Darkrooms as Metaphors; Darkrooms as Origins: Michael S. Harper’s Dark Room Poems

Abstract

The article explores the poet Michael S. Harper’s use of the darkroom as a metaphor for family history and African American identity. Acknowledging that the changes in photographic technology over the last decade have spelled the end of the darkroom as the actual workspace of the photographer and as valid, contemporary metaphor for the unconscious, the article describes Harper’s 1977 selected poems, Images of Kin, as one of the last great invocations of this metaphor, and it further examines how this metaphor and its counterpart (the metaphor of the photographic negative) develop for Harper as ekphrastic models of composition.