Our Mission


The Bushwick Community Darkroom is a space that fosters creation and collaboration among New York photographers, amateur and professional. We firmly believe that everyone has something both to learn and teach and we strive to be a space where everyone who comes through learns from someone, teaches something to someone or a combination of the two. Photographers like talking to each other and exchanging ideas about new techniques and media. We hope to be an environment perfectly suited to that by allowing folks to work along side each other or mingle over a book of photography.

Our goal is to provide a nurturing environment where photographers of all levels can come and learn and practice their art and feel good doing it. A community photography center for Bushwick. Because there really isn’t one and there really needs to be.

We welcome drop-ins during our hours of operation to rent the darkroom or just check out the space. We also offer crash courses in Black and White printing and Color printing, just bring in developed negatives and you are ready to make prints. If you want to support BCD's work, you can make a tax-deductible donation here. We'll be using all donations to get better materials, expand our space, and open up more workshops and community programs.

Our History

The darkroom was originally started in 2010 by Lucia. Having graduated from the School of Visual Arts she found herself without darkroom access for the first time in a very long time. One day she decided to build herself one in a closet in the basement of her apartment building. Then she realized that perhaps she wasn't the only person in Brooklyn yearning for a reasonably priced darkroom and some of the sense of photographic community that she had had in college. She decided to run a Kickstarter campaign and see if she could raise enough money to buy all the necessary equipment, chemicals, etc. To her great astonishment the Kickstarter campaign was successfully funded! Now she had to build a darkroom... So she did! and on February 20th 2011 the Bushwick Community Darkroom opened in a closet on Troutman st. As time went by word spread and people actually started using the darkroom. Eventually it got so busy that Lucia didn't even have time to work in it anymore. That was around the time that Lucia met Vanessa. Vanessa envisioned building a darkroom with a production studio attached so they joined forces and in September 2012 the Bushwick Community Darkroom re-opened at the Shops at the Loom. We now have 4 b&w enlargers, 2 color enlargers and a Fujimoto CP-51 color print processor! It's been an amazing journey thus far and we're super excited for the future.

Local Arts Programming

Every so often we organize and curate photography shows, rock shows and other parties/events. We always work with local artists so if you are a photographer, musician, or other artist and have an idea for an event that might work well with our mission or space we would love to hear from you. Please Email Us!

For details on our currently planned programming please visit our Calendar page.