M Dougherty

The Darkroom

For Nancy Rexroth: Secrets of My Power, the first full-career retrospective of the photographer, the Cincinnati Art Museum asked me to rebuild Rexroth's darkroom in scent. The goal was the actual smell of the room and its chemistry, as close as I could get.

Year
2026
Commission
Cincinnati Art Museum
Exhibition
Nancy Rexroth: Secrets of My Power, Oct 2, 2026 to Jan 3, 2027
Venue
Thomas R. Schiff Galleries 234 and 235
Curator
Nathaniel M. Stein, Curator of Photography
Brief
Accuracy over appeal
Diffusion
Passive, from a raw ceramic stone, one visitor at a time
Credit
Scent by M Dougherty
White scent station below Rexroth photographs on a gallery wall, with a label and a sliding cover
The scent station in the gallery, Cincinnati Art Museum, 2026. Photo: Charlotte Ogorek.

The brief

Rexroth is best known for IOWA, the 1977 photobook she printed by hand in her darkroom in Albany, Ohio. Charlotte Ogorek of the museum brought me on with one instruction, accuracy over appeal. Visitors should smell Rexroth's practice, chemistry and all.

The room

The darkroom was built into a closet in Rexroth's house by her father, who painted the inside pink. She calls it full of magic, a private room with a lock on the door.

Black-and-white film frame of a small darkroom: a long wooden sink, an office chair, shelves of chemical bottles, a wall timer and film canisters on a side table.
Rexroth's darkroom in Albany, Ohio, where she worked on IOWA. Archival photograph.

The build

Rexroth sent her full list of chemicals and ranked their smells from memory. I smelled a working darkroom again, then built the scent around stop bath and fixer, with dry woods for the closet and a papery note for the Kodak paper.

The first version smelled too good. A friend complimented it, which meant it had failed the brief, so I pushed it back toward the room.

structure:

stop bath
Acetic Acid, the hero, sharp and vinegary
fixer
2-Ethyl Furan, a second pillar, with Yeast Thiazoline as a low sulfurous hum
spent chemistry
a sulfurous accent for hours of use
the closet
dry woods
Kodak paper
a fatty, papery register
industrial edge
Xylenols

Access

The scent is one of the exhibition's new multisensory access points. It diffuses passively from a raw ceramic stone, one visitor at a time, so people who do not take in the work by sight can sense how the photographs were made.

The station with its cover slid open, showing the perforated ceramic stone
Slide the cover to reveal the stone and smell it. Photo: Charlotte Ogorek.
Gallery view of the exhibition with the scent station among framed photographs
Installation view, Thomas R. Schiff Galleries. Photo: Charlotte Ogorek.

“It might seem strange to correct a scent for smelling too good, but that's the metric for failure in this brief.”

From Secrets of the Darkroom, Scent Made Digital, Sep 24, 2026, where the full story of the build is told.

Shown at

  • 2026Nancy Rexroth: Secrets of My Power, Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH, Oct 2, 2026 to Jan 3, 2027. A Featured Exhibition of the 2026 FotoFocus Biennial: The Long View

Press

With thanks

Nancy Rexroth. Charlotte Ogorek, Cincinnati Art Museum. Elizabeth Gonzalez, picturehouse + thesmalldarkroom. Harry Sherwood, Harrison Joseph.