Northern rip announcing partnership with Bayou Film Lab
I got Charlie on a morning in Penzance, an evening here in the NR. He had a day ahead of finalising prints and a website to sell said prints, for his brother-in-law, photographer, who is having a show in London. I was surf ‘hazed’ as Charlie called it, and would be calling my day done after a bowl of spicy broth shared with friends a stone-throw from our office.
Charlie, donning a blue Topshop tee, lives in the pirate-town of Penzance in Cornwall, and owns Bayou Film Lab in our industrial estate. How does someone own and run a film lab from the other side of the world, and operate with just one employee? They find themselves a Tom.
I am often apologising to Tom for late film drop offs, and often thanking him for saving my butt with deadlines. Raised in Japan and Australia, Tom is both polite and slightly stern, and often hatted in what the Scottish call a bunnet, the Irish call a paddy cap, the British call a flat cap or newsboy hat. He smokes, wears coats and kneels on the floor for live music. He has thoughtfully texted to let us know that Kate had a spelling mistake, and we often exchange empathetic surf check-ins.
I hope you get a surf in. Go get a wave. Could be on tomorrow morning! The important stuff.
Tom and I caught up over a brew, Tom a pint of lager and a mezcal for me. We spoke of the lab, his history with film, and his art–though I had to slightly pry him about that.
No, that's about my work, not the lab
With an upcoming exhibition in a few months time, Tom had a date with the dark room that evening, attempting to do the largest print possible. To print the size he is hoping for–eighty or so centimetres wide–you need to project onto a wall with an enlarger, rather than the usual downward projection onto a baseboard, for a larger area of exposure. The image is then processed the same in the dark room. If successful, this piece will be among eight smaller photographs at the Flying Arch art gallery in late August.
How did you know I was having a show?
Prior to two years ago, Charlie and his partner Lou lived for twelve years between the Gold Coast and Byron Bay. Charlie, photographer, describes himself as the weird one that processed his own colour at university, and came to owning the film lab we now rely on by a strike of strange timing.
It was the pandemic, job security was scant, and Charlie happened to get into a conversation with the the film processing lab he was using in the Gold Coast. What was then Shibui Film Lab was closing its doors, Charlie didn’t know he was in the market, but opportunity seemed to beckon. He followed this curiousity all the way to the bank on a Monday, and this is where the strange struck.
I remember it. I was sitting in the car park at the Burleigh Stocklands shopping centre, I had just gone to talk with Commbank and I was so gutted because the sale with the lab had fallen through. I was scrolling facebook marketplace purposelessly and I saw this ad for Bayou in Byron–I was literally just like ‘what the fuck, this is weird I’m going to give this guy a ring’. And then he was just such a legend.
By Friday, they had arranged a deal and Charlie and Lou took on Bayou. The cherry? The then owner of Bayou, Dan, became one of Charlie and Lou’s closest friends. Still to this day.
I mean who buys a film lab off marketplace?
And we got busy. We were just there all the time, so we were pouring all of our time and energy into it because we couldn’t do anything else.
How it came to be that Charlie, Lou, and their two-year-old son Rocky, live in a wooly coastal town in the UK, running an inkjet printing shop, and Tom the day-to-day of Bayou, is somewhat a blur for Tom. Charlie recalls that Tom came into Bayou in the thick of the pandemic, introduced himself, and left his CV. Six months later Tom came back in, re-introduced himself, and left a semi-updated CV.
You can imagine him, can't you, coming back and doing the exact same thing, with a slightly changed resume. Legend.
Things at the lab had shifted in that surmounting time, and Tom started working a few afternoons a week there.
I was like fucking hell this guy is pretty damn good. I wonder if we could move back to the UK, which we had in the back of our minds. So after just a few months of him working with us, we took him for a beer at the Bangas pub and we were like ‘we want to offer you like a, like a job, like a real job.’
I can picture Tom’s nonchalant–yet exceptionally committed–‘why not’ response.
And then that was that.
Initially leaving Tom for a few months dry run of being in the ‘job job’, Charlie and Lou explored our land down under, while being available around the clock remotely while Tom found his bearings. Bearings got, they left Tom to it and kissed our sun-soaked-country farewell.
Taken by astro-photography, Tom first bought himself a digital camera at the age of nine or ten, but as it turns out, children of that age don’t necessarily have a knack for capturing the cosmos, and the camera didn’t stick. A little older, he discovered film.
It kind of just snowballed from there. It has been a hobby for a long time. I have taken it seriously the last couple of years.
I got into developing because I wasn’t quite happy with what the labs were giving me. Sometimes the frames would be chopped off or there’d be some weird streakings or marks on it. I started doing that in the bathroom, or shower, whatever. You just need water and somewhere to hang the film.
In our conversation Tom reinstated the sentiment that with processing and scanning, there is a base minimum that labs should be doing, that you will get similar photos no matter the lab.
Labs are labs right.
And yet.
Charlie and I are both attentive to the detail. I guess we just try our best to get it out as best we can, without cropping, dust spots, marks, streaks, and scratches. We heavily appreciate keeping it classic in style. As in, if there is an opportunity to make an image that doesn’t use any digitalisation at all, then why not? That’s how it all started. There’s nothing like doing it by hand because that’s as raw as it gets.
I’ve had the pleasure of an afternoon in Bayou’s dark room with a dimly red-lit Tom guiding me through the process. The room is used mostly for workshops, rentals, and the occasional customer. And, for Tom.
There is a bit of a worry that if the film directors that are still with us– the ones that use film, and tend to be in their older ages– stop using film, what’s next? They are going through kilometres and kilometres of film for a production, and from there they might use another however many thousands of metres to distribute that particular film as a print to chuck in a cinema. Compare that to someone who shoots a roll of 35mm a week, that’s like a metre and a half of film. Bugger all in comparison.
The second insight is that two new film cameras are soon to be–or have recently been–released. Pentax and Mint. Promising. And for Tom, who is busily developing film each day of the week, there is no imminent doom for this clever capturer of life. Film is not dead.
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