If you have ever wanted to develop a roll of film by hand in New York, your options are thinning out, and one of the last of them is on the clock. The Bushwick Community Darkroom, a do-it-yourself institution that has taught analog photography for 15 years, told its members on May 26 that it can no longer pay its own way, and it has until June 30 to lock in a new lease or shut down. The one buyer who came forward, according to Patch, offered $5,000 paid out in $500 monthly installments while asking to control the membership revenue right away.
It is not closing because nobody wants it. It is closing because one person has been running all of it. Founder Lucia Rollow opened the space in 2011 out of a closet in her basement, tested the idea with a Kickstarter (“If we didn’t make the goal, then the community didn’t need it, and I wouldn’t do it,” she told Patch) and has moved it four times since. What broke was the workload. “I’ve just been trying to do everything by myself,” Rollow said. “I can’t do the marketing and run the actual physical space.”
What is on the line is specific. From its storefront at 334 Himrod Street, the darkroom offers 24-hour member access after an orientation, classes in camera basics, black-and-white developing and printing, oddball workshops in cyanotype and caffenol, and film developing and scanning that starts at $15 for a roll of 35mm. In a city where commercial film labs are scarce and pricey, that is one of the few hands-on, around-the-clock analog spaces left.
A rescue is in motion. Sasha Brunetti, an independent filmmaker who founded the production company Ceaseless Media and first walked in early this year for a large-format workshop, is trying to take over the lease and run the place with Rollow as a partner. “I have found a home, a community, and a space that inspires me every day,” Brunetti said. The pitch is to make it bigger, not smaller: “It’ll be more of an all-encompassing creative space,” Brunetti said. “Artistic studios, screenings, rental house for equipment.” For Rollow, the appeal is finally not being alone with it. “The idea of not having to take care of everything all the time sounds really appealing,” she said.
The math is the whole problem. A creative space can be beloved and still not pencil out when a single founder is the marketing department, the landlord negotiator and the person who unjams the enlarger at 2 a.m. That lowball buyout offer, $5,000 over ten months with a grab at the membership money up front, is a blunt measure of what these spaces are worth on the open market versus what they are worth to the people who actually use them. The lease deadline is June 30, which does not leave much runway.
If you want it to survive, the rescue GoFundMe is live, linked from the darkroom’s own site, where you can also book a class or a developing slot before the end of the month, which is the revenue that actually keeps a darkroom open.
Featured image: Courtesy Bushwick Community Darkroom
