Sep 22, 2013 | Blog
After a summer of working on the Archive, getting rid of dust and scratches and the ugly white line made by the scanner, the new and improved Archive of images is alive and well and back up on this website. Because of the growing size of the Archive, it is linked to a private flickr.com account. Unfortunately, I can’t figure out any way to alphabetize the photographs by image maker on the flickr photostream. If anyone knows how to do that, please let me know! So bear with me, dear reader, and someday soon, we will have a search box on the Archive so you can find your images easily. The Project continues to grow! Right now there are about 100 cameras placed and exposing, scattered far and wide. I plan on retrieving the two I left in public places in California this past summer sometime in the next few months. Other people have placed them in their own backyards, along highways and roadsides, under bridges. Exciting news is that 10 cameras are going in October with glass artist April Surgent to Antarctica, where she will live with the scientists and make art for six weeks. Can’t wait to see the landscape in Antarctica as recorded through the pinhole. If you are going anywhere, exotic or not, take along a pinhole camera. Someday, the Archive may well a huge variety of places around the world. We already have the Czech Republic and Hawaii among the collection, as well as many different states from New York to California. And by the way, the featured image for this post is by painter Nathan Gibbs with an image of his backyard in Southern California. Thanks Nathan!
Here is the link to the Archive: http://www.janetneuhauser.com/thepinholeprojectgallery/
Aug 24, 2013 | Blog
Yesterday was a wonderful day. I received my 4 x 5 color negatives from Citizens Photo in Portland (http://www.citizensphoto.com/), the only place in the Northwest that will develop this film. Thank you Citizen’s Photo, you did a great job. Two weeks ago, I drove up the Lost Coast of California with a friend also known as the Master of the Road Trip and here are the two images from our Punta Gorda adventure: one a image from my new fancy expensive DSLR (see blog post, Paradise is a Road Trip) and one from my 4 x 5 pinhole camera on color negative film. I have been anxiously awaiting the arrival of the negative film from the lab. I am happy to report that I love the pinhole image very much. The pinhole image holds onto the feeling surrounding the moment, not just the moment itself. Let me explain: up on that ridge on the Prosper Road, the wind was whipping from the west off the Pacific Ocean. It was the Golden Hour. We were dressed in sweatshirts and hats and long pants because there was a chill in the air. The light glowed and the ocean, far below, crashed and sang its own tune. It was a moment in which I felt totally alert and totally relaxed at that same time. It was all about the light and the wind and the sound of the waves hitting the beach. How do light and moment translate feeling onto film? What does the print have to do with it? The print of the pinhole is soft and sweet and beautiful. I printed one only and it is so close to done. The DSLR print I keep trying to make it less perfect. I can’t seem to get it right. Why is that?
Prosper Road to Cape Mendocino, Digital Image from my DSLR camera, f16, 1/20 second, ISO 400
Prosper Road to Cape Mendocino, Pinhole Camera Exposure on 4 x 5 inch color negative film, two negatives scanned and stitched together in Photoshop. f256/120 seconds, ISO 400.
These images were exposed at almost exactly the same time. Go figure.
Aug 15, 2013 | Blog
Last summer I spent two weeks in my old neighborhood in Brooklyn, Red Hook and shot steadily every day. My first thought was that I would rephotograph my favorite images from the 1980’s. The problem was that the neighborhood had changed so much that I could not find the exact location of many of the images. I was disappointed and have not edited the images too much since then. But lately I have started to edit and realized that though I did not rephotograph the old images, I was working in a similar vein, on the edges, on the dead ends and in overgrown lots and streets. I loved the wild edges of the harbor then and was happy to see that still they exist.
The changes in the neighborhood have been significant, as most people know, the area has been “gentrified.” Now this is not necessarily a bad thing, but for me the big change is one called air conditioning. The eleven years I lived in the Hook, I did not have air conditioning nor did most anyone else. At night, everyone was out enjoying the cool breeze off the harbor and everyone knew everyone else. Now, the streets at night are empty. People aren’t sitting outside, talking to their neighbors. I missed the connections, the way everyone knew my name back then and the way my neighbors looked after each other. The streets were never empty in the old days. Still last summer, I walked the streets and ran into a few old timers who remembered me and they laughed when I showed them the old photographs and said, oh, you will never find that again. But I did find the edges and realized that was what I was looking for all along.
