Resurrecting Film Photography in the Eliot House Basement

In the basement of Eliot House lies a creative haven: the photography darkroom. Next to the black-and-white walls bathed in red light, there is a door with a sign that reads “Come to the dark side.” If one does, they will find a lab table in the center of the room with photographs covering the walls and hanging from hooks. Students wash out graduated cylinders and inspect the film, a process aptly named “wet photography.” Eliot House Faculty Dean David F. Elmer ’98 teaches this seminar, “Photography and Time,” which focuses on digital and film photography.

Elmer, a Classics professor with a focus on ancient Greek literature, was first introduced to photography in an eighth grade science course as a way to learn about chemistry concepts. There, he took interest in photography, printing, and developing, wishing for a darkroom in his family’s basement. Later, Elmer started learning more about the art form and took classes on darkroom work at the now-closed New England School of Photography. He even carried out his middle-school dream and built a darkroom in his home basement.

“For the past 10 years or so, I’ve been pursuing this as a hobby that gives me a lot of joy and satisfaction and a way to do something, create something, that is not directly connected with my professional life,” Elmer says.

When Elmer and Social Studies lecturer Bonnie Talbert stepped into the position of Eliot’s faculty deans earlier this year, they wanted to bring a piece of themselves into House life. For Elmer, sharing his passion for photography with the students was also a way to foster house community. So he decided to resurrect the abandoned Eliot darkroom and teach an Eliot house seminar on film photography.

“It’s very important to us to find ways to share who we are with the residents of Eliot House, and photography is a really important part of who I am at this moment in time,” he says.

Elmer’s class is the first house seminar to be offered in many years (though a 2022 class on the history of Harvard also took inspiration from the house seminar model). In the 1990s, houses regularly offered house seminars on various topics. Elmer believes the drop in the number of House seminars offered has to do with its unique class style. House seminars are meant to be taught in seminar style while also carrying significance for the House as a whole. To offer his seminar, Elmer submitted a House seminar proposal to the College, centered around Eliot as well as academic goals for students. Framing his seminar as a “kind of experiment,” Elmer hopes that the offering of his seminar leads to the offerings of many more in the future grounded in various topics and Houses.

The seminar was also meant to capture the spirit of Eliot House before it undergoes renovation next year. During House renovation, students live in swing housing. As a part of the seminar, Elmer asked students to use slates of the House’s roof saved from summer repair work as canvases for film photographs of the house. The photographs will be displayed in Eliot swing housing during renovation and brought back to the House after the process.

The seminar was also meant to capture the spirit of Eliot House before it undergoes renovation next year. By Sarah G. Erickson

“This is an ambitious, ambitious goal, but we certainly have the capacity to do it in the darkroom,” Elmer says. “I would love to take those images and take them with us into swing housing as a reminder of who we are as a community.”

The darkroom, formerly used as a home base for Harvard Photography Club, has been with the House for decades. Prior to the invention of digital photography, many Houses like Lowell and Kirkland also had darkrooms. Film photography and darkroom work were fairly popular pastimes for many on campus. As digital photography gained popularity, Houses slowly lost their darkrooms, but Eliot’s remained and is now the last remaining darkroom open to students on the Harvard campus.

Elmer sees this seminar as a way to open up the darkroom to a larger group of students. Those who made use of the darkroom decades earlier were passionate but small in number. Through teaching about the art, Elmer hopes that more students will understand how to use the space.

“It’s the last space on campus available to students, and I think it’s important that we make it available to any student in the College who wants to learn this practice and make use of the space,” Elmer says.

— Magazine writer Vivian W. Rong can be reached at vivian.rong@thecrimson.com.