Jan 5, 2019 | Portfolio
I have posted a lot of these images before but now I am hopeful that I can make them into a portfolio and put it up on this website. Here is a statement that I haveI wrote.
The images in this collection are made on color negative film, scanned and printed digitally onto cotton rag paper with archival inks. They were either made in a Zero 2000 medium format camera; or in a large format (4 x 5 inch) camera. Some were all-night long exposures, most were exposed for 30-45 minutes when light phenomena happens that can not be predicted. That passage of time is important in these images, for pinhole photography gathers light and records an extended moment differently than the camera with a lens. People become shadows, trees seem to replicate themselves, crashing waves flatten out. colors exaggerate while double exposures occur without intention. Movement is recorded while the time passes. I call this group of photographs Innards because the landscape is soft and the light is layered with what feels like memory. The images put me in touch with a side of myself I didn’t know existed. Over years of experimentation with the pinhole camera, I’ve come to this unconventional place, a mysterious landscape that glows and glistens from within–slightly ominous, endangered, beautiful, and sad. Imperfect and personal.
The preview image is a double exposure titled SomeWhere Near Yachats, Oregon Coast.
Many of these images are available in a self-published boxed book called Innards. Purchase of the book comes with your choice of a print in that is in the book. Published in an edition of 24, there are 10 still available,. Go to the shop on this website to preview the book.
Jun 6, 2017 | Blog
I am pleased to announce that six of my Pinhole Landscapes will be on view this summer at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art (bima.org) in a show called Women in Photography; I am one of ten women being exhibited. When Greg Robinson, the curator asked me to be in the show, he wondered how being a woman had influenced my work. It was an apropos question. I have long wanted to photograph the landscape but not in the way it had historically been done. I did not want to work in the same vein copying the greats, like William Henry Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan and yes even Ansel Adams. And it seemed that all the greats had been men. Making the urban night photographs (Nighttime) had inspired me to try the landscape in a kind of crooked way (see asterisk below). I wanted color, mostly because I love the way the long exposures at night shifted the colors and recorded a certain kind of movement. I knew I could not get that feeling during the day with the a lens camera. The pinhole camera allowed for both a long exposure and color. I have owned a 4 x 5 pinhole camera for years with which I had mostly made still lifes (loupe-holes). I began with an all night long exposure, and it was a perfect negative (a happy accident I later discovered). I scanned that negative and printed it digitally. There was something about that image (Tomales), a seven hour exposure that made me realize that I could do the landscape both at night and during the day. In a crooked way, with the pinhole, with film. The long exposures, in the wind, rain, snow, darkness, make the images soft; the pinhole records light and time like no other type of camera. Mostly when I am making images with the that camera, I am pushing the exposure envelope hoping to get enough light on the film, hoping for the image that I see before me, but it is always turns out differently once it is developed. Sometimes I am constrained by the available light. Sometimes I am in love with the light and the moment and simply hope for the best. All in all, I am well into making the landscape my own way. I am happy not to see the image immediately. Not to be able to actually look through the camera. I love the mystery and the uncertainty. The crookedness of it.
I am beginning to understand that photography is as much about time as it is about light and the pinhole records both. Each image seems to happen against the odds. Usal Beach, below is an example. Taken on the Lost Coast in Northern California, on a dreary, gray evening. It felt creepy, with the abandoned campground, dried-up river to the ocean, high crashing surf, strange noises one could hear but not see. A whole town once existed on this site. The three mile drive on a treacherous dirt road keeps most people away. Yet on the evening I made the image, it seems there had been many people on the beach that day, there were lots of footsteps in the sand. No one was there when this image was made. The waves were close with a steep drop off yet the surf looks deceptively calm in the exposure. While making the image, I had little hope it would turn out. When I saw the negative a month later, I knew I had something.
