Bushwick Community Darkroom

J Kim

I thought about the consequences of posting this review (for this business) for a while before posting this but because my experience was so nightmarish and because of the amount of money photographers spend on getting their photos developed--not to mention the sentimental value each film has--I am posting this after much thought as a fair warning to future customers. To be fair, this could be a rare occasion and maybe I just had bad luck in terms of timing, but it took me almost a month to receive all my scans back after submitting 8 rolls. But each time I emailed them for information on the status of my films, I was met with silence for a few days, until I followed up again, or my initial questions were evaded multiple times and previously answered questions were repeated. I think it's great that this is a community-run darkroom and I wish I could be more supportive, but I also think if I'm spending over $140 to get my films developed and scanned, the customer service should have been more indicative of the prices they put on their services. After weeks of sporadic responses from them, and days of trying to track down what happened to my last 120 film, I finally went to pick up the scans and ask them in person what happened to my last roll because I wasn't receiving any helpful responses via email (someone would instead constantly reply that my scans had been uploaded when I was asking them an entirely different question). Instead, I was shown a blank roll, told it was probably my fault even though the rolls I took on that same day with the same camera (which had no operational issues that day as far as I could tell) were developed perfectly fine elsewhere. And the person handing me my film just laughed and told me, "that sucks" and mentioned I could probably receive partial credit for it if I emailed them. I understand mistakes happen. I understand maybe I could have made that mistake and somehow really produced a blank roll. But what really bothers me is that I was given half-hearted, default apologies of "we apologize for the inconvenience" instead of an honest answer and explanation about why the scans that were initially uploaded weren’t even my photos and why it took so long. If people find this community darkroom helpful and productive, that's great. I hope it really is an educational and welcoming community. But this was my experience and I think people should know as much as they can if they're going to be spending significant amounts to get their film developed because beyond the question of whether my film is "good enough" to be missed or not, those memories were really important to me and my family, and the people I love in those photos are never going to be the same with everything they've endured, and the joy that those photos were meant to spark are always going to be missing in our chapter. And yes, "that sucks."

Niklas Wiechmann

Horrible customer service and bad quality prints.

Varsha Suresh

Best place to develop film in Brooklyn

Brittany Wright

at this point, im not even sure if this is an actual, real business or not. the customer service is completely non existent and staff will not answer emails, calls or DM’s after over a month of reaching out. Big red flag. I would not bother doing business with them.