Jan 23, 2021 | Blog
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.
Flowers: double exposure
Flowers as they died.
Three hole camera from My. Doorway
Mom and Dad’s Grave
Portrait of Jenny Riffle
The Sun Trail as It Moved Southward
My Front Door: 2 hole camera
An Array of Nine Cameras: The Shunpike Window
Two Hole Camera from the Shunpike Window
Jun 14, 2019 | Blog
Each year about this time, Photographic Center NW has a fundraising event (https://www.pcnwchasethelight.org/). In the past it has been called Long Shot. This year it is called Chase the Light, which is what we photographers do. Anyone can shoot during a 48 hour period (last week) and one week later there is a pop up show at the Center where the images which were shot all within the same time period are for sale. This Saturday (June 15th) is the pop up show. Worth seeing and a great way to get inexpensive work and support the Photographic Center NW at the same time. I am happy to donate work to the Photo Center, a good place that I have been a part of for years. For me, the timing on this event is always rough: the shooting time coincides with the Georgetown Carnival, a wonderful celebration and street fair in my neighborhood. For the last ten years I have worked the Spin Art booth and for the last three years I shot for the PCNW event while working at the Carnival. This year, I wanted to make some portraits with my 120 zero 2000 pinhole camera. I knew they would be a bit blurry since the exposures were about ten minutes long. But my subjects held still and I set the camera so that it seemed like I was taking a rectangular image but I advanced the camera as if I were taking a square image. That meant no lines occurred between the frames on the negatives, a fact my scanner did not like at all. But a fact that I love. It made for some interesting combinations with images butted up against each other and I am happy to report that I made some images which are new to me. Exciting. So here are four from two rolls of 120 color negative film. Hope you like them as much as I do.
Self Portrait (from the series, Inside Out)
Martin and Roberta, 2019
Joanne, 2019
Featured image is also a Self Portrait, without an adjacent negative. The Self Portrait above, with the garden, titled, I Dream of Green, is the one in the pop up show.
Apr 13, 2014 | Blog
The first time I photographed my daughter Jess was about twelve hours after she was born. The nurse brought her to me in my hospital room, she was wailing with what I later figured out was hunger. I laid her on the slice of light falling on the bed and took a few pictures. She had beautiful eyebrows, wide open eyes and she quit crying right away, looking at me steadily while I made a few exposures. The image from that morning became the start of the Kid Pictures: photographs of Jess as she grew up. I thought all these years that the Kid Pictures were about Jess but lately I have realized that they also are about me as I remembered/relived my childhood. Looking at the Kid Pictures, the viewer might infer that Jess was an unhappy and depressed child. In fact, that child was me not Jess. The images I made of her were dark and painful: how I felt about my past at that time. I don’t think Jess ever thought the photographs were real documents of her life, even when she posed with chicken pox all over her body: we made the images consciously thinking bad; willing to extend ourselves into what we believed was the fictional world of the photograph.
Since a photographic record of my childhood (except for the awkward, posed family shots) does not exist, I have often thought about how it would look in pictures. If I could go back and recapture my past what images would I take? Probably not the bad and sad moments; maybe the sun when it sank behind the mountains, huge and snowcapped, or the wind as it tore through the neighbor’s orchard, or the old apple tree where I perched high up in the branches to read. That is how I see it now. Did I have to raise a child to come to terms with my own childhood? Maybe. Did I have to take dark, solemn photographs of her to meet the past head on? Probably. Thank goodness for photography which gave me an entry into my subconscious memory. And thank goodness for Jess and the other kids who were willing to pose for me. Maybe it was a relief to them not to have to be cute kids for a picture. Maybe it actually was how they felt at the moment. But really, what kind of accurate record is photography anyway?
Still, it is Jess who is the subject of the Kid Pictures. I can only hope that she remains as enthusiastic now about the images as she was when she was a kid. I used to say that the Kid Pictures were about a lot of different kids. In fact, I did photograph six or seven other kids over the years as well. The images of them are of the same ilk. Perhaps we can look at the images of all the kids as simply a wide assortment of stories told by a photographer and her models, intrepreted by the viewer, supported by the arrangement of light and subject in the frame just like every other image. As the photographer, my intent is/was not important . But at the time, I was trying to make a “serious” portrait of the kids, especially my daughter, not the Hallmarky phony photographs of an imagined childhood. The irony is that the Kid Pictures have turned out to be a different type of reality, fictional perhaps but still based in the idea of light hitting a subject and reflecting back onto film. Still based on the fact that my daughter was posing for the camera, honing her acting skills, but mustering up real emotions.
To see more of the Kid Picture Portfolio, go to: https://www.janetneuhauser.com/kid-pictures/
Feb 25, 2013 | Portfolio
I made these images of the Red Hook section of Brooklyn when I lived there for 10 years from 1981-1991. I wasn’t consciously trying to make a statement about the this dilapidated area, I just photographed what unfolded before me as I walked the neighborhood with my dog, Willie. Having grown up on Puget Sound, I loved the waterfront and its impact on the neighborhood. The open spaces, vacant lots, wild dogs, rundown buildings, and the strong beautiful light became important elements in my work. I photographed almost every day, exploring the area with my neighbor and friend, Maureen McNeil. Over time, I began to collect portraits of the people who lived and worked there, architectural details, and landscapes of the waterfront and the streets. Now, 20-plus years later, these images have become an historical record of an area that has changed dramatically. Maureen McNeil and I published a book titled Red Hook Stories with her short stories about the neighborhood and my photographs. Here is a link to further information about that book. https://www.janetneuhauser.com/the-red-hook-archive
All images in this portfolio are scanned 35mm negatives printed on Canson Rag Phot
ographique 310 paper with archival inkjet inks. Prints are 14 x 9.5 inches on 17 x 14 inch paper in an edition of 25. All images are available for purchase from the photographer and from Kentler Gallery. Please inquire about editions and pricing. Vintage silver gelatin prints of certain images are available upon request.
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
