The Bushwick Community Darkroom (334 Himrod St.) had persisted for over a decade, through some five different locations in Bushwick and will now be in none at all.
“I’m looking forward to walking away and never dealing with any of these fucking assholes ever again,” Lucia Rollow told me by phone, a week after clearing out the darkroom’s latest and final location, the end of an operation she has managed since the early 2010s, shortly after graduating with an arts degree from the School of Visual Arts and discovering herself in a new neighborhood and without a film production facility paid for by her tuition. So, she decided to start her own, a dream tethered to the possibilities of analog art that she had been carrying on with her diminishing generation of young artists.
“I was trying everything I could think of to get the word out. And I just couldn’t get the word out,” said Rollow. She had the idea that this would save the darkroom, which was months behind on rent and facing the end of a lease that wouldn’t be renewed without a deposit. Being behind months in rent had not convinced landlords or other lenders of her business acumen. Like many arts spaces in the area, she was largely in the business of selling workshops, at a price of “between $15 and $300. Depending on what it was.”
“I would schedule all of the best workshops. And like one or maybe two people would show up. And I was, like, if I could literally get like 10 people in this room, I could cover it. And I just couldn’t get the 10 people in the room,” said Rollow. A month ago, she had pivoted to a different idea: a GoFundMe “specifically to help raise the deposit for a new lease.” In Patch, the site’s NYC Editor, Ainsley Martinez, told readers, “It remains one of the few spaces for analog art.” The GoFundMe raised $9,052 against the $39,000 her landlord requested.
Rollow told me her landlord ordered her to vacate by July 3rd. Over the past week, she had penned no fewer than six emails to the darkroom’s email list, small letters composed largely of koans memorializing the space. “It was small, but it was mine. I think that is why the darkroom made sense to me,” she wrote in the second email in her series, titled, “The Room I Needed.” The darkroom was a version of the world Rollow had wanted to live in.
“A darkroom has rules, but they are fair rules. Close the door. Turn off the white light. Let your eyes adjust. Keep track of your time. Do one step, then the next.”
Then came rules like “everything out by Friday.” On Monday, Rollow started pulling out the equipment she had stored there since moving there in 2024, along with lockers containing equipment belonging to the group’s remaining members. “Come w[ith] cash & take what you want. We’ve also got beakers, trays, tanks, reels, chemistry,” she wrote in a post on Instagram. In another one, she wrote “Come & get [th]em. If you wanna [want to] throw us a few bucks[,] cool[.] [I]f not[,] just take [th]em.” A few hours later, she wrote: “There were vultures that attacked the lockers as soon as we opened them so I could clear things out before I had a chance to grab everything.”
These varying posts would attract the attention of the New York Post, where Katherine Donlevy penned a report on paying darkroom members who accused the darkroom of “tossing its clients’ artwork out on the street in a free-for-all.”
“The Bushwick Community Darkroom callously dumped pink and maroon lockers filled with client’s belongings onto Himrod Street Monday, after announcing it could no longer afford rent, former members alleged,” wrote Donlevy. No names appeared in the Post report, which quoted an anonymous “heartbroken member” who was “profoundly distraught and confused, and it made me feel betrayed,” after allegedly losing “photograph paper and negatives that were stashed inside a bolted locker.”
Rollow claimed this account was not true at all, and that everyone involved with the darkroom had recovered their materials.
“Everyone that I’ve been in touch with, I’ve managed to return things to, so I’m not sure who they talked to,” she said. “Wild how a paper will publish [without] the full story but I guess that’s the story of the Post so I shouldn’t be surprised.” The Post reporter had called a day earlier, a few hours before the story appeared, but she hadn’t picked up.
The only complaints she could recall came from Sarah Salloway, a longtime volunteer at the darkroom.
“She was like my first intern, from 2010 to 2014,” Rollow remembers. “I was keeping an eye on everything all day, and Sarah Salloway came up to me, and she was like, my lockers got cut. I don’t know, she’s so hysterical. She was threatening me with hysteria.”
“And Sarah got her shit back,” said Rollow. “It was some pristine [photo] paper that she didn’t already use.”
Later in “The Room I Needed,” Rollow writes: “In a darkroom, the darkness is not a threat. It is part of the process. That distinction changed something in me. I did not have to be afraid of what I could not see yet. I could learn how to move through it. I could trust my hands. I could trust the timer. I could trust the tray. I could trust that if I followed the process, something would eventually become visible.”
The last few years of the Bushwick Community Darkroom had been restless and full of disappointment. The move into the darkroom’s fifth and final location had not been smooth. A contractor she hired, Veronica DeLaRosa, had “framed out the walls for the darkroom completely incorrectly,” she told me.
“And then she needed another $10,000 to buy supplies and stuff,” said Rollow. “Then, she stole my money and disappeared.”
Thankfully, a loan of $50,000 had been, at least back then, forthcoming from her uncle, a retired investor in the housing market. But as many in Bushwick’s transplant community know, life can only provide so many loans from retired uncles. Banks and courts are less forgiving.
In a Brooklyn court, Rollow accused a gallery in Manhattan of misplacing 15 “of my unique and irreproducible gum bichromate prints,” per the filings, where Rollow estimated these prints were collectively worth at least $100,000. These prints illuminated ethereal dreamscapes Rollow shot in the California desert. The gallery never responded to the lawsuit.
