Under the dim glow of red safe lights, Watsonville High School photography students worked in a darkroom dripping original photographs into trays of chemicals. But next school year, students may be out of the dark and in front of a bright computer screen.

The high school’s more than 25-year-old photography room will be torn down in the summer and rebuilt with modernization funding from the state, said Brian Rasmussen, district construction consultant manager.

“We are modernizing” with high-speed laser printers and newer computers for digital processing, WHS Principal Murry Schekman said.

But whether the darkroom will be rebuilt remains in limbo.

Watsonville High photography teacher Greg Eden said drama has been stirred up on campus with preliminary discussions calling for a hallway to be built in place of the darkroom.

“This is sad news for us,” said Cabrillo College photo laboratory technician Janet Fine.

Both Cabrillo College and University of California at Santa Cruz professors said freshmen entering their programs without backgrounds in darkrooms would lack fundamentals.

Cabrillo photography department chair Gordon Hammer said students who have worked in a darkroom understand what digital photography software is doing.

“We strongly feel that it is a gateway to photographic imaging and we require our beginning students to begin in the darkroom,” stated UCSC art professor Lewis Watts.

The WHS darkroom is the only school darkroom in Watsonville. Across town, at Pajaro Valley High School, a photography program does not exist, but Principal Pancho Rodriguez is working on developing a place for its own young photographers.

The digital versus film debate arose as new technology attracted professional and amateur photographers alike to go digital.

Local environmental photographer Dan Young agreed with tearing down the darkroom, stating, “I love doing prints, it’s a whole art, but what’s the goal? A finished product or the process? I think it’s the finished image.”

Furthermore, Young said there are safety concerns with putting high school students around hazardous chemicals.

Schekman pushed to cut the size of the darkroom to ensure students learn skills aligned with the professional field. Digital media is the dominant method used in commercial photography.

However, Hammer said the darkroom process is important from an artistic angle.

Generating a color photograph in a software paint program is nothing like dipping your paintbrush in paint and doing brushstrokes on a canvass, he said.

Both digital and film gives photographers control over exposure, range, motion freezing and blurring and other manipulations.

“I’m not anti-digital, I use it all the time. But you get richer tones (with film) than you get with digital,” Fine argued. “It’s just not the same.”

Financially, darkrooms versus computer equipment are approximately equitable, Hammer said.

“You don’t want to become so focused on all the contemporary technology that you lose a sense of its history and roots,” Hammer said.

The filmmakers and photographers who make it in the highly competitive field will be people who can cross over between media, Fine said.

“The reality is that there are plenty of good and very bad photographs being made with digital and film,” Watts said.

Describing the world in original and creative ways is accomplished through experience, thought, enthusiasm and hard work, he said.

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(Published in 3/10/07 edition)

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