Playing with the Dark

When I was invited to select works for this piece, I found myself wanting to move away from the usual names. I was drawn to photographs that I hadn’t encountered before, or works that revealed something unexpected. I didn’t want to create a chronological narrative or a story, and I wasn’t interested in what the image meant or was showing; I wanted one image to lead naturally into the next, and was attracted to the exquisite tonality of certain works, from the whitest whites to the deepest creamy browns. I was drawn to the surfaces of the prints themselves.

The first image, Limb, Eung-Sik’s Feet 2 (Han,Youngsoo) 1968, was chosen near the end of the selection process, but it brought everything together. The turn of the feet leads you into the images that follow. I think that, even within a still image, bodies are never fixed. That sense of motion – the subtle and graceful gesture of this image – is important because it mirrors the movement involved in the making of a photograph. Platinum printing, for instance, is an embodied process. You might physically scratch at the negatives and literally get your hands dirty. That gestural quality often comes across in the surface of the print, so I wanted to connect the movement in the image to the activity in the darkroom. Photography is often seen as a static medium, but I’ve never really believed that to be true. It’s wilder than that.

These images were all made by photographers who belonged to the pictorialist movement. They were the first photographers that I encountered while studying photography at Kitson College in Leeds in the 1980s. I learnt that they represented an important shift in the history of the medium, since they spoke about photographs as an art form as opposed to just a documentary tool, discussing them in a similar language to that applied to painting, using terms like ‘soft focus’ or describing the ways in which you brush on the photo chemicals.

I sometimes think we’ve lost sight of this aspect of photography. Discourse around it often draws from feminist, queer and Marxist theory, with the photograph locked into a sociological framework, so that its production becomes secondary. But if we only talk about what photographs depict, we miss the sensual experience of encountering them as material objects.

Vision is not the only sense we use with photography: touch and smell are important too. Many photographs by pictorialist photographers were developed and printed in makeshift darkrooms, in kitchens, cellars and other improvised spaces. I find myself imagining the processes of bleaching, scratching, coating and printing. You can almost taste the fixer. Theory often struggles to contend with these non-visual aspects of photography. We can analyse their subjects endlessly, but perhaps it’s enough to acknowledge the experience itself. These images simply hit all of the senses. Or, to put it another way, there is one word I keep using to describe these works: delicious.

^{Light and Magic, 14 October 2026 – 21 February 2027}

^{Dr Ajamu X is a darkroom/fine art photographic artist based in London.}

^{Presented in the Eyal Ofer Galleries. Supported by Yukiko Ito with additional support from the Light and Magic Exhibition Supporters Circle.}

Carbon print

In this photographic printing process, a sheet of pigmented gelatin is exposed beneath a negative. Chromium salts cause the gelatin to harden in proportion to the light reaching exposed areas. After washing, a relief image composed entirely of pigment remains. A Fresson print is a variation of carbon printing associated with a subtle colour palette and glazed appearance. The process was developed by the Fresson family in France in 1899 and remains largely secret.

Gelatin silver print

Dominant throughout 20th-century black and white photography, the gelatin silver print is a photographic process in which light-sensitive silver salts are suspended in a thin layer of gelatin on paper. Following exposure and chemical processing, these salts become visible as tones ranging from pale grey to dense black, after which fixing and washing stabilise the final print. A bromide print is one variety of gelatin silver print, in which the main silver salt is silver bromide.

Oil print

The artist begins by exposing a sheet of gelatin sensitised with diachromate salts beneath a same-size negative, hardening the gelatin in proportion to the original light and dark tones. This treated surface – called a matrix – is soaked in water then inked by hand with greasy pigment, which adheres selectively to the hardened areas, producing a photographic image that resembles a pastel or charcoal drawing.

Photogravure print

Developed in 1852 by English scientist William Henry Fox Talbot, photogravure combines photography with intaglio printmaking. The photographic image is transferred onto an etched metal plate, which is then inked and printed using an intaglio press. Widely used in fine art and illustrated publications, photogravure was valued by pictorialists for its ability to reproduce delicate tonal gradations.

Platinum print or platinotype

Particularly valued by pictorialist photographers, platinum print, or platinotype, is a photographic process in which a negative is contact printed onto paper coated with light-sensitive platinum salts, then chemically developed. Unlike gelatin silver prints, the image forms within the paper fibres themselves, producing detailed tonal subtlety and a luminous matte surface.