Not far from Augusta’s old Powder Works, just off downtown proper and under a brilliantly shining sun, is a place of complete darkness. Within this darkness is the magic of creating something from nothing – creating something from what is less than nothing, a negative.
Mark Albertin’s darkroom is a rare outlier in this age of digital photography. There’s a plastic-y smell of the black-and-gray Kodak canister, and there’s a fridge well-stocked with both the edible (ginger ale, peanut butter pie) and the inedible (all that Kodak film).
An enlarged negative awaits exposure. Not that its image is visible, not until the lights go off and a low red glow is all that’s left. A faint depiction, almost sketch-like, now emerges in the darkness.
You have to find the grain, Albertin says, putting his eye to the scope and turning a knob a couple ticks counter clockwise.
He’s running through a series of test prints, trying to gauge the right amount of exposure and taking note of those areas he’ll have to further finesse either through “dodging” (blocking exposure to keep a section of the image lighter while the rest continues to darken), or “burning” (increasing the exposure for a darker effect while protecting the rest of the image).
“All it is, is light manipulation,” he says. “And how creative you want to get with it.”
“All it is, is light manipulation. And how creative you want to get with it,” said Mark Albertin of film photography.
A thousand-plus interviews: From stills to video
Albertin moved to Savannah in 1986 and then to Augusta in 1995. Before that, the Wisconsin-born Albertin was “a northern boy knowing nothing about the South; knowing only about bratwurst and sauerkraut and cheese and beer and frozen custard.”
But the tightly intimate nature of his professional work, both in film photography and video production, has since provided some edification of life here, and the man now calls Augusta home.
Albertin estimated he’s interviewed more than 1,000 people during his career with Morris Communications and, since 1999, through his own Scrapbook Video Productions company.
His freelance documentaries alone have brought him into the more personal folds of history in Augusta but also in Aiken. And Savannah. And Jacksonville. And St. Augustine and Topeka, Kan.
Each one of these films has involved interviews with 50 to 100 people.
“I think it’s really cool to preserve these oral histories, to preserve these stories and then put them into a format that people can really digest,” Albertin said.
Albertin’s documentary of Augusta from fin de siècle through the 1990s, “Finding Home – A Journey Through Augusta’s 20th Century Past,” is a work that’s been 20 years in the making.
The Fire of 1916. The Flood of 1929. The Cracker Party. Eisenhower’s visit. These are all segments of the 2-hour film and told through the voices of those who lived them or who knew closely someone who did.
“Those people are all gone, they’ve been gone for years, for 20 or 30 years now. I’ve got their stories,” said Albertin. “When the Augusta National was nothing, and the kids would go swim in the ponds there – there was no fence – and they were trying to get you to come…”
The documentary builds on the one he started with Morris in 1999 and called “Augusta Remembers.” That film had ended with 1940.
Albertin’s since expanded it to include the local histories of WWII, Vietnam, the Augusta Riots and the fading of downtown.
“It’s a century of oral history and memories. It is a 20th century time capsule; that was the whole intent,” he said.
Much of Mark Albertin’s photography is nature photography, and that interest in the outdoors has made its way into his video projects, too.
‘Something for the next generation’
The past 10 years have found Albertin more engaged with environmental topics, and his documentary on the Okefenokee Swamp and the nearby Twin Pines mining venture in southern Georgia has won him multiple honors, including the Humanitarian Award at the Beaufort International Film Festival.
Both Albertin’s “Finding Home” on 20th century Augusta and his more environmentally political work on the Okefenokee, “Sacred Waters,” will run in this month’s Black Cat Picture Show, the ninth annual Augusta film festival hosted by Le Chat Noir Aug. 17-20.
Albertin’s environmental oeuvre also includes a film on the suspended, 360-mile Kinder Morgan Palmetto Pipeline that was to run from Belton, S. Car. through Georgia and down to Jacksonville. The pipeline had come under fire after an oil leak near Belton that eventually prompted the Georgia state legislature to place a moratorium on approving the necessary permits for those parts of the project that would come through Georgia.
“My passion behind these documentaries is to try to help people learn and to try to educate them and to try to show people through my eyes why we need to protect this planet, why we need to slow down,” Albertin said. “We need to not develop and destroy these places that are so unbelievable and so beautiful – leave something behind, leave something for the next generation.”
“We don’t think this planet has any value except for ‘how can we make money from it, how we can gain from it?’ Yet, to me, getting away from that – getting away from all the noise – is really what’s good for us – mentally, physically, and in our soul; everything,” he said.
Then, with a laugh, “Not saying throw all that [man-made tech] away and hug trees for the rest of our life. But anytime I feel like my compass is out of whack, I go someplace and I camp or I get away.”
Mark Albertin uses a loupe to look for imperfections in a finished print. If he finds any, he can correct them with a daub of monochrome paint mixed to the exact tone he needs.
The ‘Christmas morning effect’
More often than not, that camping and getting away involves a secondary getting away: the many hours it takes Albertin in that edge-of-downtown darkroom to develop the photographs he takes.
“It’s that Christmas morning effect. You take a picture, and you don’t know if you’ve got something good or not and you don’t know if it’s going to be really wonderful, if it’s going to be really beautiful,” he said. “When you go to the dark room and start processing those negatives, it’s an exciting event when you go down there, and you find something.”
Albertin said it can take him a full day just to get one image right.
From the first shutter of the lens to the last drops of hand coloring (a delicate process of mixing monochrome paints to the correct shade and daubing it onto the finished image), film photography is a means for “slowing way down.”
He said he hopes to expand his studio in the future to better accommodate the four photography aficionados who’ve regularly been coming there to develop their own skills over the past year.
At least two of them, mother and daughter and bringing with them that peanut butter pie, have already allowed the art to take hold of them in a way that has them chasing down the perfect shot (still elusive, the mother confides).
The final print, painstakingly created hour after hour in the darkroom.
“You start looking at the details, the textures, the bark,” Albertin said of how this analog form of art has connected him more to the natural world.
That’s what he’s spent so many hours doing, getting those details to reflect on paper as close to exact the image his own eyes had seen.
The print is a 20×24. The image, captured outside his his other darkroom, Preservation Studios in Harrisburg, Ga. shows a rare occurrence: the roots of two trees have grown toward each other and begun to combine, something that normally wouldn’t be seen for a layer of soil or water.
