On Hexenküche
Wednesday 11th June, London
There is a particular circle of Hell my friends — Dante missed it, the slacker — reserved for men who stand in pitch darkness at three in the morning, sniffing their own fingers and muttering about sulfite, and it is into this clammy oubliette that we now descend, miners’ lamps extinguished, to appraise four bottled liquids that promise to turn your silver halides into Art and instead generally turn them into something resembling the chest X-ray of a heavy smoker.
Consider first Ilford ID-11, a developer so determinedly inoffensive it makes magnolia emulsion look like a Jackson Pollock fever dream. This is the chemical equivalent of a beige cardigan: competent, fine-grained, full of dependable mid-tones, and possessed of all the personality of a regional sales conference. It does nothing wrong, which is precisely its crime — it is the developer you’d introduce to your parents and then quietly never think about again. And here’s the truly delicious absurdity: ID-11 is, to within a gnat’s whisker of metol and borax, Kodak D-76 wearing a false moustache. Two corporations, one on each side of the Atlantic, have spent the better part of a century maintaining a blood feud over what is functionally the same bucket of soup, like identical twins who refuse to speak because one of them was born in Rochester in 1927 and the other in Cheshire and consider the whole thing frightfully common. D-76 is merely ID-11 with a swagger and a louder shirt; you may dilute either of them one-to-one for a bit more bite, the photographic equivalent of adding a single ice cube to lukewarm tap water and calling it a cocktail.
Then we arrive at Microphen, and here, finally, a flicker of villainy. Microphen has thrown out honest old metol and signed a pact with Phenidone, that Faustian little accelerant, in exchange for actual speed — push your HP5 to 800, 1600, and Microphen will oblige with the eager amorality of a getaway driver. The price, naturally, is grain, which blooms across your shadows like mould across a forgotten Camembert, until your delicate portrait of Auntie Vera acquires the textured ambience of wet gravel. Marvellous in a dim Belleville bar at midnight; rather less marvellous when Vera asks why she appears to have been photographed through a colander in a reactor core.
And finally Perceptol, the undertaker — the embalmer of the negative — which achieves grain of such pornographic smoothness that it sands the very life out of the image, costing you the better part of a stop in speed and rendering every tone into a creamy, contrast-shy semolina. Use it on slow film in good light and the results are exquisite, gossamer, almost embarrassingly tender; use it carelessly and you have produced a photograph of fog having a quiet lie-down.
The verdict, since we demand one: mix ID-11 or D-76 when you wish to be a sensible adult and have nothing to prove, Microphen when the light has betrayed you and grit is the lesser sin, and Perceptol when you want your silver to whisper rather than shout — bearing always in mind that the difference between them, magnificent though we pretend it to be, would be utterly invisible to any human being who had not first spent forty quid and several marriages learning to care
