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.
Recently the Pinhole Project received a storefront window in the South Lake Union Area sponsored by Shunpike. This storefront is a 12 foot long window that will house some of the Pinhole Project images for about three months. It will house a very small percentage of the images in the archive. The window is three feet deep and I will be putting prints up on the wall and cameras up on the window (from the inside). The goal is to photograph during the duration of the installation and refill the cameras as I empty them and put up recent prints. So far I have some cameras to put up, and nine small round tins which will be in a grid. I am glad to have this opportunity and am printing photographs wanting to print many more. I love the simplicity of this photography. The image below I printed originally but recently a ten foot print was made for the window. This First Season of the Sunny Arms Artist Project, “Out There” is featured here. The Sunny Arms artists exposed pinhole cameras from their windows looking out, from Equinox to Solstice, a total of four times (all four seasons of the year, 90 days each season). The building is in South Sodo, five stories, in an industrial neighborhood; decidedly not beautiful but these images make it seem so. The first season, below is on a bus shelter at South Beacon Avenue and South Holly Street. I knew it would print well large. The bus shelter project was sponsored by the Photo Center NW and King County Metro; they put photographs on shelters all over King County. (Go here for a previous blog post on the bus shelter project). Take a look.
I have been poring over all the Pinhole Project images. Each day brings new choices. With almost four thousand images in the archive it is difficult to choose. I have been printing from different “galleries” or folders on the website. One print I have done is from people who have shot at least ten images and now they have their own folders on the website. I am not done yet but I printed this one yesterday.
These big pieces of paper are 22 x 17 inches. I think I can only fit six in the installation. On the window, inside looking out will be several pinhole tins that will be taking photographs of the street. I will use several tins and put a print on the window next to the camera so people can understand how they see. I have a saltine tin two hole that has been used three times. The problem is, I only have crazy photographs from that camera, it must a camera with the crazies. My brother, Steve Neuhauser, used the camera inside his boathouse where he lives on his boat. This is what he took a photograph of. The featured image is also from the Saltine Tin.
This image was made in a old Poinsettia covered Christmas tin. I think it must have held cookies. It is the perfect shape for a two hole camera. This I took during the pandemic, hung the day the lockdown began and finished on April 26th. I am planning on using it in the window too.
So if you need something to do during the summer, go downtown after June 1st, the install date. Park in the South Lake Union Area (SLUA) and walk over to Boren and John Streets. You can see all the images that are up and stand very still for oh about a week and you can be recorded on the cameras in the window. If you walk around there are several other artists with windows in the area, I think 8 total. There will not be a formal tour of the windows by Shunpike this year as in the past. But you can walk around down there and it is a pleasant neighborhood. Thank you #Shunpike for this opportunity. The featured image is one of the big prints I made with a lot of images on it. You can see the image in its entirety at the Storefront. I will post some photographs of the installation when it is installed. Thanks for reading. And get a camera and join the Pinhole Project.
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
As director of the Pinhole Project, I am always looking for new ideas and new cameras with which to make pinhole images for both me and the participants. Recently, in the past year or so, I have been using two cameras for myself again and again: a three hole metal can that is a former Dewar’s Scotch container and a smaller squarish can that is a bit bigger than the Altoid tins but has only one hole. I have been working on two series of images with these cameras: the Getaways are images that I expose from a car or truck during a road trip. I have made several of these; and love the way they record the sun trails. The Home series which I have made with the three hole can, are images made within my studio and just outside of it, usually exposed for at least six weeks and they record in triplet a myriad of things both inside and outside the studio. I have also used a smaller tin and a round tin for these images. A friend gave me a Solarcan and I made one with that as well. Since pinhole photography has become something of an obsession with me, I generally have two or three cameras exposing at one time. When I tire of the look or run out of ideas I will try something different. In the meantime, I present some of the images to you, first the Getaways and then the Home series.
The Getaways: All were made from a moving vehicle with the pinhole camera attached either outside the car or on a window facing out. Exposures are usually about 2 weeks. The titles are as follows (top to bottom): To Doe Bay and Back, Oregon Road Trip, To Northern Idaho and Back, To the Grand Tetons and Back, Top of the World, The Sunny Arms from the Parking Lot, Near Seiku, The featured image was made on a road trip to Oregon with the camera on the front hood of the car facing b
Home Series with the 3 hole camera: First two are of the windows in my studio. The next two are from the front windows looking out. The blue image was made with a Solarcan pinhole camera exposed for three weeks. The next image is of the curtains and the window sill made with a regular one hole camera and the last image is with a round can inside the screen doors entering the studio.
There are many more. These are just the most recent. Thanks for looking and if you would like to be a part of the Pinhole Project, go to The Pinhole Project website and send me an email to join.
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