The Analogue Laboratory

The Analogue Laboratory is an independent artist run photographic facility in Adelaide, South Australia, specialising in traditional and experimental photographic techniques and providing a well equipped darkroom space. The Lab was founded in early 2012 by Alex Bishop-Thorpe and Aurelia Carbone and initially hosted within the Fontanelle Gallery and Studio Complex in Bowden, South Australia. As of March 2013 we have taken out a new lease in The Mill arts incubator complex, residing at 154 Angus St in Adelaide City. We're just across the road from a bakery now and we're pretty excited about that.

Initially conceived as a space to allow us to continue our own experimental arts practices and collaborate with other artists, The Analogue Lab quickly grew into an educational space and informal meeting point for analogue photography in South Australia. With only a small darkroom that could accommodate maybe 3 or 4 people printing at any one time, it soon became apparent that we needed to expand if we wanted to keep the public involved.

Over the course of 2012 we conducted 7 workshops with more than 30 South Australians, working with everything from pinhole cameras, Holgas and Polaroids to Wet Plate photography, making Dry Glass Plate emulsions and Albumen Printing. We found there was a remarkable demand for workshops in experimental and traditional techniques, and these workshops allowed us to pay the rent on the darkroom, finance new equipment, make improvements to the facilities, and start to think of how we could do things better. We also found working with the public to be a wonderful, fun and just generally uplifting experience, and the enthusiasm has always been infectious. With The Mill just as excited about us, and South Australian Photographic Artists Alice Blanch, Andrew Dearman and James Tylor on board, we have taken out a two year lease and set about building a bigger and better darkroom.


With a new city location near the Central Markets and a plan for two rooms encompassing six quite comfortable enlarger bays and even more equipment than before, we hope to finally have enough room to open our doors to the public on weekends and support South Australian photographers with a fully equipped darkroom for hire. Armed with equipment collected over the course of some 8 years, we are able to work with any ultraviolet photographic printing process, black and white processing and printing, as well as colour materials in any format from 35mm to 4x5" and beyond.


But, with all of this expansion comes some sizable expenses. We need to build walls, run plumbing and ventilation to the space and also have electricity installed. Right now our fourteen thousand dollars of equipment is sitting in boxes, and our darkroom just amounts to lines drawn with masking tape on the cement.
With your help and enthusiasm, an impressive amount of DIY ingenuity and the help of some very generous tradesmen we aim to have the darkroom operational again by late May, 2013 – in time to host a new set of workshops for July.

In 2012 it took two of us a week to put the the darkroom door together, and we operated on such a small budget that we were pulling the nails out of old bits of wood so we could re-use them. It took a month, 6 cans of expansion foam, 8 tubes of gap filler, two cans of black spray paint, a roll of black builder's plastic and a roll of aluminium foil (what?) to actually make the darkroom dark. In March 2013 it took 8 people one day and a truck to move all of the equipment to its new location, and only one day to put the TARDIS back together – now, with five of us, we're excited to get to work and get our lab up and running.

With your help, we'd like to make our darkroom dark again. Then you should come over and play.