Usal Beach, CA
I don’t mean to take creepy landscapes but somehow end up in creepy places. Usal Beach was followed by several more images but the one below taken near the Dyke Access Road on the Columbia River speaks to the same aesthetic. Cottonwood Tree, Columbia River was made with the camera perched on a plastic box near the water. It started to rain about 15 minutes into the exposure. A big ship came up the river, in from Astoria. It moved slowly and I decided to make the exposure the length of time it took the ship to come past the camera, about an hour. The cottonwood tree was a victim of flooding and erosion from a very wet winter. I was surprised how it seemed to be growing out of the water. The wake from many boats on the river must have created that effect because the tree looked like it was growing out of the mud when the photograph was made. Again, none of the boats appear in the photograph, because the exposure is too long to record their speed.
Columbia River, WA
There are four other images in the show. One made three years ago, the others within the last year. I hope you can stop by BIMA. The show will be up the entire summer. The work of the ten women included in the show is diverse and interesting. If you are in the Northwest, the opening is on Saturday, June 24th, from 2-5 pm for friends of friends of friends, all are welcome.
Featured Image: The Little Klickitat River
Dec 13, 2015 | Blog
It’s been two years since the Pinhole Project began and well over 2000 people have made an amazing array of long exposure images. Very, very inspiring. I intend to do a blog post on some of the images soon. Bear with me while I update the archive and create a website just for the Archive in 2016. In the meantime, I have been shooting with several pinhole cameras/devices recording the image on film or digitally. The images here represent new work with a few of these cameras. Last summer I shot with the 4 x 5 pinhole, my old buddy, onto color negative film while on the Northern California coast. These images are different than the ones I made two years ago there with the same camera. They frighten me a bit: a cross between faded Kodachrome postcards of my youth and an off-beat surrealist future where the world is unpopulated and lonely. The image below, Salt Point South, is a ten minute exposure during the golden hour, crashing waves flattened out and all the world with a magenta cast . I love standing by the camera during the exposure, knowing I won’t forget the smell of wind and the glorious light. This image is of course not “reality.” It is 20 minutes of time compressed onto a sheet of film exposed though a tiny little hole punched in metal on to sheet film. I did not even get to see it for almost a month.
The image above, Usal Beach, was made on a close damp evening, another long exposure, around fifteen minutes. There were a lot of people around that beach, walking through, unrecorded. The place had a kind of creepy air to it, four miles down a bumpy dirt road, once a “doghole” where loggers lived and worked a hundred years ago, creating a company town which has totally disappeared. Now the place is run down, full of ghosts and garbage, discarded bullet casings and strange cries in the night.
This past year I have also been making images with several homemade camera obscura boxes that project an image through a pinhole into the back side of the box. A hole drilled beneath the pinhole holds the lens for DSLR. It is a wonderful way to record the pinhole image without film. Inspired by one of my heros, Abelard Morell and his camera obscura room photographs done around the world, I decided to try my own hand at homemade portable obscura boxes. I am interested in the way the images feel contained yet expansive at the same time. And I like that while I am making these images I can stand in front of the camera and create a self portrait of sorts. Here is diptych from my old haunt, the Argo Trainyard, just a few blocks from my house. This image was made from two images taken side by side, both long exposures on a windy afternoon and I was able to stand in for the first exposure. For the second, I had to shield the box from the wind.
Another image made with a similar box/contraption, taken outside my front door, with my neighbor standing and chatting during the five exposure.
Both of the above images were inspired in part by a project that I almost got to do but in the end did not–I was hoping to make an old grain silo into a camera obscura. These boxes started as models for that project and evolved into life forms of their own. I do have a self portrait from that silo experience; the pinhole in the silo projected the image of me onto the wall opposite as my DSLR teetered on an upturned bucket inside recording the projected image.
There are many more experiments. I give you a few of my favorites. Why do I like these images better than a tack sharp image made on a tripod with a DSLR or a film camera? What do these images have that those other images do not? I don’t know the answers yet, but I do know that I like to record the passage of time with long exposures — more than a minute and less than oh say 90 days. I like the fact that I have to keep the camera (DSLR) and the camera obscura box together both on separate tripods and move them around together as one big contraption. With the large format pinhole and film I like how the time exposures change reality. These cameras make photography difficult and rewarding — wonderfully so in a world where photography has become so very rote and predictable. Lensless photography is simple but not easy, modern yet historical, unpredictable and thrilling.
