Developing (Or Why Parents Take First-Day-of-School Pictures and Nobody Photographs the First Tuesday of a Fiscal Quarter)

There was a particular week, every year, when the store fills up with parents.¹ It happens right after Labor Day, like clockwork, and it happened at the one-hour photo and video place (literally named "One Hour Photo and Video") I worked at in college with such reliability we used to joke about putting a sign in the window: BACK TO SCHOOL, BACK TO US. Rolls of film would come across the counter in twos and threes, sometimes a whole grocery bag of them, and you could tell without asking what was on each one. First day of kindergarten. Soccer team picture, the kind where somebody's little brother is looking the wrong way. A blurry shot of a dorm room, because college kids dropped off film too, mostly disposable cameras from move-in weekend, the flash bouncing off cinderblock walls.²

I want to tell you about one roll in particular, but first I need to explain how the machine worked, because the mechanics of it turned out to matter more than I understood at the time.

The Minilab

The store had a minilab in the back, a machine about the size of an upright freezer that took in undeveloped film on one end and produced prints on the other.³ Between those two ends was a process that, when you actually walked through it with someone, sounded almost superstitious. The film, in a light-tight canister, got pulled out from the machine in darkness, and got run through a series of chemical baths, developer, then stop, then fixer, each one doing something specific to the silver halide crystals on the strip.⁴ Only after all three baths had done their work could you let light hit the film again.

This is the part people don't think about. The negative image, the thing that eventually becomes your photograph, only exists because the film spent several minutes in total darkness first. If you opened the canister early, if you got impatient and let light in before the chemistry had finished its job, you didn't get a faster photo. You got nothing. A grey, fogged, ruined strip, and every image on that roll gone for good.⁵

I learned this the hard way in my second week, on a roll that turned out to belong to a woman who had photographed her son's first day of first grade, a pool party, and what I'm fairly sure was a 40th birthday party for someone named Denise, based on the banner I glimpsed in one surviving thumbnail before the whole thing went grey. I had to call her at the number on the envelope and explain that her film had been "compromised in processing," which is store language for "I broke it," and I still remember the particular timbre of silence on the other end of the line.⁶

My manager, a guy named Terry who had run location for eleven years, did not take the loss well, and not for any reason connected to the mother of a first grader losing her photos. He took it badly because a ruined roll meant a free reprocessing and a store credit, and store credits came out of a margin he tracked with the attention most people reserve for their own bloodstream.⁷ Terry was, in fairness, extremely good at his job. He was also the kind of manager who scheduled you for three hours and forty-five minutes so he'd never owe a mandated break, who "forgot" to log overtime until you brought it up twice, and who once tried to make me pay for a jammed print drum out of my own check before a district manager quietly told him that wasn't legal.⁸ He walked me back to the machine that day not to teach me anything larger about life, but because a second ruined roll on his watch was money he didn't want to lose again, and the fastest way to stop losing money was to make sure I understood the process cold. "The dark isn't a mistake," he said, or something close to it, I'm reconstructing from over 25 years of memory here so allow me some latitude.⁹ "The dark is the reason there's going to be a picture at all." He wasn't offering me a life lesson. He was explaining a cost center. I decided, years later, that it was a life lesson anyway.

I thought about that line for a long time afterward, longer than a college kid running a Fuji Frontier minilab has any business thinking about anything.¹⁰ It's sounds like a fortune cookie until you've actually stood there and watched it be literally, mechanically true. Darkness is preparation for light, not as a nice sentiment, but as a chemical fact you could ruin by not respecting it. The insight was real even though the man delivering it had zero interest in insight. That distinction turned out to matter more to me, over time, than the line itself.

What the Season Actually Marks

I want to sit with why that week, specifically, produced so much film. Obviously: kids go back to school, parents want a record of it, disposable cameras were still a normal purchase in a way they aren't anymore. But I think there was something else going on, something the customers themselves would have struggled to articulate if you'd asked them at the counter.

The first day of school is one of the few remaining moments in American life that everyone agrees deserves documentation. Nobody photographs the first day back at the office. Nobody lines their kid up against the garage door for a portrait on the first Tuesday of a new fiscal quarter. But the first day of school gets marked, every single year, by people who otherwise let most of their days pass unrecorded, because something in us recognizes it as a threshold.¹¹

A threshold is just a fancy word for a boundary you choose to notice. The calendar is full of them if you're paying attention, and mostly empty of them if you're not. September doesn't actually mean anything more than April does, cosmically speaking, but we've collectively decided it's a hinge point, a moment to reset the story we're telling about the year. I think that instinct is correct even if the mechanism (a school calendar drawn up by nineteenth-century agricultural needs) is arbitrary.¹²

Here is where I want to bring in something that seems irrelevant, which is that getting what you actually want out of a life seems to reduce to two things: the story you tell yourself, and where you point your attention.¹³ Not tips. Not hacks. Just those two levers, operated daily, mostly unconsciously, by everyone including you and me right now as you read this.

