The photographer’s darkroom, with its iconic red light, has long been favoured by makers of thrillers and mystery movies. When a scene is lit in red, a number of motifs are readily invo­ked, ranging from the forensic to the magical, from the voyeuristic to the sensuous. Clues are created in darkrooms as well as discovered there, and they are just as easily altered in the darkroom; revelations emerge under the red light, where science and technology mingle with alchemical secrets: where there was nothing, soon there will be something. The authenticity of the portrayal of darkrooms in movies is rarely in question: the red light is enough to signify everything or anything, and is usually left on all the time, even when there is no one in the darkroom. The darkroom illuminated by its so-called safelight also carries intimations of the diabolical and echoes of demonic nightclub scenes that are invariably bathed in the same red light, the colour of rubies or blood leaking out from dark corners; the promise of sexuality, the home of the devil: the cellar filled with demons, blood and birth and an endless range of associations, too many to recall at once, but all to be lost now that the darkroom is falling into disuse as chemical processes are replaced by digital procedures. The Canadian photographer Michel Campeau has travelled the world photographing the last darkrooms of Toronto, Mexico City, Havana, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Niamey, Ho Chi Minh City and Tokyo. The results can be seen in Photographic Darkroom / Photogenic Obsolescence, published in 2013 by Kehrer Verlag.