I fell in love with photography completely by accident.

I was eighteen years old, on my first solo road trip, armed with a disposable camera and absolutely no idea what I was doing.

I drove through the mountains popping off pictures of anything that looked remotely impressive. Mountains. Roads. Landscapes. Whatever caught my eye.

Then I got home and had the film developed.

I remember looking through those little 4×6 prints and thinking they were incredible.

Apparently, I was the next Ansel Adams.

There was only one logical next step.

“Ma! I need your Minolta.”

“Why?”

“Because I'm going to photograph women for a living.” Okay, kid. Here you go. Good luck.

And with my mother's Minolta and the completely unjustified confidence of an eighteen year old who had just successfully photographed a few mountains with a disposable camera, my career began.

Models Wanted

There was one small problem with my brilliant new career plan. I didn't have any models.

This was before Instagram. Before social media. Before you could open an app and find thousands of people looking to collaborate.

So I did what you did back then.

I walked into the local newspaper office and placed a “Models Wanted” ad.

The woman behind the counter had to be at least eighty. She read the ad, looked down at it again, then looked back at me with the kind of discerning expression only an eighty something year old woman can give an eighteen year old kid trying to hire women to photograph.

“You really want me to run this ad, son?”

“Yes ma’am, if you don't mind.”

She ran it.

The next morning, I was on a roof rebuilding a chimney when my phone rang.

It was a model responding to the ad.

Holy shit, this might actually work.

More than twenty years later, I'm still doing it.

I Never Really Had a Plan

There was no grand business plan. No photography degree. No carefully constructed personal brand.

I just became fascinated with making photographs.

Then I became fascinated with film. With the physical photograph. With negatives, transparencies, darkrooms, all the strange little processes that happen between pressing a shutter and holding the final image in your hand.

Photography gave me an excuse to explore.

I've traveled. I've moved more times than any reasonable human being probably should. I've photographed people in bedrooms, hotels, studios, cemeteries, houses and whatever other interesting places I could get access to. I've hauled cameras, lights and film around with me and built darkrooms wherever life happened to put me.

The scenery changed, the obsession didn't.

The Long Way Around

Today almost everything about photography is designed to make the process faster.

I seem to have spent my life going in the opposite direction.

I still shoot 35mm.

I shoot medium format.

I shoot 4×5.

I develop black and white film. I process color negative film. I process transparencies. I make gelatin silver prints in a darkroom. I make stereo photographs that can actually be viewed in three dimensions.

There is something wonderfully irrational about taking this much trouble to make a photograph in the twenty first century.

But the process matters to me.

The imperfections matter.

The grain matters.

The fact that something physically existed in front of my camera, light passed through a lens, struck a piece of film, and that same piece of film eventually ended up in someone's collection matters.

Dantes Darkroom grew out of that obsession.

The People

My work has always revolved around people.

Not perfection. Not necessarily conventional beauty. People.

Different bodies. Different ages. Different personalities. Different backgrounds.

Sometimes the photographs are strange. Sometimes they're beautiful. Sometimes unapologetically erotic.

I don't want everything polished, I'm far more interested in making something that feels like it happened.

A messy hotel room. A shower. A bedroom. A strange roadside location. Someone laughing between frames. Something that could have been photographed in 1978, 1998 or yesterday.

That ambiguity fascinates me.

Still Looking

The funny thing is that the eighteen year old kid with his mother's Minolta never really went away.

I'm still looking for the next person to photograph.

I'm still wondering what's around the next corner.

I'm still willing to throw cameras in the car and travel because somebody interesting is six hours away. I'm still hunting locations. Still experimenting with old processes. Still buying ridiculous pieces of photographic equipment because I have an idea I can't get out of my head.

And I'm still dreaming bigger than whatever I'm doing today.

Dantes Darkroom isn't intended to become a perfectly polished photography studio.

I want it to become an archive.

A growing record of people, places and moments captured on physical film. Prints, negatives, transparencies, stereo photographs and whatever strange analog object I decide to make next.

I want to travel farther.

Photograph more people.

Work with people I never imagined I'd have the opportunity to photograph.

Make photographs that outlive the website, the social media post, and hopefully me.

Maybe someday somebody will pull one of my slides out of a box and wonder who the hell these people were and why some lunatic was still shooting them on film decades after everyone else went digital.

I'd be perfectly happy with that.

Because after all these years, I'm still basically that kid who came home from a road trip convinced he was Ansel Adams and asked his mother for her Minolta so he could photograph women for a living.

I just have more cameras now.

— Dante Gallo