The Darkroom She Left Behind
At thirteen, Brooke Nipar was already standing in a darkroom watching photographs emerge from chemical baths. Her grandfather had left her his 35mm camera when he died—an inheritance that turned out to mean more than anyone could have predicted—and she’d been making black-and-white pictures in school before that, the kind of work that requires patience, chemistry, and a particular quality of attention that the digital era has mostly made optional. She studied at the Art Center College of Design, graduated, decided to be a professional photographer, and by the time I spoke with her she’d already shot M.I.A., P. Diddy, Busta Rhymes, Amy Winehouse, Natasha Khan, and Lykke Li.
The Natasha Khan and Lykke Li detail sticks with me—this specific situation of being a genuine fan and then having the job give you an hour in the same room as someone you’ve admired from a distance. The great thing about being a photographer,
she said, is getting the chance to meet people you find interesting and spend a little time with them.
She described both women as kind and as talented as their work suggests, which I believe, because both of them always seemed like they’d be exactly like that.
She had no preference between shooting celebrities and unknowns. What mattered was openness—someone less focused on looking good than on making something interesting happen in front of the camera. With subjects who gave her trouble, she’d found that discomfort was almost always the cause, and easing that discomfort generally fixed everything. She seemed constitutionally disinclined toward grudges.
Her inspirations, reduced to essentials: life, friends, music, fashion, art, travel. Which could sound like a press-kit answer if it weren’t clearly a complete accounting rather than an aspiration. She was living in New York at the time, single, and had the tone of someone who’d made peace with the city’s structural hostility to certainty. In one minute you swear you’ll never go on another date,
she said, and in the next you’ve fallen completely in love with some guy.
The people she loved most were funny ones—the kind of funny that arrives paired with intelligence, the deep involuntary laughter she described as one of the best feelings available. She watched Mad Men, Curb Your Enthusiasm, 30 Rock, and mourned Arrested Development the way you mourn something that deserved a longer life. She read i-D, Purple, Dazed & Confused, and Nylon—insisting on print, on the weight of a photograph held in the hands rather than scrolled past on a screen. For music that year: The XX’s debut, The Horrors, and Radiohead above everything else, Radiohead so thoroughly that she’d driven across the entire United States to catch six shows on their last tour.
The darkroom she’d left behind years earlier and didn’t miss. What she was working toward was music videos—staying a photographer, she said, but directing, making music move. I keep thinking about that camera her grandfather left her. The weight of an object passed from someone who loved it to someone who will love it even more, and what that kind of inheritance quietly asks of you.