Before Substack, There Was the Darkroom
Before the essays, the headers, and the mythology, there was simply a boy learning how to turn memory into light.
There are moments where I stumble across evidence of younger me and just sit there like:
…oh.
This has been the same nervous system the entire time.
This week, while digging through old boxes, I found a black-and-white photograph I took of my sister in January 2004.
Not only did I take it.
I apparently:
shot it on film,
developed the negatives myself in the school darkroom,
hand-trimmed the negatives,
exposed and printed the photograph,
and signed and dated the back like I was preparing work for a museum retrospective no one asked for.
💀
And honestly? I had completely forgotten I even knew how to do any of this.
The back reads:
“Photo of Kendall Ferguson
age 13
By Tavis Ferguson
1/27/04”
Which is somehow both deeply earnest and unintentionally hilarious.
Because why was I already documenting provenance at age 14?
Why was I behaving like the curator of the Smithsonian of Rural Oregon Adolescence?
And more importantly:
why does the photograph itself actually kind of slap?
The image has this strange accidental indie-film quality to it:
oversized Bucks hoodie,
jeans,
early-2000s cap,
little choker necklace,
dim interior lighting,
wooden doors in the background,
a globe sitting off to the side like symbolism wandered into frame uninvited.
It looks like a still from a coming-of-age movie that played Sundance once in 2007 and emotionally destroyed six people.
What gets me most is that this wasn’t just “taking a picture.”
Darkroom photography required patience.
You had to:
understand exposure,
work in near darkness,
handle chemicals,
wait,
adjust,
crop,
burn,
dodge,
print,
and hope you didn’t screw it up halfway through.
There was no instant gratification.
No filters.
No delete button.
No “fix it in post.”
Just:
light,
timing,
composition,
chemistry,
and instinct.
And looking at that photograph now, I realize something kind of emotional:
I was already trying to preserve feelings before I understood that’s what I was doing.
That instinct never left.
It simply evolved.
The kid developing black-and-white film in a Pendleton darkroom eventually became:
the adult building cinematic Substack headers,
the writer obsessing over emotional context,
the person archiving family mythology,
the guy creating split-timeline imagery and VHS textures and memory essays at 2:13 AM while Chip snores beside him.
Different tools.
Same nervous system.
And honestly, there’s something weirdly comforting about discovering proof that who you are now didn’t appear out of nowhere.
Sometimes adulthood feels fragmented.
Like you became ten different people trying to survive ten different eras.
But every once in a while, you uncover a tiny artifact that quietly says:
No.
It was always you.
Even then.
Especially then.
⸻
Chip’s Production Notes 🐾
Executive Producer Chip would like the record to show that:
He believes darkrooms sound terrifying.
He would absolutely drink photographic chemicals by accident.
He respects the cinematic tension of the oversized Bucks hoodie.
He also believes young Tavis already had “regional PBS documentary energy.”
And finally:
“Imagine manually developing film when you could simply stare dramatically into the void and call it content.”