“If you want to take a real photo, you have to shoot analogue. And if you want to hear real music, then you have to hear it on vinyl. That’s the way it is.”
It’s 6am on a Monday morning and I’m standing with my digital camera in Copenhagen’s last professional darkroom feeling like a teenager getting a good telling off. Steen Petersen, the local legend that has run Laboratoriet i Nannasgade for 30 years, is explaining a few facts of life to me.
"When digital came rushing in like a tornado, it all had to be so razor-sharp. But it is unnaturally sharp - it's not natural that you can see every single blackhead," he says, almost angry. “That is why it is great that more and more people have realised that film is the only right thing to do if you have to do something that is real. Film is a living being, you cannot recreate what happens on film digitally at all.”
It became clear very quickly that it is best not to argue with Steen. I went about my shameful digital work as quietly as possible while Kerstin, the journalist I was here with, apologetically followed Steen around trying not to annoy him too much. Apparently there had been some miscommunication in the scheduling and he wasn’t expecting us there and then. He was way too busy to have us hanging around, he explained irritably, as he began unpacking the several hundred rolls of film that had been left in the night box over the weekend. I’m not convinced the reception would have been much warmer if he had been expecting us, but as the clock ticked by and we annoyed him less and less, Steen softened up and by the time we left a few hours later we were all good friends.
As the other professional photo labs in Denmark closed their doors during the digital revolution of the 2000’s, Steen stuck to his guns and kept on running Laboratoriet. "My board has often said 'stop developing film, it's dead, it's done, it's never coming again - everything is digital now'. But I did not jump on that wagon. I have always believed that it would come again. People will get tired of digital, just wait,” he says. And it seems he was right, as he appears to be about most things. Film is back, and it is back big time. Much like the growth in sales of vinyl records (see my trip into Europes largest vinyl pressing plant here), analogue photography is seeing a boom right now - but the surprising thing is that it isn’t just keen amateurs that are embracing film, it is also the pros.
I was truly amazed at the amount of film from professional photographers running through Laboratoriet in the few hours I was there - the fashion world has embraced it, and the big fashion companies and magazines are willing to splash out the extra money, time and risk involved in letting their photographers shoot on film.
But these are the final days of Steen and Laboratoriet as we know them. After 30 years Laboratoriet has been sold to The Lab, Denmark’s largest photo studio, and is in the processing of moving the whole operation - including Steen - to their premises in another part of Copenhagen. As one of the biggest players in the Nordic photography industry, The Lab realised they could not risk letting Laboratoriet slip out of their hands, and instead are investing resources in keeping it alive for the future - more employees, a new darkroom, new scanners - and still, thank god, Steen.
This series was shot for Journalisten Magazine. Thanks to Kerstin Bruun-Hansen for letting me borrow a couple of Steen’s quotes from her article.
