I know this about myself: I often make photographs and then don’t look at the actual images for a year, sometimes more. I can easily ignore whole bodies of work as I shoot them. I am not kind of photographer who shoots, reviews, edits, prints, then shoots more. For me, the best part of photography is in making the photograph in the field; it is exhilarating and much better than post processing. I find that when I edit as I work on an idea, the subject gets stale.
That said, one problem arises as long as I am hooked on film (and all my images these days are shot on film). It is absolutely necessary to write down the following soon after making the photograph: location, the date, the film type, exposure time, ISO, and of course the camera and pinhole size. I quit taking notes and writing down what I did when I got my first digital camera several years ago. Now after shooting film again for the last five years, I find I want to return to certain subjects and find the portals, the little river, the big trees, the end of a road campground, the slough. It is impossible to tell where many images were made. Good images and bad record keeping exists in my life. I vow to do better. I will take concise notes I will.
Of course with digital, one has lots of metadata but without GPS turned on, no location exists. But what is photography about anyway? Pinhole photography is about pausing for 30 minutes or more and just looking. Not that I eschew technique in pinhole photography. I am just not a technical kind of gal and refuse to pretend that I am. After all, the image is about feeling, the light, the moment, the weather and of course it is about the ISO of the film and the size of the pinhole aperture and the exposure times. I have began a notebook just for keeping film and camera data with little drawings of my photographs at the time I make them. Hopefully, this will help me be able to return to the scene. The featured image was taken on a road trip to California I think in 2016. It is a happy accident. I decided to try an all night long exposure and had a hard time getting up before dawn to close the camera. I actually closed it sometime after the sun came up. This image is easy to find again. But the exposure/film combo was not recorded.
The images below have unrecorded exposure times and location and were based on knowing that a good photograph could be made from what is in front of me. That is the exciting moment in photography. These are just a few of the total shot this way. Some can be found again easily, some can not.
I am so happy to have received a month-long fellowship from the Civita Institute to go to Italy for a month to make pinhole photographs. The Civita Institute is based in Seattle and gives three fellowships a year to all types of people. Here is a quote from their website:
Fellowships are open to architects, planners, designers, artists, writers and other arts professionals practicing in all states west of the Rocky Mountains, including Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. They provide an unparalleled opportunity for the recipients to undertake a project of their own choosing related to current or anticipated professional work, in a highly unique setting, far from routine obligations.
I will go to Civita in November and do long exposure pinhole photography with color negative film in a big camera and on paper in recycled tins. These tins/cameras will expose for the entire month I am there. The landscapes on film will be 30 to 45 minute exposures. Civita is an ancient Etruscan town teetering on a hilltop with no cars and a small year round population. I love the last line of the Institute’s statement where is says I will be in a highly unique setting far from routine obligations. I am so interested to see if I can capture a both the history and the present in one long exposure. Below are three views of the town. In the meantime, I have a lot to think about and many questions to be answered…..The featured image is from when I was in Italy for seven weeks in 1998. A photograph on film of a Via Cava: an old Etruscan road dug deep into the tuffa rock. This one near Sovana. It was taken as a vertical, cropped for this blog. I hope to explore more of these roads in the countryside when I am there. You an see more of my Italy work from the earlier trip here: http://www.janetneuhauser.com/italy/
With the exception of the featured image which is mine, the Civita images in this blog are from the internet.