Note: The featured image was taken with a great big old cardboard obscura box, with the DSLR. An early experiment, the box had a light leak on the corner which created a lovely red line. And there was some junk inside the box that could have been taken out but wasn’t. Heres to the happy accident.
Sep 22, 2015 | Blog
I am happy to announce the retrieval of two long exposure pinhole cameras. One was left out on a windy high place in the Olympic National Forest (for about eight months) and was intact albeit face down on the ground when found. The other, retrieved from under a bridge on the Lost Coast of Northern California, was covered with spider webs. The former was stapled and nailed and taped onto a stump just at the tree line in a place that is called Top of the World by the locals. That place appears to be a hangout, but the pinhole camera did not stick out among damaged skeet targets, gun casings and broken beer bottles. Early on in the exposure, the camera must have fallen, then fallen again. Someone put it back up at least three times. The incredible view was not recorded, just a crazy mishmash of sun trails.
Then last summer on a trip to the Lost Coast of California, another camera out for just over two years was retrieved. Under an old steel bridge that covered an obscure little river, it survived without falling down or getting wet. Wedged underneath the steel structure, pointing straight down, this camera did not record sun trails but orange squiggly lines, perhaps kids with flashlights under the bridge, who knows what happened. Driving there, I was pretty certain the camera could not have survived for such a long time. But it did and that retrieval is one I will never forget.
I love so much about both of these images. The simplicity of a piece of black and white enlarging paper patiently gathering light over time and then somehow showing color when scanned. The fact that one forgets about the little boxes, time goes forward and then there they are still recording. These little breath mint can pinhole cameras are a tenacious bunch. I am happy to share their images with you.
An Aside: the featured image was made en route to retrieve the two year camera in Northern California. A two-hole camera was placed in the back window of the pick-up truck, the home away from home. The exposure was about two weeks, the time it took to go and get the camera, make some more pinholes, put some more cameras out and drive home. This image feels like a big grin to me, which pretty much sums up how I feel about these images.
Nov 22, 2014 | Blog
I am honored to be chosen as part of the Seattle’s Photographic Center Northwest, PCNW Presents program. They have selected ten photographers to represent for the next two years and will be showing the work in the gallery where people can buy it. This is a big first for me, to have gallery representation in my hometown, and I am humbled and grateful. And I am in very good company with the likes of Jenny Riffle, (http://www.jennyriffle.com/) and Glenn Rudolph (http://www.glennrudolph.com/), both amazing NW photographers. Others include Sylvia Plachy, a photographer I have admired since the 1980’s. For more detailed information on all the photographers, go to http://pcnw.org/exhibitions/pcnw-presents/ Over the next few months the two photographs below will be hanging in the gallery. Stop by and take a look and also visit the show in the main gallery, Well Read: Visual Explorations of the Book. It will make you think differently about books in general.
I have taught at PCNW for the last seven years and have always said that it is the heart and soul of photography in Northwest. I love teaching my ten week class at night: an introduction to the DSLR and “serious” digital photography. I think there is still room in the Monday night class that starts in January. And I will post whenever the PCNW Presents photographers have work on the wall. Stay tuned.
Featured image for this post Georgetown Backyards from the Albro Bridge, 2014 One of my newest night photographs, captured with a DSLR this year.
The two images below while both night photographs were each captured differently. The top image, The Road to Grant’s 50th, is a digital capture made with a DSLR. The image below is made on color negative film, exposed in a pinhole camera. Despite the differences in capture, they have many similarities that may or may not come through on the computer screen. All the more reason to go to the gallery!
Title: The Road to Grant’s 50th, 2012
Print Size: 22” x 15” Frame Size: 22” x 28”
Print Type: Digital Capture Printed on Crane’s Portfolio Rag Paper with Archival Inks
Title: Due West: Lost Coast, California, 2013
Print Size: 22” x 15” Frame Size: 22” x 28”
Print Type: C-41 color negative film exposed in a 4 x 5 inch pinhole camera; Negative scanned and printed on Crane’s Portfolio Rag Paper with Archival Ink
