For Issi and Remi, what began as a love of analogue photography at art school in Sydney quickly became a mission and research project to find sustainable alternatives to chemical-heavy film processing. Seaweed, coffee grounds, even tequila can all be used to process film photographs, in what The Darkroom Social (TDS) describes as eco developing.
Here's our chat with Issi and Remi from TDS, all about analogue photography and eco developing. It might make you think twice before chucking away the coffee grounds from your next cuppa... Photography fans, it's time for a science lesson.
Tell us about The Darkroom Social and what drew you both to analogue photography and eco developing
Hello! We are Remi & Issi, and we run The Darkroom Social, a small social enterprise in Australia. We research, educate, and advocate for more sustainable methods of image production.
We’re artists and educators who live in and work in Sydney, Australia, and we are both passionate about the outdoors.
Remi spends as much free time as possible hiking and exploring her local environments, and Issi grew up traversing the east coast of Australia, always honing back to the coastal zone as the place she felt most at home.
Through our experiences at art school in Sydney, we both fell in love with photography via the darkroom. Analogue photography (for us, this usually refers to the shooting and processing of silver gelatin film and paper) is hands-on, material, and alchemical.
"It can be unpredictable and open-ended, which lends itself to experimentation, meaning there are always new processes and workflows to learn and play with."
Separately we had begun thinking about more environmentally conscious ways to work with these processes that we love. It’s difficult to work with analogue photography sustainably - the light-sensitive component of film is silver, which is mined and extracted from the earth, emulsions are made from gelatin (a by-product of the cattle farming industry), fresh water is required, and chemistry used to process materials is often environmentally and personally toxic & harmful.
The Darkroom Social emerged as a space for us to collaborate on research into more sustainable alternatives, and this has evolved into running community workshops and outreach activities to share this research.
What is eco developing?
In our research and workshops for The Darkroom Social, we have been using organic materials (e.g. coffee, seaweed and plant waste) to make developers to process film and paper. The developer is the first chemical step in processing that transforms latent and active silver halides into highlights and shadows in a negative or print. Working developers can be made from a few easy to purchase ingredients and organic additions.
"We love this idea of recycling or diverting waste products into usable and generative art-making materials."
We like the idea of working with things that are in season and locally available. Part of our ethos is trying to lighten the footprint of how we live and our art making practices. This means working with what can be sourced locally and without detrimental impact on the environment. We both live near the coast, and Remi has been working with a few species of invasive weeds in her local area while Issi has been focused on using different species of washed up seaweed as the basis of these solutions.
Household waste such as food scraps and garden clippings can also be used to make these low-tox developers, and we have also run some site-specific workshops diverting industry waste from hospitality venues.
At these events, we have taken ingredients such as spent beer hops from breweries and used coffee grounds from cafes and converted them into developers that we use to process film at the venue. We love this idea of recycling or diverting waste products into usable and generative art-making materials.
Why seaweed and why invasive weeds? Do these ingredients have any impact on the outcome of the photos?
Issi is a keen swimmer and scuba diver, and seaweed is something that’s always present and essential in our ocean environment but is often overlooked (although seaweed is really having a moment RN). Washed-up seaweed is something that’s readily available and collecting it for use in photographic processing on a small scale makes a negligible impact on the environment, so it’s like a free, accessible resource.
It’s also just a lovely way to spend a day - wandering the beaches collecting seaweed. Plus, there can be so much variety and variance depending on where you are in the world. These variations between species result in different qualities when made into developers, so you can have amazing local variety right at your doorstep.
Most of Remi’s work is centered around place and local ecologies, many of which have tensions with weed overgrowth.
These weeds are interesting in the sense that they form part of new, chaotic ecologies where native and introduced species become entwined. Keystone and threatened native animal species that Remi works alongside (e.g. Grey Headed Flying Foxes and Long-nosed Bandicoots) live in and around these ecosystems, and it becomes impossible in many ways to completely separate the invasive weeds (both practically and aesthetically) from the experience of these spaces.
The two primary species in the area that Remi works with are Morning Glory (Ipomoea purpurea) and Lantana (Lantana camara), both of which grow in and around creek sites and on the coast. They both happen to make fantastic and reliable developers for both film and paper when extracted.
Any plant or organic material you put in a developer will have an impact on the stain and density of the film, which results in different contrast and fluctuating tonal ranges. In making eco-developers, we are less interested in creating a perfect technical outcome, but rather in the ideas and discussions that are raised about collaboration and immersion with/in local sites and landscapes.
There’s also a beautiful way that images made with plants end up echoing the materials they’re made from - the seaweed images have a really unique kind of muddy stain which feels uniquely seaweed-y.
"There’s also a beautiful way that images made with plants end up echoing the materials they’re made from - the seaweed images have a really unique kind of muddy stain which feels uniquely seaweed-y."
How and where do you run workshops?
It comes as a surprise to many people when we first speak about TDS, but you don’t need a dedicated darkroom space to process film. In fact, with a few bits and pieces (a change bag, a tank, some water and a few other things), you can process black and white negatives basically anywhere.
We have worked and taught pop-up workshops out of Remi’s car boot, at street festivals, and more regularly from the bright and sunny nooks of cafes and tap rooms of local breweries. Photography for a lot of people is about getting out and exploring nature and we love the idea that we can do all aspects of processing film outdoors, immersed in sunshine and fresh air.
"Photography for a lot of people is about getting out and exploring nature, and we love the idea that we can do all aspects of processing film outdoors, immersed in sunshine and fresh air."
How has TDS evolved since it began?
It’s been interesting to experience the uptake and interest in TDS growing. While there are many amazing practitioners in Australia working with eco and alternative processes, we hadn’t found much in terms of centralised resources or workshops tailored to more environmentally conscious processing, which was the gap we wanted to fill.
It’s been lovely meeting so many different people for the first time and having the workshops function as a kind of beacon for people with shared interests in analogue photography and with a variety of experiences (from those who have never used a film camera before to experienced practitioners and artists interested in experimenting with eco processes in their work).
Through the small (but growing) gravitational pull of TDS, it feels as though participants are drawn into each other's orbits as well as ours - connected through a desire to learn and experiment, to socialise and make together.
How can you get started at home with some of these processes?
More often than not people’s introduction to eco processes is with caffenol, a developer made from instant coffee, vitamin c (ascorbic acid) and washing soda (sodium carbonate). There are loads of free resources for different caffenol recipes (ratios of those three ingredients) online at the FB group, and the caffenol cookbook.
We would probably start here if you’re new to film processing, and then once you’re confident with that, you can experiment with substituting the coffee for another additive. Look at what plants may be growing in your gardens or what is readily available in your area (herbs such as rosemary and peppermint make great developers, as do a lot of invasive weeds).
We have some suggestions, recipes and examples on our website.
If you give it a go, please reach out and share - we’d love to see the results of your experimenting! You can find us @thedarkroom.social on Instagram (and separately @remi.siciliano and @isobel_studiosabii)
Issi & Remi x
