Play and Production: The Role of Boundary Breaking Play in the Photographic Darkroom

This paper focuses on the role play in photographic practice as a means of both construction and boundary-breaking as understood through theories of play and creative output. Photography’s capacity to spread ideas and examine the world as it is— or propose what it should be— is often discerned through photography’s final output, the photograph. Through its visual legibility and easy distribution, the photographic print is touted for its ability to share experiences and ideologies. Distinctly, this paper is instead concerned with photographic production as an operation of transgression, exploration, and examination. This is achieved through play, a play which is made possible by the freedom and darkness of the analogue photographic darkroom. Here, physically and metaphorically separate, the artist can push against or totally withdraw from social constructions and constraints. As such, darkroom play and experimentation allow the artist to freely create, a world-building exercise that can tap into the unconscious in service of self-revelation. Play in the darkroom includes a range of practices— from material experimentation to socially taboo behaviours to total destruction— all of which aim to dismantle boundaries and develop a new sense of self and of the outside world. While the photographic print is for public consumption, the print’s production, the photographic play, is for the benefit of the individual. Through examining the value of play, this paper will foreground the subversive possibilities of the actual process of photographic production.