As most of you know, I was a resident at the Willapa Bay AiR for the month of October. Photographing with my 120 Pinhole camera onto color negative film, I wanted to make a personal record of the Long Beach peninsula, a place I have been going to regularly for over 30 years. Two miles wide and 28 miles long, the peninsula is bounded by the Willapa Bay to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. The roar of the ocean is a constant. The people who live there make their living from oysters, cranberries, fish and the tourists. Leadbetter National Wildlife Refuge, on the north is a wonderful place to hike and walk. Cape Disappointment is on the South end along with many camp grounds and the Lewis and Clark museum.
I set out every day to photograph, often taking no more than 12 photographs a day (one roll). I looked at and listened to the ocean and the birds and the bay. Here is my first take on the images. Thirty-four of them are in this portfolio and I am amazed by how each one speaks to me. As always thank you for looking. Please visit the Willapa Bay Peninsula and love it as much as I do.
I am a lucky person. Mostly. Since the pandemic began, I have been staying home, like most people and as most of you know, I shattered the femur in my right leg, August 24th. It took almost four months for that to heal. In the meantime, my friends have been very good to me and while I have not done a lot of new pinhole work, I have been well taken care of and been well fed. A website designer and friend, Angela Prosper thought I should definitely upgrade my almost ten year old website. She is so right and she designed a new one for me; She is a great designer who is visually smart and creative and also has the ability to explain the technical “stuff” to an techno-idiot like me. Go to her website and you can see for yourself: rainydayprosper.com
On the new website there is a place for you to sign up to get an email each time I post something new (probably about twice a month). I have a new Mailchimp account.and will send you an email {if you fill out the newsletter form) when I do a new blog post. . What else have I been shooting all these long months of the pandemic? I turned to flowers and have begun to photograph them with my 8 x10 inch pinhole camera on color negative film. I found a box of 8 x 10 color negative film that I won in a raffle several years ago. I also been given some awesome tins for making new long exposure cameras. I made two into cameras and are still exposing–one is a lunch box, (it has become a 2 hole camera) several are beautiful round tins that were old tobacco cans and one is a big potato chip can that has become a three hole camera and is exposing as we speak along with the lunch box camera. I dreamed about doing pinhole portraits of people. So along with this new website, I will post a few photographs that I have made in the last year and hopefully snag you for my new email list Thank you for reading this post. Oh and I made some long exposure pinholes of the parking lot where I live in Sodo and was in a show that was featured on zoom. Here are some images that are recent. The featured image is called Portrait of Jenny Riffle because well it is her.
Well, I have been working steadily on all the images from Civita. So many I do not know what is good and what is not any more. I would like to add at least 10 more images so I can get around 25 uploaded and make a portfolio. What have I learned so far?
My scanner is dusty. I spend a lot of time cleaning it and getting rid of dust on the files. I love working with Photoshop and really do not mind the dust. It is a way to zoom in to about 300 percent and look at all the details. It makes me homesick for Civita. But in order for it to be good photograph, for me, the dust has to go.
I love the exaggerated color. It is so powerful this color. I am not enhancing in Photoshop. There is no need to. And while in this surreal place, the colors did pop out and make me stop sometimes and catch my breath.
I need to return to Civita in a different season. In the winter when I was there, a big fog hovered over us. That mixed with rain, made colors pop. A different season will mean different light. I would love to see how the evening light looks on film..
Of course I have learned so many things working on this project other than the three items above For example a question I am seeking the answer to: What makes a good diptych? How does one shoot to ensure that what you get is what you saw? There are many more questions to be answered but this is not the place.
I feel incredibly lucky to have these images. I am often surprised by them and do not think that they were made by me. But I did this, I took these images. People have asked me, why take photographs that are jumbled together and not “real”. They are not always easy to look at I understand that sentiment. But they are also different than the millions of other photographs taken of this touristy place. The fact is that they are very real. Everyone who knows this place, Civita, will recognize the streets, the cliffs, the buildings, the church, the fog. I did my best to simply take photographs as I saw them. Thanks for looking.
The featured image is the entrance to the tunnel that runs under Civita.
Other possible titles:
Etruscan Caves
Street View
San Donato #5
Lone Cypress
Street View, Landscape and Tiled Roofs
From the Garbage Storage Area
Apartments
Cats
San Donato Disappears
Gate and Street on the Edge
The Valley and the Tunnel Entrance
Fog in the Valley from the Santa Maria Gate (Single Image)
I spent a month in Civita di Bagnoregio, an Etruscan hilltop town in Italy on a fellowship from the Civita Institute, (civitainstitute.org). Since I arrived home mid-December, I have been scanning and editing images. I am still not done but three days ago, finished scanning the 120 color negative film that I shot in a little pinhole camera called the Zero. It took a beating in Civita, the cobblestones, and the tuff rock outside, and the stone floors in the houses are all unforgiving. I dropped the camera, it broke, I taped it back together and kept going. It gave me 32 rolls of film with about 190 files. I shot so that each image related to the one before or after. This was a difficult thing to do but I wanted to overlap the images so I shot with the camera on a rectangular setting and advanced it as if it were set to a square. This way I did not get any lines between the frames of the negatives–and I made 16 images to a roll instead of 12. I could not see any of these images because the film had to be developed once I returned to the States. Also pinhole cameras do not have a viewfinder and I had to become astute at knowing what the cameras would see. Two things helped me get great negatives: the Pinhole Assist app which enabled me to use my iPhone as a light meter and the wonderful people at the Shot on Film Store in Lake City, WA (www.shotonfilmstore.com/), who developed my film and did a great job.
