I love the smell of developer in the morning

Matthew Smeal reflects on luminous memories, Lee Miller, and a love of mechanical cameras.

Photography has a smell. As a visual art, photography’s olfactory nature is not usually considered, but photography—well, at least film photography—has a smell.

Above: Three palm fronds. Taken with a Nikkormat FTN and a 50mm manual focus lens—both about as old as I am. Film: Ilford HP5. 

Developer, stop bath, fixer, my laundry-come-darkroom, and the film emulsion itself, have their own smells. Even my trusty dark bag—that ingenious black sack with its two-zippered light-proof opening at one end, and two elasticised sleeves at the other where my hands enter the infinite blackness of spacetime to load film onto spools—has its own smell; and one so soothing and familiar that I found myself clutching it like a child’s comfort blanket recently, breathing in its reassuring smell while my eyes welled with tears.

OK, a little weird perhaps, but smells do evoke strong memories – and some are painful. And they can evoke memories of a simpler time and a fast-disappearing one.

I was reminded of all of this when I reluctantly saw Lee last week – Kate Winslet’s film about 1930s model-turned World War II photojournalist Lee Miller. I say reluctantly because I knew the film would affect me, but with steely resolve I made my way up the stairs at the local cinema and took my seat at the first session early on Saturday morning knowing there would be few others. Some films need to be seen. Sometimes alone. Lee is one of them.

Shooting, developing, and printing film was something I used to do often. I stayed true to the faith while my contemporaries went digital; and patiently waited at airport x-ray machines while customs officials hand-checked my rolls of film at my insistence instead of subjecting them to repeated fog-inducing scans on any given photojournalism trip.

Above: Women wait for loved ones, maternity hospital, Nigeria. Nikon FM3A, Ilford HP5.

There is a scene in Lee I knew about – the one that caused me my trepidation. Lee Miller is in a field hospital when the power goes down. The surgeon is yelling for light and Miller uses her torch to light the operation.

Yep, done that. It was Nigeria in 2016. I was filming and photographing at a maternity hospital for an international medical NGO when a lady was brought into the emergency ward in a wheelbarrow. She had been in obstructed labour for three or four days and had been pushed along for who knows how many kilometres by her anxious family desperate to find her help.

We didn’t have time to get to the OT, the surgeon deciding to operate then and there on the floor of a remote hospital in northern Nigeria. And then the power went out. We waited for the back-up generator to kick in. And we waited. And we waited. Someone ran in. The generator was broken. A lady was dying at our feet. The surgeon was yelling for light.

I had a small LED video light in my kit, the type you see on top of news cameras. I grabbed it, pointed it towards the open abdomen and hoped the AA batteries would last – and filmed with the other hand.

Watching Kate Winslet as Lee Miller, shooting film, using a light metre, loading and unloading her Rolleiflex, packing exposed rolls into envelopes to be shipped back to Vogue, and taking a few deliberate, well thought out images and not thousands of ‘spray and pray’ digital ones, reminded me of my process – and that I had a couple of rolls of Ilford HP5 at home that needed developing.

My son, when watching me work one day, asked why I went to so much trouble when I could skip several hours of effort thanks to the digital age. It was a good question. Surely, I could take a photo, upload it and be done with it. Surely, I could find better things to do with the money I would save from not buying film and chemicals—both of which are becoming harder to find and more expensive by the day. Surely, I could just embrace the latest technology and get on with it. The question caught me a little off-guard but my immediate response remains true: I enjoy the process.

Our society has a strange relationship with the past: we assume old is inferior and that new is best. Imagine telling a painter that they should no longer use paint and brushes because art can be created digitally; or that a sculptor should just 3D print; or that a musician should sell their instrument because their particular sound can be achieved much more easily with any number of plug-ins.

Truth is, I love buying a bulk roll of film and rolling it off into canisters. I love packing enough film to know I’m covered but not too much to tempt a lack of discipline. I love using my light metre or the good ole’ Sunny 16 rule to set my exposure. I love using manual focus lenses. I love sliding my hands into the elasticised sleeves of my dark bag to load exposed film onto spiral reels in my trusty dark bag. I love mixing up chemicals in my laundry-come-darkroom and getting them to a steady 20 degrees. And I love the smell.

Above: My Nikon F from 1965, Nikkor-S 50mm f/1.4 from around the same time, and my trusty Sekonic lightmeter. Aperture, shutter speed, and focus—the three ‘features’ a camera needs.

The smell represents craft. And time. A lifetime of study and experience. And memories. Some are hard to reconcile. Some can easily bring me undone. And some cause anxiety when walking into my local cinema. But they’re my memories, and good or bad, they’re memories of using photography to make sense of the world. And the slightest whiff of developer will bring them flooding back.

Film photography is more of a passion now, and while most of my professional work is now digital, I do shoot film whenever I can, and long for an opportunity to shoot a documentary project where I can just use film. And I now scan my negatives which has become part of a refined workflow to give me the best of both worlds to keep me shooting and developing film while giving me a digitised image.

But as I went to scan my newly developed negatives I was confronted by the curse of modernity: an upgraded computer rendered my scanner software obsolete. Updating the software proved difficult, expensive, and came with a high risk of not working anyway. Instead, I dug out my old Mac, which I thankfully still had, because I knew it would work.

The irony doesn’t stop there. One of my favourite cameras is a Nikon F, Nikon’s first SLR camera, a camera that revolutionised photography—and photojournalism in particular—and one I enjoy using a lot. Serial number dating puts its manufacture between June and September 1965. It’s five years older than me. Its lenses are from the same era. My go-to film is Ilford HP5 Plus, a film emulsion that has been with us since its first iteration as HP back in 1931. All work perfectly.

I don’t know if Lee will create a resurgence in film photography, but I hope it generates at least a little interest. But whether it does or not, I’ll keep shooting film for as long as I can. Because I enjoy the process. And I love the smell.

Matthew Smeal is a photographer, writer and documentary filmmaker who is most definitely stuck in his ways.