Jun 12 2006
Printing [1]
At age eighteen I started working in a photo lab specializing in printing black & white amateur photographs. Although color was already popular for household photography, the company I worked for had no intention of changing their business strategy.
On my first day on the job I was led to a large room in the building that was pitch dark in my perception. In reality there was a 30 Watt red bulb on the ceiling and soon I found out that I could see everything around me, as my new colleagues had already predicted, when I was trying to find my chair, stumbling over paper baskets and involuntarily grabbing a woman trying to protect myself from falling.
We all sat behind Agfa printers that were loaded with 100-meter rolls of light sensitive paper. I would take a negative, put it under a viewer and judge the image on a tiny screen. There were five buttons in front of me, marked 1 to 5. When the contrast of a negative was so high that the greys had almost disappeared, I would press button number one. Button number five was for negatives with a very low contrast. I do not recall how many prints one could make on a roll, but when the roll was at the end, somebody who knew everything about chemicals developed it in a large machine.
I thought that the five buttons were quite a challenge. Stoically denying the fact that I had found an underpaid job doing monotonous work in the dark ten hours a day; I thought I could make a difference. I would judge every negative with the best of my knowledge, telling myself that these pictures were of immeasurable sentimental value for the people who took them.
In reality my boss, who was 68 years old and in charge of the last quality control, needed reading glasses and was too proud to use them. The higher the contrast of a photo was, the better he could see what was on it. Soon I started printing all negatives while pressing the number five button.
So, we sat there in rows behind our Agfa ‘sowing machines’ as I soon called them, listening to popular tunes on the radio. Especially in holiday seasons the days were long because of work overload. After a while I needed sunglasses on a cloudy day, because I became over sensitive to light.
Then one day the people from Agfa showed up in neat overalls with that beautiful logo on it, and one by one our machines were taken out and a mechanic changed the rolls for cassettes and with rubber kit the machines were protected from light. After a week of hauling with our sowing machines, another company came in during the weekend to install light boxes on our ceiling.
On a Monday morning we entered that room that we had grown used to work in. The artificial light was blinding and it was strange to see that our working space actually had a marvellous view on a canal. We were all in awe. We felt that there were no limits to what modern technology could achieve.