Darkroom Archives: Athens Locked Away — Dec. 2020
While clearing now dusty boxes of negatives in protective sleeves and matte prints on old Ilford paper in my basement darkroom in Athens, I was taken aback by how extreme the times of lockdown and restriction were. It took a while to realise just how strange, although necessary they may have been, the restrictions placed on our everyday movements were.
I had decided one cloudy day in December 2020, when strict restrictions on personal movements outside of your residence were still in place, to pick up my black Olympus OM-2, load it with a roll of old bulk-loaded Ilford FP4, push it to 400 (if memory serves right) and document what taking the metro from home in Elliniko to the centre of our ancient and august citadel, the Acropolis, felt like. I got back home and developed the roll, let the negatives air dry, printed some, scanned all the frames — and committed both the digital and analogue products to their boxes. Now uncovered as a sort of ‘time capsule’ of that most strange time.
Here are those images, unvarnished, unedited, and in chronological order.
“I realised then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored”
— Albert Camus, The Stranger
