Smells are very important for memory. What is the fragrance which evokes the most vivid memories of your student days? Stale beer? Other less legal party smells? Mould from damp walls? Unwashed underpants? One smell which I shall never forget, although I shall probably never encounter it again, is the smell of the chemicals used for developing and fixing photographic film, in the days before computers and digital cameras. The chemicals had a distinctive, acrid odour which takes me straight back to the days of my youth. 

I got my first set of darkroom equipment when I was about six years old and was given my first Box Brownie camera for a birthday present. My father was a keen photographer, and taught me the basics in our blacked-out bathroom. Photographs in those days were recorded on rolls of paper or celluloid coated with light-sensitive chemicals and sealed inside a metal capsule which fitted inside your camera. When you had exposed a whole roll, you had to take it to a darkened room with a dim red light (the chemicals were not sensitive to this one wavelength), take them out of the camera and immerse the film in a bath of ‘developer’. Magically, the images would appear on your strip of paper, in reverse i.e. the dark areas of the picture would come out light and the light areas dark. The paper had to be rinsed and immersed in a bath of ‘fixative’ to stop the remaining chemicals reacting to light. It then had to be rinsed again for an hour or so and pinned up to dry. The strip of celluloid was then threaded into an ‘enlarger’ with an arrangement of lenses and each image projected at a larger size and printed onto sheets of light-sensitive paper. These also had to be ‘developed’ and ‘fixed’ in the darkroom. This was all black and white, of course. Colour films had to be sent away for processing and were extremely expensive. 

I was still using this kind of equipment as an undergraduate, taking my compulsory course in photography for archaeologists, in the late 1960s. The archaeology students had to spend two hours every Wednesday afternoon for our first two years, learning how to take photographs of sites and objects. After all, we might someday be working in the wilds of Mesopotamia and not have access to a professional photographer. See Agatha Christie’s charming little book, “Come Tell Me How You Live”, describing pre-war surveys and excavations in the Middle East with her husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan. I particularly like her description of developing photographic plates in a “darkroom” so small that she had to work kneeling down in suffocating heat.

For some reason, instead of training us on the single-lens reflex cameras with rolls of film that were used on sites everywhere by that time, we had our basic training on a magnificent set of brass and mahogany cameras of the sort used in Victorian times (or by Agatha Christie). These museum pieces had to be set up on a large and sturdy tripod, they couldn’t be held in the hand. Instead of a viewfinder, they had a focussing screen. To see the screen properly, you had to drape yourself in a large black cloth and use a separate magnifying glass. Once you had focussed your camera (manually), you had to remove the screen and replace it with a 4-inch square glass slide enclosed in light-excluding packaging that then also had to be removed. This was nearly impossible to do without jiggling the camera and disturbing the focus. You then guessed the correct exposure, which I remember as being always around 20 seconds. How any of our shots escaped being totally blurred I do not know. Most of them were not exactly sharp.

The whole process looked extremely dramatic, and as we were sent out to practise in pairs in places like the Victoria and Albert museum, it was often carried out in public. Little did I know it then, as elderly couples respectfully walked round the apparatus, that this was the beginning of my career in what one might describe as archaeological showmanship (there will be a later post on this).

We would then return to base and spend hours in semi-darkness in the warm smelly photo lab, immersing our negatives in the chemicals, earnestly rubbing extra developer onto any under-exposed corners, and then making the prints from them. Days later we would go and ask old Mrs C, the photography tutor, how our prints had turned out.  I can still hear her voice saying apologetically “Well, they’re not too good.” I cannot remember an occasion when they were any good. But we all passed our exam, and were let loose on the archaeological world.