I spent a good chunk of my morning inside George Forss’s darkroom, a mystical place, a witches brew of lights, sounds, buzzers, chemicals, smells and sounds. Please don’t expect me to tell you how it works, this place is a spiritual manifestation of genius, it is a portrait of George’s mind, only he knows how it works and what goes where. To turn on the darkroom lights, he must first turn off the refrigerator in the kitchen and the light over the back door. He knows where every piece of equipment he uses came from, most of them scavenged from garbage cans or given him by friends or photographers tossing them out.

George throws nothing out, he uses everything, the room is filled with gurgling tubes, wires, clotheslines, bubbling tanks. When I got in there and George turned the lights out, I realized it was too dark for me to take any photos, I just didn’t know how to do it in pitch black, so we talked and George explained his darkroom process, I could follow little of it. George sees like a cat in the dark, he has spent half of his life in darkrooms, he is wary of the digital experience. He watches his prints as they develop, he soaks and turns them and then brings them into the adjoining room, a bathroom with sink and toilet, criss-crossed with clotheslines where he soaks the prints, hangs them up to dry, and then irons them in some complex but effective process for flattening them out.

He is almost in a trance when he works, talking out loud, looking at the print, mixing chemicals, muttering, explaining what tube goes to what wire, explaining the odd switches and buttons gerrymandered to turn lights on and off.

George is meticulous in his darkroom work, a lost art that digital photography has nearly obliterated, it is getting harder for George to find the chemicals and darkroom paper he needs for his work. After an hour, we emerged and the amazing thing about George’s Frankenstein Lab darkroom is that it is magical, it produces the most beautiful and polished photographs. He has gone to work on his Kickstarter project “The Way We Were,” he is as excited as I’ve ever seen him.