To mark the anthropological continuity of his photographic work on photography, Michel Campeau turned logically to the darkrooms where he had worked throughout his career. With the advent of digital, the artist decided to capture these mysterious enclosures where images are revealed, and which are today doomed to disappear.
Beginning in 2005, his series Darkroom, published and exhibited internationally, takes the viewer into 75 Canadian photo labs. With the support of Martin Parr, who offered to publish a Nazraeli Press monograph of the work, Campeau chose to continue his research in other darkrooms, ones abandoned or still active, in Europe, Asia, Havana, Mexico and West Africa.
Free of nostalgia and viewed as an anachronism, the digital images, lit with a flash, in search of the printer’s secrets, take the viewer into these spaces sealed in darkness except for the safelight. After pushing through the blackout curtains, we navigate our way through film fragments and chemical odors. The craftsman who worked over the vats has disappeared; only traces of him remain. Those who have known darkrooms will be able to smell the developer and fixer. Younger viewers born during the digital era will experience the images as relics from the history of photography.
Presented for the first time at Paris Photo 2013, this photo essay is also a tribute to these “magicians of the shadow,” without whom, as the author Serge Tisseron says in a pertinent analysis at the end of the book, “the act of photography would have been without pictures.” Michel Campeau, whose subjects serve as an archeological record, has here immortalized these obsolete places, marking a transition in the world of photography. The Canadian release of his monograph, published by Kehrer Verlag, was held April 3rd at the Formats bookstore in Montreal.
For over thirty years, Michel Campeau has explored the subjective, narrative and ontological dimensions of photography. In 1994, he was awarded the Higashikawa Prize in Japan. Represented by the Galerie Simon Blais in Montreal and the Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto, Campeau lives in Montreal.
