Carol Golemboski is Professor of Photography at the University of Colorado Denver. She has taught there since arriving from Ithaca, NY, in 2002. The alchemical magic of the darkroom is central to her image making; in fact, magic and notions of the supernatural have been recurring themes throughout her career, which began in Virginia in the 1990s. We connected most recently when I was distributing unused photo paper from the late Sandy Hume’s house in Boulder. Several weeks later, at her home studio, she showed me a remarkable journal that consists of strips of paper she has developed and notated, sourced from numerous posthumous estates such as Hume’s; conceptually it represents an ethereal paper trail that conjures up generations of mostly anonymous hobbyists plus the occasional professional such as Hume.

When we gathered for this interview in September 2025, I began by asking her about her schooling and early influences.

CG: I went to the University of Virginia as an undergrad, and my photography teacher was Holly Wright. She was the only Photo teacher at UVA at the time. The art department offered intro, intermediate, and advanced photography courses, which could be taken repeatedly for credit. I wasn't originally an art major, I was studying communications, but at some point, after I had taken enough photography classes, I decided to double major.

Holly’s classes were open-ended; there were very few lectures, and little technical instruction. Overall, it was a conceptual program that offered students a lot of feedback. For inspiration, I used to go to the library at UVA and pull books off the shelf of photographers who were unknown to me. Early influences like Diane Arbus and Ralph Eugene Meatyard were chance discoveries. … I liked work that was a little foreboding, very psychological. And I loved photographers who weren't necessarily manipulating their imagery at all. It was just the subject matter, what they were shooting, and how they were editing their images, that made their work psychologically charged.

RCJ: I was reading about your MA thesis on the Wicca. I guess this was in Madison?

CG: Yes, I did a project about witches in grad school at UW Madison (images above). I photographed the Wiccan community as part of my MA exhibition. It was a continuation of my interest in things that veered toward the supernatural. When I first started that project I tried to photograph during their rituals, and it felt disrespectful, too much like photographing in church. So, I began scheduling appointments with the people in the community, going to their houses and asking them to recreate some of the gestures from their rituals. I wanted to capture something that would visually express their spiritual energy. Around the same time, I started combining photography and drawing and printing through mylar. It was an attempt to make something visible that I would never be able to capture with my camera. I also did some pinhole work with that project, which enabled me to blur motion in a significant way. I don't know how strong those pictures were, but the project was an important part of my development.

RCJ: Did you grow up in that sort of mysterious environment?

CG: No, not at all. In fact, maybe that's why I’m attracted to mystery, because I grew up in an utterly normal suburban military household. My family didn’t move around much by the time I was born, but my older siblings practically went to a different school every year. We ended up in Virginia, right outside of Washington DC, and that's where I grew up. When I was a kid, I always thought I would be a writer. I loved mysteries, and I used to write, not surprisingly, loads of creepy short stories. Eventually my interest in writing fiction transferred to photography. I feel appreciative that my parents were so supportive of me because creative writing and visual art were not a big part of their world.

RCJ: You earned an MA at the University of Wisconsin Madison, and then an MFA in Virginia. How did that work?

CG: Well, I was accepted into UW Madison’s graduate art program, and I could have stayed there for my MFA, but it was me and about twenty printmakers. They didn't have a peer group of other photographers so I decided that it would be best for me to get the MA in Wisconsin and then look elsewhere for a stronger photo-based MFA program. I transferred to Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in 1997 to get my MFA (1999). That's when I started the Psychometry series (images below).

The very first pictures from that series, the oldest ones, are from my MFA project. When I moved back to Virginia, I started collecting antiques and photographing them in old houses. I felt that those objects had wonderful, unknowable histories, and they seemed kind of eerie and magical to me. The photography graduate building at VCU during that period was originally a convent (below left). It was a three-story brick building with a small chapel on the first floor, and little rooms that used to be the nun's bedrooms where grad students had their studios. By the time I enrolled at VCU, the whole building was falling apart, virtually crumbling. Nobody worked in there but me because it was so creepy and dilapidated. There were rumors that it was haunted. That environment inspired me.