Another volunteer would eventually take Rollow to court. Before the pandemic, she said she had gotten involved with a group that does legal work for small businesses, called Start Small Think Big, whose lawyers notified her that letting people use the darkroom in exchange for volunteer hours actually broke labor laws in New York.
“Volunteers would come in and do three-hour shifts at the front desk. And then they would have three hours of free access to do whatever they wanted,” said Rollow, who said she stopped running her volunteer program that way after the nonprofit’s lawyers told her that she was “signing [herself] up for a class action lawsuit.”
“The problem was, there was one person that had accrued enough hours to sue me,” she said. But she didn’t expect that Caleb Savage, a longtime intern who was, by then, helping run the space, would be the plaintiff.
“I told him how to do it [sue me]. Because he was in the team, and I trusted him 100%,” she told me. The pair fell out during the pandemic, when Rollow said that “he went on vacation for six weeks” and left her to operate the online platform he built to handle film orders, which blew up in the early days of the pandemic, as other commercial darkrooms had briefly shuttered. Rollow was committed to keep working, even if her longtime intern was vacationing with “his new lover,” she told me.
“So, the system got really overloaded and crashed. And it started sending out incorrect scans to customers. Which then resulted in angry customers calling us. And it was a whole mess. And Caleb was completely unreachable,” she said. “I had no idea how this website worked. He wrote the code for it. He built it from scratch. He’s crazy.”
Then when he came back, he wanted to turn the place into a more commercial film lab, she told me, and after some disagreements with Rollow about that, he left.
He returned with a lawyer and, eventually, Rollow would be $50,000 lighter to settle that dispute, a number that includes the value of a Noritsu scanner that Savage had his eye on. She had to give that to him too. Savage would later open Exposure Therapy (615 Marcy Ave.), a rival photo-lab in Bed-Stuy.
“And he really called it ‘Exposure Therapy,’ because of the amount of therapy that he needed after being exposed to me and my personal toxicity,” said Rollow. (Exposure Therapy remains in business as of this article’s publication).
In her fourth email (“A Kind of Freedom”), Rollow writes: “Today is July 4, so I have been thinking about freedom. Not the big dramatic version. Not the movie version. Not the version where one clean break fixes everything and you walk away transformed, backlit, and suddenly emotionally regulated.”
“For me, the darkroom was one of the first places where freedom felt practical.”
Savage wasn’t the only man in the photography business who crossed Rollow. There was a more recent effort to reach a deal with Adam Ottke, a real estate investor who also owns both NYC Film Lab (321 Starr St.) and LA Film Lab, where Ottke is based. There was an idea, she told me, that she and Ottke would run the Darkroom together, along with Sasha Brunetti, another Darkroom volunteer, as part of Brunetti’s production shingle Ceaseless Media.
But all that wasn’t what Ottke had in mind.
“He was like, ‘I’ve decided I want to buy you out,’” said Rollow. “He just wanted to have me fuck off for 500 bucks a month.”
Ottke offered her $5,000 for the name of the darkroom, her email list, and the membership program that was the only remaining stream of revenue. Under those terms, she wouldn’t be involved in the Darkroom. He had planned to take over the space immediately and to pay her in $500 monthly installments.
She returned with a counterproposal: $120,000, to be paid in installments of $5,000 a month, with a stipulation that Rollow stay on board as “Operations Manager,” with a monthly salary of $5,000, set to grow to $7,000 the next year.
“Thank you for sharing this. I now see how apart we were on this,” Ottke wrote back. “Unfortunately, this is literally an order of magnitude higher than what was floated in previous discussions.”
In her sixth email (“The rules were fair”), Rollow writes: “One of the first things I loved about the darkroom was that the rules were real. Not easy, not exactly forgiving, real. If you expose paper to light, it fogs. If your chemistry is exhausted, the print looks wrong. If the temperature is off, it shows. If you agitate unevenly, it shows. If you rush, the process will find a way to tell on you. I love that.
“I am standing inside the consequences of a lot of things. Some were my mistakes. Some were bad bets. Some were exhaustion. Some were underfunding. Some were me trying to build something too big with too little help for too long, because apparently ‘typical Scorpio middle child’ is not a business plan.”
Rollow said that she thinks it’s likely Ottke will end up taking over the space anyway, even if he won’t be able to call it the ‘Bushwick Community Darkroom,’ and perhaps will call it something else instead, probably related to his NYC Film Lab brand.
While Brunetti was very willing to run the darkroom with her, she didn’t have the kind of funding Ottke had. Outside of developing film, there were other things to do. Brunetti was already moving on; her company is now involved, Rollow said, in shooting “Too Honk Too Handle,” described as an “all clown reality show.”
For her part, after operating in Bushwick for most of her adult life, Rollow had decided to move to a house somewhere upstate. She asked me not to say where because another former, longtime volunteer “is psychotic and has been harassing all the film labs.”
“I tried to keep working with her for a few years until it turned into an actual stalking situation & she threatened to kill me. I have all those transcripts,” she said.
But Rollow has her own ideas as to why a community dark room can’t make it in Bushwick anymore, outside of the allegations of insanity from her various former volunteers, or failed business ventures or issues paying rent, or anything superficial like that.
“I think it’s really being taken over by cis white men,” she told me. “And I’m sad that I was in one place that was supposed to be like a safe place for everybody else to be, and now we’re not because cis white men decided that we couldn’t exist.”
“There used to be like 75 independent small galleries [here],” she later told me. “It was a place [where] things were possible, and now we have Pacha.”
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