So what did I photograph? The old Etruscan hilltop town of Civita where people have lived for thousands of years: this is what was before me. The pinhole exposures are at least 10 seconds and no people showed up in my photos. Mostly I photographed every morning at sunrise until about 9:30 when the tourists started to arrive. I photographed the town, the streets (cobblestones with no cars), the landscape, the drop off at the edges of the town, the hilltop and the ancient church, the walls, the stones, the light, the fog, and of course the incredible color. (Overexposure exaggerated it). Doing this was a joy but made me quite nervous at the same time. Was I getting the correct exposure? Did I really think I could overlap the images and it would work? With the amazing amount of wind and rain would anything be discernible? What would the townspeople think of these images? The town is a museum but lived in as well. It isn’t the way it actually is became my mantra. Each day I would photograph with my Zero for a few hours, come back, eat breakfast, clean up the apartment and then go back out around noon to take some more photographs. The afternoon was more difficult with the number of tourists in the town and the light. In late afternoon I would eat some lunch, then work on the computer for a while and as soon as it got dark, go back out again and take night photographs with my DSLR. (see previous blog post janetneuhauser.com/civita-a-month/). Then a nice long Italian dinner and bed.
Now, as I scan and look and scan and look, I am slowly understanding what it was that I did. Mixing the landscape with the architecture made sense, but it was something I had not done before. I am posting thirteen images (including the featured image) that show the variety of the 120 pinhole images that were captured. All are from the Zero camera 120 on color negative film (except the first one, a double exposure from the 4 x 5 large format pinhole still color negative film in which I exposed the full moon outside my kitchen door all night long, then the walkway to the entrance in the fog on the same sheet of film). I find the editing process to be as satisfying as the shooting. Thanks for looking. (PS Click on the first image to get a slide show).
The featured image is the top of the entrance to the Altar of the Virgin Mary down off the trail by the cliffs. Working titles of the others top to bottom, left to right are:
Full moon trail and Walkway (Double Exposure/4 x 5 negative)
I have been in Civita di Bagnoregio for the past month shooting pinhole photographs on a fellowship. Civita is a surreal, isolated hilltop town north of Rome and I fell in love with It. It survived largely due to the work of an architect, Astra Zarina and her husband Tony Costa Heywood, also an architect. Read this article to learn what Astra Zarina did with her fascinating life. (Astra Zarina). The Civita Institute, known also as NIAUSI, now manages the houses and awards fellowships to all types of people, among many other things. Their website, civitainstitute.org has so much information: you should go there and read about it.
So this is what I did.
I put 35 cameras from the Pinhole Project around the town when I first arrived. They were loaded with paper. Since these needed a good thirty days of exposure, I put them up right away. Not in the plan was how much rain there was, I mean a lot of rain and wind which soaked and moved the cameras: some so wet that I had to pour the water out when I retrieved them. The tape used to stick the cameras up did not work at all with the tuff, the rock of Civita. Instead I put the cameras on downspouts, railings, fences and trees. One went in a car. Some got taped to windows inside.
The response from the citizens of Civita was gracious and for that I am grateful. They seemed interested, respectful and kind. Not one of the cameras was taken down or messed with. Apparently there are no pinhole bandits about the area. I have retrieved the cameras I put up and am in Rome right now. The paper negatives have been removed from the cans and are in a light tight box waiting to be scanned; several cans have been given to interested people with which to make images to be retrieved later. I will scan my negatives as soon I as I get home! I also have 32 rolls of 120 C-41 (color negative) film from my Zero 2000. This film is waiting to be developed along with 30 sheets of 4 x 5 C-41 film shot in my Leonardo. All of that film, once it is developed can be scanned and shared. I have been researching developing my own color negatives but am a wee bit nervous to start with this batch. I have been told that it is easy and would certainly be less expensive. Please chime in if you have done this type of development before or want to help!
I also shot a lot of iphone photographs. I have always loved that camera. I will probably make a little book of these images. I have been publishing them on Instagram as a way to keep in touch with everyone and everything. It felt good to publish to Instagram which worked when nothing else did but What’s App. (What’s Up with that?) I will do a blog post of some that did not make it to instagram in the future. I just have to say: I hate the selfie stick and do not understand the need to photograph oneself in front of historical places or monuments or landscapes. I have never used the iphone in this manner. And I never will. Just saying.
I did not intend to but started also to work seriously at night with my DSLR. I brought it along as a kind of polaroid for the pinholes and was glad I did despite how heavy it was. The rain would stop and the town would glisten. Since the images are digital, I have been working on them and have posted some previously unfacebooked images here.
Patience. It will no doubt take me at least four or even six weeks or longer to get these pinhole photographs done. I do hope there is something valuable there that will intrigue me and you and enlighten us both. I learned some interesting concepts living in Civita: that I can eat well, make art and be happy that I actually forgot to lock the door at night. Photography at night is more physically demanding than the day but digital makes it seem easy. Digital gives us that shot of instant gratification. In the meantime, here are some night photographs as promised. Grazie a tutti cari lettori! Buona Sera!
Some Titles:
Moonrise in Civita
Night Delivery The Arch Fantasma Boar Hunting in the Moonlight From the Street: A Home
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