settings, and the experiences that these factors enabled and constrained, impacted on the wider discipline of photography. In doing so, this special issue begins to unearth those histories of ecological transactions between people and their physical and chemical environments, of labour, of class, gender, and racial inequalities, but also of collaboration, that subtend our global photographic heritage, and to start a critical conversation on the place that the darkroom has occupied in the wider history of photography“.
The journal contains contributions by Jennifer Tucker, Junko Theresa Mikuriya, Michelle Henning, Michael Pritchard, Franziska Lampe, Núria F. Rius, Kelley Wilder and Uschi Klein, and closes with a case study in the form of a conversation between CREAM doctoral researcher, Lucy Rogers and three members of the London-based collective The Gate Darkroom, Carô Gervay, David Whiting, and Jonathan Blower.
DOWNLOAD ‘MAKING SPACE: THE GATE DARKROOM IN CONVERSATION WITH LUCY ROGERS’ http://e.pc.cd/cWiotalK
You can read the introduction by Sara Dominici in open access and order the journal here: http://www.eshph.org/journal/photoresearcher-no-41-2024/