Safe Light
By Janelle Lynch
November 30, 2024
Safe Light, lyric essay published with silver gelatin photograph.
The Ekphrastic Review, Toronto, Canada,
I am curious how one color can mean opposing things: safe and sorry. How it can be a signal to stop and one to go. How it can mean the unfathomable. Amber was introduced as a safelight in a Paris darkroom in 1841. Later, on the street between red and green in Detroit in 1920. And as an alert nationwide in 1996 after the death of a girl. In the Stone Age, amber was a gem.
I am ten today and at my party receive the gift of my mother’s presence and from her a camera wrapped with ribbon. What surprises me more? I hold the black plastic box, slide open the lens cover and start to take snapshots like my grandfather did before he died when I was four. In them, my uncle grins, my aunt glowers. My cousins gaze uncertain from their bikes. Kids aren’t supposed to have cameras in Jamestown. My Nana, in profile: the line of her back repeats that of her hair, curved from a visit to Carm’s for the occasion.
I am in a crowd of strangers in a darkroom lit by warm light. Big black machines lurch on the perimeter, each in its own station. My peers’ skin, the color of death. Standing corpses around a stainless steel sink of trays and tongs. Is anyone as afraid as I am? Numbers and timers, mixtures and math. What are ratios, anyway? Long ago I was told I couldn’t learn. I want to, but leave with a list of materials I can’t afford. Why don’t you become a secretary? I hear my grandmother’s voice from years before in the whirl of the revolving door. It follows me onto the New York City streets. How will you live?
I am in the spotlight on stage, a master of something after just two years. The audience is full and empty. What I know is that I barely know a thing. What I know is that I needed my name in calligraphic letters to lay claim to who I already was. To show the results of a hearing test. That I listened to myself. A license on bond paper. Textured and vulnerable. But safe to proceed.
I am standing in safety underneath an amber light that in this small space means go not slow. The chemistry is intoxicating. I want to inhale it, drink it, bathe myself in it as a homecoming celebration in this Oklahoman home far from home where I belong and don’t belong and where I’ve been born a photographer all over again. A lone wolf teaching photography in Lone Wolf.