CG: I continued to work on Psychometry through about 2008 or 2009.

RCJ: Right. By which time you were in Colorado, teaching at CU Denver. You made a digital version that was very successful (above right). Can you talk about that?

CG: That would've been 2013. I worked with former student who was in our design program at CU Denver, to make an artist book app. The designer created the code, but we collaborated on all the ideas, pages, and assets. I had been considering ways to get a book published but I wasn't finding any publishers who wanted to take it on. The app felt like a way that I could use new technology to get my work out there. It was downloaded in over seventy countries.

I had this idea that it would be something that would offer the viewer a really different experience than a traditional book. I'd given artist talks and thought about how much people seemed to enjoy hearing the behind-the-scenes stories like the one about the about the convent, for example. For that section of the app, I had a friend in Richmond take pictures of the building. The app was filled with all sorts of anecdotes and pictures of me photographing in old houses. It also included explanations of my process. There were video interviews and objects that would spin around if you traced them with your finger. It was pretty cool.

RCJ: Is it still available?

CG: No, within two years Apple changed the formatting for apps and the technology we used to create it was no longer supported. I still have a version of it on an old iPad, and the only reason it exists is that I have never updated that iPad’s operating system. When Apple made those changes, I had a decision to make: do I rehire the designer to redo the whole app, or let it go? I decided to let it go when I realized that the process of updating that technology would never end. So, I started thinking of the app as a rare artist book that's gone out of print. It'll be this thing that once existed and is now only a legend. Right?

RCJ: Right! Looking at your career, your work seems to develop in a straight though-line from one project to another.

CG: That’s true. It doesn't change drastically all at once. It seems more like a slow-moving ship that eventually takes a different course. Magic (images below) came after Psychometry. It all started because I saw an ad in the classifieds for an estate sale of a former magician.

I had been going to estate sales for years to get objects to photograph. When I saw that ad I figured I go to the estate sale and pick up a few objects for the Psychometry series. But when I got to the sale, there were boxes and boxes and boxes of these amazing magic trick props. I got a good price, so I just put them all in the trunk of my car and went home. As I started photographing those objects, I began to realize it was its own series, different from Psychometry. It dawned on me that I had been doing tricks in the darkroom for my entire career. I also started thinking about the connections between magic and photography. Anybody who has ever worked in a darkroom describes the image coming up in the developer as magic.

There's also a relationship between truth, deception, and illusion in photography. I began thinking about the ways I could use magic trick props as a metaphor for analog photography and what people are willing to believe in a photograph. I incorporated a lot of old school photographic tricks into those pictures, like suspending objects from fishing line or creating double exposures in camera. In the end, those pictures were a reference to both worlds, the realm of magic and photography.

RCJ: Did you ever actually learn to be a magician?

CG: No. I did start collecting vintage “how-to” books for magicians. I love the diagrams and illustrations in those books. I had a student assistant at one point and the two of us tried to learn some of the tricks to determine their photographic value. I always felt like the descriptions in those books left some crucial part out. They're written in a way that suggests you'll be able to perform the trick if you follow the directions. But I never could.

I had an exhibition several years back where the venue hired a magician for the opening, and he was walking around doing sleight of hand. He was amazing! I genuinely could not tell how he was doing the tricks. In my photographs, I don’t use the props in the way a magician would. In fact, I don't know how to do the tricks, and I don't really want to know. The magician he told me that he thought that it was better that I didn't know, because it made the pictures more mysterious.

RCJ: I'm intrigued about your use of expired photo paper that you find in estate sales and homes. We connected this time because I’ve been filtering Sandy Hume's photo archive and darkroom equipment, and you rescued a lot of paper from the house. Then you told me how you test each packet of paper to see how fogged it is, and you choose which paper to use depending on the project you are working on. Some paper you find is left behind by military personnel returning from Europe, so you’ve gathered all kinds of obscure brands. You also gather as much information about the previous owner as you can and notate everything in a journal. It's really an amazing document. One aspect I’m especially interested in is how you identify with the people whose paper you are using.

CG: Most of the papers are from the sixties, seventies, and eighties, and a lot of times I don't have any idea who originally owned the paper. A lot of those people have passed away, and their families are trying to figure out what to do with their belongings. I like to think that I'm rescuing old boxes of paper that would have otherwise ended up in a dumpster. I want to preserve some of those materials to see if they can be used for something.

I have a lot of respect for 20th century photographers. Even as they grew older, they could not seem to get rid of their darkroom equipment and supplies. Often their materials sat unused for decades in little basement darkrooms that were barely bigger than a closet. I hope that those photographers would appreciate that somebody is interested in taking care of these things that they couldn't part with. I totally understand the impulse to hoard the materials. You always hope that you have more great photographs in you.

I’m also interested in tracking down information about the photographers themselves. Sometimes I know someone who knew them, like with you and Sandy Hume. In other cases, I’ll find a name written on a box of photo paper, which is sort of like a clue, or I can derive information based on the address of an estate sale. Often, though, I have little to no information at all.

RCJ: Your playing card series (above, images 1-4) uses that old paper and if I’m getting this right, is created by masking the card symbols and dropping the paper directly into the chemicals, after which you peel off the masking tape. How did that series evolve?

CG: I started that series in 2018. At that time, a lot of artists were already finding new uses for old photographic papers through alternative processes like lumen prints and chemigrams. I didn't want to use the paper in the same way that everybody else was using it. So, I start looking for creative ways to extend the concept of magic, using the papers and darkroom chemicals in unconventional ways.

Actually, I’m now working on a new project with vintage paper dolls from the 1940s (above, images 5-9). It'll be a two-part process - part analog, printed on the expired paper, using techniques I learned when making the card tricks, and part digital, printed on inkjet paper. I've also recently been photographing vintage objects that relate to social constructs and representations of women. A lot of the images in this new work focus on the objectification of women or suggest something about gender roles and domesticity. The images reflect a toxic mix of feelings that I’m experiencing right now.

RCJ: The paper dolls are part of that?

CG: Yes. They’re newspaper paper dolls from Sunday comic strips from the 1940s and 1950s. The comics section would often contain a pinup-style paper doll and an outfit or two that she could wear. But the backside of the cut-out dolls, because they were printed in newspapers, inevitably include bits of unrelated comic strips. These reverse sides contain all sorts of randomly cropped graphics, text, and colors. As I'm selecting paper dolls to scan, I'm looking for examples that have some sort of nuanced suggestion about women and their place in our culture. I’m also creating silhouettes of these figures on vinyl adhesive that I’m attaching to vintage paper for chemical experiments in the darkroom.

RCJ: Do many of your students want to work in a similar analog/digital hybrid process?

CG: I've definitely seen a resurgence in interest in analog materials in the past ten years. I’m teaching a generation of kids who have grown up with everything digital, and they are intrigued by the darkroom. But it’s super expensive. It's hard for them to afford the afford film and paper, so we're always trying to find ways to help our students out.

RCJ: And you’ve got the environmental consequences as well.

CG: Well, it seems like there are environmental consequences to everything. Obviously, there are huge discussions happening right now about the environmental impact of technology. I’m using darkroom chemicals and that practice has its own problems, but at least I’m recycling darkroom papers that would have likely gone into a landfill. I like to think I’m creating something interesting, relevant, and timely with those expired materials.

END

Please leave a comment or question, and thanks for your interest in Colorado’s photo history!

The Colorado Photo History blog is the online presence for “Outside Influence: Photography in Colorado 1945-1995,” a University Press of Colorado book by Rupert Jenkins. (Note: Because of tariffs and government closures, publication is delayed. New expected release date: March 2026.)

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