This thesis is grounded in ongoing debates about how photographic images are read, particularly the persistent tendency for Black queer photography to be approached primarily through the frameworks of identity -thinking and representation. While such readings remain valuable, they often eclipse the conditions, materials, and gestures through which these images come into being. This research argues instead for a shift toward praxis: toward the material procedures, sensual relations, and atmospheric operations that shape photographic production. By foregrounding the process, this thesis re-situates Black queer photographic work within the distributive, sensuous, and material dynamics that inform its making.In response to the limitations of representational readings, The Wet Darkroom as Distributive Sensorium proposes a new approach that concretely changes the register of analysis. Rather than treating the wet darkroom as a neutral technical space, the thesis focuses on its material and sensuous dimensions, its textures, atmospheres, chemical agencies, and tactile negotiations, that actively shape photographic emergence. Despite its foundational role, the wet darkroom remains strangely under-theorised across both historical and contemporary photographic studies, a gap this thesis directly confronts. The central premise is that by foregrounding logics of sense and prioritising the non-visual aspects of image-making, a different method of engaging Black queer photographic practice becomes possible. This approach challenges entrenched orientations within photographic studies that overvalue vision and underplay the radical materiality of darkness, its immersive, distributive, and sensory operations that contribute to the formation of the image as a kind of photographic skin. Ajamu Ikwe-Tyehimba: The Wet Darkroom as Distributive Sensorium Accordingly, the thesis argues for understanding the wet darkroom as both the site and expression of a poetics of production. Here, the darkroom becomes not merely a technical chamber but a generative, sensuous environment that co- collaborates in the emergence of the wet image. This practice-led research reconfigures photographic studies, methods, and methodologies by disrupting conventional understandings of the darkroom and reclaiming it as an active, non-neutral agent in the making of images. Chapter 1, Darkness, challenges Enlightenment and representational frameworks in order to shift attention from vision to the non-representational dimensions of making. Chapter 2, Exposure, explores how image-making intersects with poetics of error, touch and transgression. Chapter 3, Liquidity, examines moments when processes “fail, ” reframing these instances as generative poetics of error and aligning liquidity with destructive plasticity. Ultimately, the thesis argues for a sensually attuned material theory of the wet darkroom, one that refuses the flattening of this space and its images, and instead insists on the experiential, the immaterial, and the poetics of making-as-sensing.