Expansions...

So, I'm not going to lie, I totally fell asleep while writing my original blog post, and upon waking up in a chair with my computer luckily still on my lap, I just posted what I had written, which wasn't much.

I wanted to expand on something I've been thinking about in relation to Darkroom.  I studied photography for five years in a previous life, and was always enamoured by the term "the latent image."  When Quintero Weaver introduces the term herself on page 17, she does it of course in reference to photography.  She writes "Within seconds, the full tonal range developed, punctuated by areas of black and white."  The connection isn't clear, but she refers here to the grey area that she finds herself in, raised as a tonal range between black and white.

Her own personal latent image, is in fact her heritage.  While her family still has a very clear connection to their past in Argentina, having traveled back and forth, Lila's connection is more of a latent image- something that is there, she has been exposed to it, but it has not developed.  On page 47, in the chapter titled "Blending In," she illustrates a parallel life of her own, one that stayed in Argentina as a girl,and she refers to it as "the latent image forever hidden."  Though, very much like the very literal photographic latent image, she does carry this life with her, it has in fact been exposed, it just was never developed and never fixed.  In a way, everyone carries a latent image of their past around with them.

These latent images appear through out Darkroom, though in a different sense.  Quintero Weaver incorporates the idea into her illustrations.  It could be said that they begin on page 49, but I think they really begin on page 52 and 53, when she begins drawing people without a tonal range- only in black and white.  It's a clear and obvious distinction, because she has taken such time to provide the reader with drawings rich in tonal range.  The full page panel on 53 is an easy representation of how she felt she was the grey area, while the other unknown people in the panel are drawn in black and white.  This scene speaks volumes because she feels especially grey when her parents are speaking Spanish to her in public.  Her tonal range stands out against the clear cut black and white background.

On 74, she creates another successful panel using latent imagery.  She writes that "the faces of black people looked interchangeable" to her, and draws a group of people on the street without any tonal range.  She calls it a blindness, the inability to read tonal range.  Could it perhaps be metaphor for the uncertain times, on the cusp of civil rights- where these people perhaps denied identity?  Were they in fact latent images, waiting for change, for development?