Darkroom by Michel Campeau

To accompany Dark Tales: British Documentary and the Gothic, Martin Parr Foundation is partnering with the nearby Arnos Vale Cemetery to present Darkroom by Michel Campeau in their Anglican Chapel Crypt. In this work, Campeau's large-scale photographs reflect on the mortality of the photographic medium through his intimate depictions of analogue darkrooms, located just 8 minute's walk from Martin Parr Foundation. In this body of work Michel Campeau reflects on the mortality of the photographic medium through intimate depictions of analogue darkrooms. The works in this exhibition are drawn from the original book of the same title published by Nazraeli Press and form the first solo show of Michel Campeau in the UK. Through an immersive display in the Anglican Chapel Crypt at Arnos Vale Cemetery, Michel's photographs show darkroom spaces as haphazard or obsolete in the face of digital technologies, whilst also revealing them as personal, human environments marked by improvised adaptations and DIY interventions giving them a fragile, idiosyncratic presence. The Anglican Chapel Crypt at Arnos Vale is used to store tools and objects relating to the burial process; connections are drawn as Michel's images of darkroom apparatus sit alongside these other usually hidden, out-of-sight tools of labour. Michel's Darkroom photographs installed within this environment, invite new interpretations and further reflection on the mortality of photographic medium, labour, and the spaces that sustain them.