Here are a few examples of the new work from the Hook. I hope to have a portfolio up on the website soon.
.
Aug 11, 2013 | Blog
I took a week and flew to San Francisco and then drove up to the Lost Coast with a friend, a master of the road trip. We hid two pinholes on the Coast and if they survive for six months, they will need to be retrieved and scanned. If found accidentally, I left a little plea not to open, to search the internet for The Pinhole Project and hopefully then preserve the camera. I love the idea of putting out the cameras for extended periods of time, no way to know whether they will make it six months. The experience has taught me much about placing the cameras for the long term and how niches are best, protected from the weather, subtle little corners no one will notice. The key is flexibility and believing in the happy accident.
I als
o photographed on this trip with my trusty dslr and a 4 x 5 pinhole camera that was loaded with color negative film. Here is a dslr image taken from the exact spot as the 4 x 5 pinhole, up on Prosper Road. One important difference is in the amount of time both images were exposed: the pinhole had an exposure of about 30 minutes, and the dslr exposure was only 1/20 of a second. The wind was blowing straight in from the ocean. Very energetic and very tranquil at the same time. It will be interesting to see which exposure does justice to this magnificent view. The fog rolled in and laid down on the hills, said a big screw you to me as though a little fog could talk me out of taking a picture. I photographed until the light was gone. Incredibly beautiful spot, and I do not begin to believe that I have done it justice. But am grateful for the opportunity to try. Below is the pinhole image: I will let you decide which one you like better.
The featured image was a small long exposure pinhole camera placed loaded with paper and placed under a bridge for just 24 hours. I do not understand it nor can I tell what happened, One of the mysteries of life.
Jul 27, 2013 | Blog
Earlier in the week, I was angry. Instagram deactivated my account stating that I had violated their legal terms of agreement. I could not figure it out. While I have seen many images on Instagram of illegal activities (underage drinking, lewd not artsy nudity, pot smoking, etc.) I certainly have not posted anything of that nature. Then it struck me that I my last post was of a dead baby rabbit. Its skin had dried and it was laying in my friend’s front yard on the green grass. It was sad and beautiful and abstract. I think it might have violated Instagram’s legal terms of agreement. I enjoyed the daily practice of posting on Instagram and had about 500 photographs in my feed. What surprised me when I was deactivated, was how addictive the activity had become. I found myself trying to check my feed every few hours. Had I really been doing that without realizing it the past year? I also felt disinclined to photograph with my iPhone. That surprised me as well. Was I just using the iPhone camera so I could post on Instagram and see how many likes I could get?
Instagram does not answer emails and there is no customer support phone number. On their website they clearly state this. They also state that if you are deactivated, the only thing you can do is start over again with a new user name. I have decided not to do this. While I enjoyed the little filters and the way they made all my iPhone photographs look like works of genius, the practice took me away from some of very basic things that I like best about photography: that I do it purely for myself. I made that decision years ago when I left editorial photography to teach for a living. It was very freeing to no longer have to take a photograph for anyone else ever again. Instagram had become a way for me to gather those “likes,” it made me competitive in a not so very nice way. It also took away another thing: I love the fact that I take a photograph and it exists as much in my mind as on the film or sensor. If I take a photograph I really like, I keep to myself for sometime. Instagram, as the name implies, is well, instant. I can’t remember so many of the 500 photographs I had made for my feed. I took them and then they were gone into cyberspace, away from my psyche.
So this is my farewell to Instagram and it may well be my farewell to all sorts of instant photography. This weekend, for the first time in years, I am shooting some color negative 4 x 5 film. I like the idea that I won’t see those images for a few weeks. I have to send the film off to Portland, for there is no place in Seattle to have it developed. I look forward to walking around the next few weeks with those images in my head. And maybe they won’t turn out. I will have no way of knowing for some time. Ah, just like the old days.
I can’t seem to recover that dead bunny photograph, so here are a couple of dead animals I posted on Instagram last summer: the dead fish in a vial that my daughter’s friend brought back from the Bering Sea and a dead bird my friend brought out from Brooklyn years ago. Instagram apparently did not catch these which are much more explicit and less abstract than the dead bunny. The featured image is one that I took last summer in Brooklyn. I am still answering that question about Instagram: How does freedom feel?
