'There is still beauty in film': exhibit helps photographers rediscover the joys of the darkroom

Dennis da Silva is most at home in his small darkroom, with the faint glow of the red safelight and the smell of processing chemicals hanging in the air.

The black-and-white film-printing legend, with more than 45 years of experience in processing film and hand-printing for local and foreign photographers and artists, such as Roger Ballen, Greg Marinovich and Alf Kumalo, says he has seen a resurgence in the popularity of film.

An exhibition of black-and-white prints in Melville will showcase the work of new and experienced photographers.

The show is to be put on by the Alternative Print Workshop, which Da Silva runs with his partners Janus Boshoff and Friederike von Stackelberg.

"Some of the people who took part in the project came back to film cameras after years, and there were some who had never used film before. But it was a group of passionate people," said Boshoff.

Da Silva said: "There is still beauty in film. Digital photography has made everything so easy. But with this project experienced digital photographers had to start thinking.

"You really have to know what you're doing, you have to understand the camera, you have to understand light. It makes you slow down and really think about what you're doing," Da Silva said.

The experienced black-and-white film printer said he knew he wanted to work with film since the day he started developing negatives in a cupboard at home while he was at high school.

But as a result of advances in digital photography, Da Silva now believes "we are a lost generation".

"Because of digital, very few people are printing photographs.

"There is no visual history and soon all of that will be gone," he said.

However, the I Love Melville black-and-white film photography exhibition, which opens at Studio Gesso in the suburb next Saturday, attracted more interest than Da Silva and Boshoff expected.

The exhibition was the brainchild of Boshoff.

Its ethos is the diversity and people of Melville.

"It had to be something that is honest, true and frank. Melville is a community everybody somehow has a connection to," Boshoff said. "It was a community of photographers photographing a community."

Boshoff said Da Silva's knowledge was "something really special" and passing some of that knowledge on to other photographers was important to them.

Alexi Portokallis, a Johannesburg photographer, took part in a project run by the Alternative Print Workshop in 2016 called the Overnight Rush, which involved simulating shooting with film and developing and printing the pictures before the next day.

"My whole film journey started because of Dennis. From that, I started this whole discovery with photography," he said.

"I had experience with digital, and Photoshop and other apps. I never knew the apps were built around the principles of the darkroom," Portokallis said.

"It really simplified a lot of things and brought back a lot of joy to my photography. We want to keep the darkroom alive," he said.

• This story was originally published in The Times.