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
Jul 9, 2016 | Blog
The Pinhole Project continues with over 2000 images made in the last two and a half years. What I love about the Project is the willingness of the participants to try different cameras and wait for sometimes up to three months to see the image they have made. While a certain breath mint tin makes a fantastic camera and has been used for the majority of the images in the Archive, several photographers have ventured into new territory and made cameras out of a variety of tins with several holes, sometimes placed evenly around the front of the tin and sometimes randomly placed. The beautiful thing about the Pinhole Project is that anything goes and almost always everything works out well, even images that have been soaked with water and are damaged, even cameras that have fallen down and been put back up several times.
This post celebrates those participants who tended and placed their multi-hole cameras or whose cameras persisted despite all odds and were put up after falling down, again and again. The two holes harken back to the old stereotype cameras of the 19th century and the old landscapes which took lots of time and effort to expose. They reinforce my love of the diptych.
One of the great experimenters has been April Surgent who took cameras with her to a remote scientific station in Antarctica a few years back. She was a novice at making the cameras and inadvertently at first poked several holes in the piece of brass shim stock where one hole usually is poked. She made beautiful images with sun trails floating across the sky like flights of birds in dreams. For a full account of her journey, take a look at an earlier blog post on here work: http://www.janetneuhauser.com/april-surgents-pinholes/
Another major player in the two hole pinhole camera world is Eric Riedel, a fellow Sunny Arms artist coop member. Eric has made over 20 exposures over the last few years and his images are stunning. He generally exposes the images for just three weeks. Here is a pinhole image he made in collaboration with Barry Christensen.. it is four hole camera–Eric and Barry each exposed two holes.
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sabelle Ranson has experimented with several two hole cameras. Here is one of her’s:
I have been working with a three hole camera; here is one of my recent 90 day exposures from the Sunny Arms Artist Coop, where I live and work in Seattle. The yellow lines in the foreground are car lights coming in and out of the parking l
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he featured image is by Steve Neuhauser who made a 60 day exposure in his boathouse, where he lives with a two hole camera.
Look for a new website for the Pinhole Project coming soon. It is now under construction….
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.
Apr 19, 2014 | Blog
My first encounter with pinhole photography was in 1986 when late one night, my husband and I punched a hole in the brick wall of the landing outside my studio door to see if we could put a window there overlooking the vacant lot. The next morning when I went upstairs to go into the studio, the vacant lot outside flooded onto the wall opposite the hole. It was a camera obscura! The image was projected by that crude hole and it was elegant and dreamlike. Still, I did not think to use the pinhole camera in my own work or make an actual camera until about 5 years later when I got a 4 x 5 pinhole camera design from my friend, Craig Barber, (www.craigbarber.com) a pioneer in pinhole photography. I was teaching photography in a community college, looking for ways to engage students and pinhole photography seemed a perfect fit: it was inexpensive, students could build their own cameras from scrap board and it taught them an enormous amount about exposure. I tried out Craig’s design and shot some dixie cups sitting on a potter’s wheel. I fell in love. The students loved it too and about a year later, I was trying to figure out a way to capture what I saw under the 8x loupe that I wore around my neck in the darkroom. I was entranced by the way everything, not just negatives and contact sheets, looked under the loupe. How to get up close and capture that beautiful glowing light that made any old detritus look good? I actually had a dream one night that I could do this with a pinhole camera. I got up in the morning, duct-taped a loupe to a pinhole camera and took a photograph of a butter knife on a napkin leftover from dinner the night before. You can see the loupe itself in the image, the camera was too wide-angle, but I knew I was onto something I wanted pursue.
For the next several years, I photographed many things under the loupe that I attached to a Leonardo 4 x 5 pinhole camera. I shot these images on ISO 400 film, mostly guessing the exposures, developing the negatives in my dusty basement darkroom. I enlarged them to 16 x 20 prints, as large as I could go before the soft focus fell apart. The series which I titled LoupeHoles, (you can view some of these images under the portfolio section) consisted of all kinds of subjects that could fit under the loupe but gradually I started to concentrate on dead things, old dusty cast-offs, things that nobody else paid attention to. Thinking back, these images were a part of my pyschology of the time: dark, somewhat morose, isolated images that were really reflections of my own personal nightmares and fears. But the prints were beautiful, big and gutsy, toned in blue and gold and selenium. For many years, I sent them out to various calls for work, showed them to dealers and curators and was always rejected. The work remained unseen until Eric Renner and Nancy Spencer from the Pinhole Resource (www.pinholeresource.com) offered to publish some of the images in the Pinhole Journal (Volume 20, #2) and include The Point of A Pencil in their book, Pinhole Photography: Rediscovering a Historic Technique, (third edition). Then Eric and Nancy accepted six prints into their collection of pinhole images at the Pinhole Resource. Recently, The Point of A Pencil became a part of the New Mexico State History Museum pinhole collection. The rest of the images remain unshown.
After years of working on the LoupeHoles, I acquired in 2000, a roll film pinhole camera, a Zero 2000. For about five years, I shot hundreds of rolls of film with this camera, self- portraits, portraits, landscapes and still life. These images are not so dark, more about movement, soft focus, the dream-like state that Pinhole Photography can reference. I photographed landscapes in and around the area where I grew up on the Kitsap Peninsula, west of Seattle. Using this camera made me rethink the landscape, understand it not as a representation of reality but as a representation of memory. In 2006, I started to teach digital photography only and pinhole photography was laid aside. I had no time for darkroom. I needed to make a living and to do this I had to learn digital photography.
But pinhole photography did not languish. I started the Pinhole Project, so anyone without a darkroom could make a camera on old school paper. Lately, I have been wondering if I should not just ditch my digital cameras and go back to film and pinhole based image making. I have realized that I am a very intuitive, low tech photographer in this high tech age. Go to the archive on this website and take a look at the amazing array of images from over 600 photographers. (www.janetneuhauser.com/thepinholeproject) While I love digital photography (really just another form of image making), I miss the film based pinhole image, its mystery, its slowness, its magic. I have been making the long exposure color negative images. The next step is to clean the cobwebs out of darkroom and start again with black and white negatives. So much to do.
Dixie cups on a potter’s wheel: my first pinhole photograph, circa 1994
Butter knife on a napkin: paper negative with positive. First pinhole photograph with an 8x loupe attached to a camera, circa 1996
The Point of A Pencil, from the series, LoupeHoles
Featured image: Self-Portrait: Day Off, made with a Zero 2000 pinhole camera
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