Dark Rooms

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Dark Rooms is a photography project by David K. Ross. In this series, photographs are made in the near-complete darkness of storage areas belonging to artists and public art galleries. Photographs are executed behind closed doors, utilizing only existing light that leaks into locations where objects are stored. The project relies on extremely long exposure times—up to multiple days in length—to produce images that are not only documents of space, but also records of the passage of time and the very slow accumulation of light onto film.

As “portraits” these images also represent a very private and intimate glimpse into the sometimes chaotic, sometimes quiet spaces of material memory where individuals accumulate objects of importance. If indeed we are what we keep, these portraits of stored objects, artworks, artifacts, and archives reveal a side of the collector which is literally and figuratively kept in the dark most of the time. As photographs of spaces belonging to artists’ who themselves are interested in collecting, the Dark Rooms images become collections of temporal moments that depict a collection of collecting.

Repose as a dynamic flow, what Gaston Bachelard called a “concrete duration that teems with lacunae,” is not easily pictured. The practice of collecting minute traces of available light puts Dark Rooms in league with more scientifically based photographic methods that push the limits of imaging technologies, enabling us to ‘see’ the invisible (astral, sub-atomic, or thermographic practices, for example).

Using sheets of film slowly marked by traces of light, the Dark Rooms project creates individual portraits of storage spaces that emerge in increments. For technical reasons, this accumulative method rules out the use of digital imaging, and instead stretches the capabilities of film-based photography. Itself a kind of portable ‘storage device’, the camera archives not a single moment with the quick click of a shutter, but a series of moments that are successively layered over extended periods of time. Less a document than a reference, the resultant images reveal only the vaguest of details and the slightest sense of depth. As when entering a darkened room, the viewer must allow their eyes to adjust to the subtleties of the image in order to ‘see into’ the darkness of the photograph. In this way, the Dark Rooms images offer a glimpse into the private world of objects using a process that is sympathetic to, and in concert with, the slow time and dim space of entreposage itself.