subscribe to our newsletterMichel Campeau – Darkroom
Darkroom is Montreal-based photographer Michel Campeau’s elegiac visual study of photographic darkrooms around the world, which are closing as a result of developments in digital technology. Having initially visited over 75 darkrooms in his native Canada, he then went on to visit many more in countries across the world including Niger, Cuba, Belgium, Mexico, Vietnam and France. The resulting images of these peculiar, claustrophobic, yet alchemic environments highlight the passing of an era.
Chemical stains, broken enlargers, eerie lighting and a profusion of gaffa tape holding everything together typify these darkrooms. Campeau shows how they are often personal spaces that become lived in by photographers and cluttered with talismans; a tarot card, an old test print, notations pencilled on the wall. The artist’s intimate investigation of these ramshackle spaces serves as a kind of lament to what soon will be extinct. In making this study, he has also produced a striking body of images, poetic in their own right.
Featured at Les Rencontres d’Arles 2010 and selected by Martin Parr for the Parr/Nazraeli Edition of 10 publications and the New Typologies exhibition in New York 2008, this body of work won Campeau the prestigious Duke and Duchess of York Prize in Photography 2010, awarded to the most outstanding Canadian visual artist working in the medium of photography. Seven works from Darkroom have recently been acquired for the permanent collection at Le Centre National des Arts Plastique.
Works on loan from Galerie Simon Blais, Montreal and Le Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris.