I’m Michael White. I own Temperature Service, an HVAC company in Indianapolis. Stop Bath Studio, based in Noblesville, Indiana, is what I’m building on the side of that, not yet a business, more of a practice I’m growing into one. The two aren’t separate instincts though: build something that works reliably and doesn’t need me standing over it to keep working.
Photography covers a lot of ground for me: large format, digital, drone, and infrared, alongside analog processes like direct positive paper, dry plates, and silver gelatin. I started in a high school darkroom in 1989, and I still move across formats and processes rather than settling into one, because the process is part of what I love, not an aesthetic I’m chasing.
I inherited a lens from my great-grandfather, a Bausch & Lomb Rapid Rectilinear in its original Kodak shutter, and built an exhibit around it: History in Focus, a project documenting Noblesville buildings on the same glass he saw the world through over a century ago. My wife and I moved to this town for its old-town character and material history, not by circumstance, and that project is the most literal version of why.
My darkroom is in the basement of the old First Missionary Baptist Church, now the HCAA’s Birdie Gallery, where I develop and print. Right next to it is my small studio built for controlled shooting, and the layout isn’t an accident: shoot a large format negative or plate in one room, walk through the door, and develop it in the next. My space at Noblesville Creates is separate from both, a dedicated public-facing gallery where the finished work actually gets shown.
Temperature Service is where the discipline comes from. Running an HVAC company teaches you that systems either hold up under real conditions or they don’t, and neither business nor photography forgives sloppiness. One funds the freedom to take the other seriously.
If you want the standard behind all of it: I have to be able to explain why something exists, in the work, on the wall, in the darkroom or in my workshop. If I can’t, it doesn’t earn its place.