Recently I spent about 24 hours with my brother Steve, scanning my father’s old slides of our childhood and some slides of Steve’s from the 1970s. I was reminded again, at how lucky I am to have had a father who was into photography and so innately good at it. It must have rubbed off on me somehow. Many of the slides had started to decay, but most were fine. I discovered that I loved the old messed up slides, the ones that had started to decay showed such depth and beauty. The history of my early childhood is here. Dad shot slides when he wanted color images and black and white film all the rest of time. Slides were special and I remember him saying how important it was to get the exposure right on and how important it was to make a good photograph. When I think about how strapped for money our family was, the money spent on photography had priority and the folks believed that it was important not to worry about spending on it. I decided to publish many of these images just so my viewers could see the amazing color that is still in there after all these years and so that they could see another side of my father’s photographic history. I have written about his dedication to photography before and that dedication shows through here as well. More images to come in the near future. You can look at some other blog posts here: http://www.janetneuhauser.com/for-dad-and-his-love-of-photography/ and here http://www.janetneuhauser.com/ode-to-mom-and-dad-and-their-love-of-photography/
Bertha and Reuben: Neuhauser grandparentsUncle Bob (Dad’s brother) with tractor in South Dakota.
Our old boat: five children and two adults!
Grandpa Neuhauser in South Dakota.
Family shot: Carol, Dan, Mary, Mom. Steve and I in front row.
Mom at the fireplace Dad had just built. With a couple cats I think. Slide damage!
As most of you know I was a high school photography teacher for 24 years. I loved the job, working everyday with young people who were intrigued by and creative with photography. Teaching them was fun. I have now retired from that job. I hate that word retired. It sounds as if I am off to bed to do nothing for the remainder of the days I have left. For me retirement is not about that. I developed a good work ethic over the years as a high school teacher which continues to pay off now: I get up and drink coffee with my work. I honestly do not know how I had time do the high school job. I spent at least 60 hours a week working including with the commute (which involved a 30 minute ferry ride). On top of that I tended to my studio and did what I could with my personal work. I had shows and grants and sold photographs but it was “on the side.” Now it is all about simply producing for the pure joy of it.
So what am I doing right now? The Pinhole Landscapes of course. The Innards Portfolio as I have come to call those images. I am also working on a cookbook of my Mother’s recipes, the DSLR images I randomly take, the Pinhole Project, and two personal pinhole projects called Getaways and Home (a future post is in the works) and I of course am updating my two websites and applying for grants. The Pinhole Landscapes involve a lot of post-processing: the negatives are very dusty and the color is off. Sometimes I reverse them horizontally. Sometimes I change things in photoshop: the aspect ratio, the background among other things. I want these images to knock me for a loop, just like the darkroom has in the past. I refuse to be judgmental about post-processing decisions.
I just spent 17 days in November in New York City photographing the archive of my dear deceased mentor from graduate school, Judy Seigel. Many things amaze me about her work. She produced a huge, incredible body of images from the about the time I met her (in the early 1980s) until about 2015. Her work ethic was so strong. She was not always easy to be around. She asked me hard questions and got impatient when I did not have an answer. Yet I learned so much from her and I have continued to learn from her looking at her images while I photographed them. She produced a strong and unappreciated, odd body of work. She had an unique vision. She was experimental and fearless. She thought a regular silver print without any “post factory manipulations” was boring. Her work inspires me to go into the darkroom with the Innards Portfolio. They are film negatives after all. I have an idea to transform these images and make them both about process and the image. I will let you know how that works. Meanwhile, the studio is glorious, depressing, exhilarating, Some days I do not go out: I mean I do not go outside at all. Forgive me if I have canceled a date with you. But now that I have the gift of time, I am using it.
In the past I eschewed the DSLR. But in fact I am shooting with it now and again, especially when I am on a road trip. Here are some photographs with the DSLR from my recent trip to the Grand Tetons. I did shoot a lot with the pinhole camera as well, and I took along a telephoto lens (a rarity for me) for the DSLR. I used it to make studies for the pinholes. Maybe you will see some sort of relationship between the two types of shooting. Maybe not Let me know. You can see two of the trip’s pinholes in the More Innards post. Another post on them later.
To the Grand Tetons and Back, 2018
.
.
.
These images are but a few of the 500 or so that I made with the DSLR. It will take some time to sort them out. The images above have popped out as favorites. The featured image is from inside a cabin near Jackson Lake with the Grand Tetons in the background.
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.