What story were those parents telling themselves, dropping off film in September? I think, mostly, a hopeful one. This year my kid does better. This year I'm more present. This year is going to be different, and here's the photographic evidence that it started that way, filed away in an envelope for later. The back-to-school photo isn't really documentation. It's a wager. It's a person placing a bet on their own capacity to follow through on a story, and asking a photograph to hold the opening line of that story in place so they can check it against reality later.

The Mirror Behind the Counter

I want to be careful not to let Terry sneak back in here as a mentor figure, because he wasn't one, and dressing him up as one now would be a disturbing kind of dishonesty. He was a guy who found every loophole the labor schedule offered him, who fought video rental customers over eighty-nine-cent late fees with a ferocity that had nothing to do with the eighty-nine cents and everything to do with some private accounting only he could see, and who I'm fairly sure once shorted a coworker's final paycheck on a technicality just because he could.¹⁴ He was not a good boss. He was, separately and almost inconveniently, an extremely good photo technician, better at reading a negative strip by eye than anyone else who ever worked that counter while I was there, and being around that particular skill did something to me even though being around him, as a person, mostly did not.

There's a line from Confucius that gets at what I'm trying to draw. When you meet someone better than yourself at a thing, turn your attention toward becoming their equal. When you meet someone not as good, look inward instead of outward, examine yourself rather than feeling superior.¹⁵ Nothing in that line requires you to admire the person you're learning from. Terry was, in the narrow domain of running a minilab and catching a bad roll before it hit the paper, simply better than me, and the correct response to that fact was attention, not affection. I started watching how he held the strips up to the light table, how he could tell from a glance whether a roll had been shot in a dim gymnasium before it even finished developing. I wasn't trying to become him, and I certainly wasn't trying to become the kind of manager who'd cut a shift short by six minutes to dodge a break. I was trying to close the gap between where I was and where the craft lived, and it happened, in this case, that the craft and the man who'd mastered it are two entirely separable things.

This say this because a classroom is supposed to be exactly this mechanism, formalized. You are placed, deliberately, in proximity to people who know more than you so that your attention has somewhere useful to go. The tragedy of a lot of schooling, and a lot of workplaces for that matter, is that this proximity gets wasted, spent on comparison and status instead of on the plain, humble act of watching someone better than you and letting that watching change your hands.¹⁶

Learning and Enjoyment, Together or Not At All

The philosopher Richard David Precht wrote that learning and enjoyment are the twin secrets of a fulfilled life, and that each one curdles without the other. Learning stripped of enjoyment wears a person down. Enjoyment stripped of learning dulls them.¹⁷ I didn't have this quote in my head at nineteen, obviously, but I lived a crude version of it every September at that counter.

The job itself was not glamorous. I stood in a windowless back room breathing chemical fumes for minimum wage. But I loved it anyway, because I was learning something real, watching an actual craft get performed at a high level by someone who cared about doing it right, and the enjoyment of that (the small satisfaction of a perfectly exposed print, the pride of catching a jam before it ruined a roll) fed directly back into wanting to learn more. Meanwhile the video rental side of the store, which required no learning curve whatsoever beyond alphabetizing, I was fine at but never once excited by. Same building, same paycheck, wildly different relationship to the work.

I think this is worth considering as school starts up again, for your kids or grandkids or nieces and nephews, or metaphorically for whatever new thing you're about to attempt in your own life. If a subject or a project has become pure grind with no enjoyment left in it, something's broken and it's worth asking what. If it's become pure enjoyment with no learning happening anymore, that's a different kind of stall, a comfortable one, but a stall.

Snow, Attention, and the Thing You Can't Change

I overheard someone say, once, that if you choose not to find joy in the snow, you'll have less joy in your life but exactly the same amount of snow.¹⁸ I think it's the sharpest possible rebuttal to the idea that circumstances determine happiness. The snow is a fixed variable. Whether September means dread or renewal, whether the new semester feels like a burden or an opening, whether the roll of film from the first day of school captures a kid who's scared or a kid who's ready, a huge amount of that reading is supplied by you, not by the actual event.

This connects back to the two levers, story and attention, because deciding to find joy in the snow isn't passive. It's an act of directed attention. You have to actually look at the snow and choose to see it as something other than an obstacle. Most of what fills a day doesn't matter and most actions don't move anything forward, which is exactly why the ones that do deserve the full weight of your focus rather than the scattered, reactive attention most of us default to.¹⁹

Which brings me to the question

The years go fast, faster than the calendar wants you to notice, and September has a way of sneaking up and reminding you of that every single time, whether you've got a kid starting kindergarten or you're just a person who used to develop other people's kids' first-day-of-school photos in a windowless back room for three-fifty an hour.

So here's the actual question: what have you been dreaming about doing, and is there a real, concrete way you could start doing it in the next six months? Not the vague version. The specific one. Write it down somewhere you'll actually see it again, the way a roll of film sits in its canister waiting for the dark to do its necessary work before anything can develop into light.

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