"It's magic innit!"

I am a photographer who photographs for print. As a child and novice photographer, I spent countless hours in the darkroom—testing, dodging, burning, flashing. I was always awestruck by the magic of an image appearing under the red safelight as the paper sat in the developing tray. But more often than not, once I inspected the wet print in good light, disappointment set in—my technique wasn’t quite there, my lack of perfectionism apparent. And when the print dried, I was rarely fully happy with the result.

With time—close to the fabled 10,000 hours—I improved. But it wasn’t until I spent days in the darkroom with Roberto, one of London’s master printers of the 1980s, that I truly understood what I had been missing. His studio near Old Street was a place of alchemy. It wasn’t about following the rules or even breaking them; the secret to a great black-and-white print was apparently courage and more experience still—more enlarger light hours—than I’d ever be able to accumulate.

Roberto, with a cigarette perpetually hanging from his lips, could glance at a negative and instantly know the right paper brand and contrast grade to use. He’d move effortlessly under the enlarger’s conical beam, adding a little time here, taking away light there by shaping his hands in the most contrived ways, to give the image the image extended tonality with instinctive precision. And he’d get it right mostly on the first sheet, mostly every time.

His sudden and far too early passing coincided with the birth of digital photography. Now, I make my prints on calibrated inkjet printers with archival inks, whether the photographs were shot on film or not. I like it this way. I can achieve stunning results, and I can pretend—to myself—that I’m as good as he was, knowing full well that Command-Z hides all the trial and error.

Roberto is still often on my mind and I like to think he might like the prints. I miss his stories. I miss his being.As he always said when he was please with a print in the wash: it's magic innit!