The main thing that is almost always missing when I go somewhere to interview for a teaching job has nothing to do with the students, or even the faculty usually: it is the facility. I have never seen an adequate ventilation system in a school teaching darkroom. Sometimes I have seen very unsafe practices in addition to poor ventilation: once I saw a bucket of old, used fix, with no lid, sitting in the darkroom. It sat there for weeks.
I think that students and faculty are both sadly uninformed about the real health risks of breathing fixer fumes especially. If you only work in a darkroom a few hours a week, and if you are young and generally healthy, and you only take one photo course, maybe it wouldn't hurt you too much, but eventually people start having pain in their chest, and sometimes they get very sick indeed. This has happened to several people I know, besides myself.
The worst school darkroom situation I ever saw was a color darkroom that had a color printing machine in a room with a window next to it, and the window was cracked open a bit. That was the ventilation. The whole place smelled terribly of chemistry. I couldn't work in there. I heard that one student got so sick that she has had to use asthma inhalers ever since. I think she should sue the school.
I agree that film is wonderful, and analogue darkrooms are wonderful, but if schools are unwilling to spend the money to make them safe, I think it is better for them to just teach digital photography.
I said at first that this has nothing to do with the faculty, but actually I think faculty must take the initiative to make sure their facilities are safe. Unfortunately usually the teachers don't actually use themselves the darkrooms that they subject their students to. Sometimes they don't even go in the darkrooms very much. I think this is because intuitively they know they are not safe. Some of these teachers have also sort of quit making their own work, maybe for the same reason. If people are going to spend a lifetime working in photography--and many years are needed to get good at it--the facilities are going to have to be safe.
I am not sure why so many teachers of photography ignore this aspect of their craft. I think a lot of artists in general don't really want to think about the health effects of their medium: they just want to focus on the image. But a lot of them get sick as a result, not just photographers but also painters, ceramicists, printmakers, etc.
--shannon ============================================================================================================= To unsubscribe from this list, go to www.freelists.org and logon to your account (the same e-mail address and password you set-up when you subscribed,) and unsubscribe from there.
