Safe Light, by Janelle Lynch

Lone Wolf I, by Janelle Lynch (USA) 2024

Safe Light

I am curious how one colour can mean opposing things: safe and sorry. How it can be a signal to stop and one to go. How it can mean the unfathomable. Amber was introduced as a safelight in the darkroom in Paris in 1841. On the street between red and green in Detroit in 1920. And as an alert nationwide in 1996 after the death of a girl. In the Stone Age, amber was a gem.

I am ten today and at my party receive the gift of my mother’s presence and from her a camera wrapped with ribbon. What surprises me more? I hold the black plastic box, slide open the lens cover and start to take snapshots like my grandfather did before he died when I was four. In them, my uncle grins, my aunt glowers. My cousins gaze uncertain from their bikes. Kids aren’t supposed to have cameras in Jamestown. Nana, in profile: the line of her back repeats that of her hair, curved from a visit to Carm’s for the occasion. 

I am in a crowd of strangers in a darkroom lit by warm light. Big black machines lurch on the perimeter, each in its own station. My peers’ skin, the colour of death. Standing corpses around a stainless steel sink of trays and tongs. Is anyone as afraid as I am? Numbers and timers, mixtures and math. What are ratios, anyway? Long ago I was told I couldn’t learn. I do want to, but leave with the list of materials I can’t afford. Why don’t you become a secretary? I hear my grandmother’s voice from years before in the whirl of the revolving door. It follows me onto the New York City streets. How will you live?

I am in spotlight on stage, a master of something after just two years. The audience is full and empty. What I know is that I barely know a thing. What I know is that I needed my name in calligraphic letters to lay claim to who I already was. To show the results of a hearing test. That I listened to myself. A license on bond paper. Textured and vulnerable. But safe to proceed. 

I am standing in safety underneath an amber light that in this small space means go not slow. The chemistry is intoxicating. I want to inhale it, drink it, bathe myself in it as a homecoming celebration in this Oklahoman home far from home where I belong and don’t belong and where I’ve been born a photographer all over again. A lone wolf teaching photography in Lone Wolf.

​​Janelle Lynch

Janelle Lynch is a writer and an award-winning photographer. Her writing has been published in monographs and in journals including Afterimage, The Photo Review, and Loupe. Her photographs have been exhibited worldwide and are in several museum collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Victoria and Albert Museum; and the Denver Art Museum. She has three monographs published by Radius Books: Los Jardines de México (2010); Barcelona (2012), which also includes her writings; and Another Way of Looking at Love (2018). She is a faculty member at the International Center of Photography and is represented by Flowers Gallery.