Darkroom by Michel Campeau

In 2005, the Canadian photographer Michel Campeau set out to document photographic darkrooms – spaces increasingly rendered obsolete by the rise of digital photography. Once essential sites of image-making, these workspaces are reimagined through Campeau’s photographs as places of ritual, labour and memory, prompting reflection on what is lost as they disappear.

Campeau has photographed more than 75 darkrooms, primarily in his native Canada but also across countries including Cuba and Niger. Each image bears witness to the repetitive, tactile processes of analogue printing. Worn surfaces reveal years of photographers leaning into the same positions to adjust enlargers and equipment; improvised repairs, with duct tape holding together ageing tools that can no longer be easily replaced, speak to the ingenuity of their users. Handwritten notes taped to walls and enlargers hint at the meticulous routines, technical precision and quiet obsession that underpin the printing process.

Photographed with a digital camera and direct flash, the series deliberately resists nostalgia. Rather than advocating a return to analogue photography, Darkrooms foregrounds the material culture of photographic practice, revealing the traces of human labour embedded within these spaces. In doing so, Campeau invites viewers to consider how photographs are shaped not only by the images they depict, but also by the technologies, environments and rituals through which they are made.

Biography

Michel Campeau (b. 1948) is a Canadian photographer, writer and collector whose work explores the subjective, narrative and material dimensions of photography. Over the past two decades, his research has focused on the material culture of photographic practice, examining the spaces, tools and histories of analogue image-making. His celebrated Darkrooms series (2005–2010) has been exhibited internationally, including at the Rencontres d’Arles and the Musée Nicéphore Niépce, while major solo exhibitions include Icons of Obsolescence at the National Gallery of Canada (2013) and Life Before Digital at the McCord Museum (2018). Campeau received the Jean-Paul Riopelle Career Grant in 2009 and the Duke and Duchess of York Prize in 2010. He lives and works in Montréal.

Supported by: