Oct 10, 2016 | Blog
Over two years ago, the artists at the Sunny Arms, the building where I live and work, agreed to expose pinhole cameras out their windows for 90 days, from the Summer Solstice to the Fall Equinox. The results were so spectacular that everyone agreed to expose cameras until we had covered each season. The project came to be called, Out There: Pinhole Images from the Sunny Arms Artists. Over the course of the next two years (the time it took us to expose all four seasons), over 100 images were made from our windows. The residents changed, but the pinhole cameras continued to be exposed. You can see an update on this project in this blog, https://www.janetneuhauser.com/out-there-an-update/ that was published in 2015.
When I heard about the public art project called City Panorama, I was inspired to submit the first season of Out There to it. Sponsored by Photographic Center Northwest, King County Metro and 4Culture, the project has placed hundreds of murals in the last six years on bus shelters throughout King County. I am pleased to announce that the Sunny Arms first season of Out There has been placed on a bus shelter on Beacon Avenue South and South Holly Street, just up Beacon Hill from our building. A great big thanks to all three organizations who have sponsored this wonderful project. A great way to make our bus shelters more inviting and show off the photography of so many people throughout King County.
On the Photographic Center NW website (pcnw.org) a description of the project is as follows:
The City Panorama Project began in 2010 when King County Metro, WA partnered with PCNW to expand the public art scene in Seattle and other cities in King County. As a way to incorporate art into everyday life, to beautify Seattle and other cities served by Metro, and to make new perspectives and ideas available to all, the City Panorama Project seeks photographic artwork that will accomplish these objectives while increasing the visibility of the photographic arts. Over 450 photo murals have been installed since the launch of this public art project in 2010. This annual project is funded through a 4Culture grant and now enters its sixth year.
So special thanks to the Sunny Arms artists who collaborated to make this project happen and to all the Seattle and King County organizations who also collaborated to beautify our county. I am honored to be a part of this. If you are in the neighborhood be sure to stop by “our” bus shelter and oh, don’t forget to take the bus much more often!
Jul 21, 2016 | Blog
Last winter I read a most wonderful book about Eadweard Muybridge, the photographer known widely for his motion studies. The book, by Rebecca Solnit, is called River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. If you have not read it, I recommend that you do, not only for it’s in-depth look at the life and work of Muybridge but also as a history of the Wild West, the railroads and early San Fransisco. Partly in search of that American West, this past Spring, the Road Trip Maestro (who prefers to be anonymous) and I drove to Oakland and then back towards Seattle through the beautiful National Forests of Northern California. We went to Lava Beds National Monument right on the Oregon/California border where Muybridge had been hired by the US Army to photograph the tired, senseless war it was waging against the Modoc People who were making a stand against the federal “relocation” of their culture, their life, their history. Since it was next to impossible to photograph this ridiculous war, Muybridge, in 1873, made photographs from a rock known as Signal Station looking down on Tule Lake and the Army encampment near the Lava Beds. He put together a panorama from the stereotypes he made there which Rebecca Solnit reproduced in her book.
We wanted to re-capture the same photographs Muybridge made some 143 years earlier, minus of course the Army encampment. Much had changed in the landscape. All that was left of the encampment were two historical Army structures visible in the Muybridge photographs: a large square stone fence to the South was apparently a wall around a temporary cemetery and a small round stone structure to the North is believed to have been a corral of some sort. We parked in the hot, empty parking lot (visible in our photograph) and went looking for the place Muybridge stood to take his photographs. Tule Lake has almost disappeared. In its place, a rich farmland stretches out to the east. On the distant horizon are low hills, not visible in the Muybridge’s images. Was it a hazy day when he took his photograph? Why were those hills not visible then?
We climbed around the cliffs; they were steep and the afternoon was bright and hot even though it was early April. We saw lizards and lots of coyote scat and watched out for snakes. I headed up the hill on the right-hand side of Muybridge’s panorama. The RTM (Road Trip Maestro) climbed the cliff, up and up to the base of a large rock. It was Signal Station seen in the featured image for this post. The two stone enclosures were clearly visible from below. It was the spot! The RTM lined up the shot and we fired away. Then we sat and thought about Muybridge in that same place. Such a complicated figure, a mixture of genius, scalawag and fiction. So mysterious. Quickly, we gathered up the equipment and raced down the hill, chased by ghosts perhaps and the need to get back to the safety of the car (and the dog whom we had left there). When we arrived at the car, I realized I had left my old black sweatshirt up on the hill where we sat. I could clearly see it with the binoculars and I held them against the lens of the DSLR to take a photograph, my low tech answer to a long lens. In Photoshop, I circled the sweatshirt for your convenience. I imagine it is still there; we simply could not climb that hill again. If you are in the area, go there and find it please!
Below is our rephotograph of Muybridge’s panorama. In the lower right corner is my camera bag; you can just barely see the corner of tripod for the pinhole camera. The steepness of the hill is not recorded by the camera in the Muybridge’s photograph or ours. If I go back to retrieve the sweatshirt, I will record my lack of breath on the way up to that rock. The parking lot is the white dot in the right hand photograph. It actually is not that far away, just a big drop in elevation. If you zoom in, you can see the round stone corral, almost dead center. Off to the South, the larger stone structure that enclosed the Army’s cemetery is partially hidden by the trees which have grown up on the hill.
Here is the reproduction of Muybridge’s panorama. If you look closely, you can see at least one person standing on the hill on the right side of the frame. It is clearly the same hill on the right side of our photograph. How alone those men in the Army must have felt! The war actually only lasted a year but the conflict really started years before. The Army outnumbered the Modocs 10:1 but could not subdue them until the end when they brought in 300 troops with Howitzers. The area was barren and hostile. It was a war no one wanted to fight. In the labyrinth of the Lava Beds, the Modocs made their stand, waiting out the white man. All they wanted was to stay on their land with the right to hunt and fish and gather food as their people had done for centuries. It was not to be.
Panorama of Lava Beds from Signal Station at Tule Lake, Camp South, from the series The Modoc War, 1873 (one frame each of five stereos) by Eadweard Muybridge
I am indebted to Rebecca Solnit and her wonderful book. I am indebted to the RTM for his insights, dedication and diligence concerning this crazy pursuit. I am honored to have stood where Muybridge once stood. It was a great road trip overall, but more on that later.
Featured image: Signal Station from below, 2016, Janet Neuhauser
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: https://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 30, 2015 | Blog
In June of 2014, the artists at the Sunny Arms, the building where I live and work in Seattle, started a long term pinhole photography project exposing cameras from our windows for 90 day periods. The only parameter was the cameras had to be pointing out at the view from our various studios. The description of this first season can be found in an earlier blog post, https://www.janetneuhauser.com/out-there-long-exposure-pinhole-photography-from-the-sunny-arms/. I am happy to report as an update, that those images from Season 1, as I like to call it, have been chosen for a public art project to be displayed on a King County bus shelter. This link shows the 2015 winners and their images: http://pcnw.org/connect/2015-city-panorama-photo-mural-project/ . Completion of the bus shelter is expected in the spring of 2016.
Meanwhile, the artists here at the Sunny Arms have continued to expose cameras for two more seasons. I did not know whether there would be any difference between the photographs from different seasons and I was grateful for the commitment of the residents to tend their cameras. We have been gathering time and light, and I am happy to report that there indeed a big difference in the images. Most of us have put cameras close to the same vantage point for each season. All the paper and the cameras have been the same.
This fall, for the Sunny Arms Open Studios, I printed 20 diptychs of the first two seasons. The third season is coming down now and I give you a few of the the paired images. In March we will start the last of the four seasons: the Spring Equinox to the Summer Solstice. I love this project for it’s slowness and the quiet way the entire building is working together to make a document. Cameras fall down and get put back up; tape slides down the windows, trucks rattle the tins loose. The trees gain leaves and drop them, the sun trails move across the sky. Two years will have passed when we are done with all four seasons instead of one year, which would have seemed rushed. We skipped seasons for a number of reasons: the cameras did not come down all at once and I thought it was important that everyone see the image they made before they made the next one. It will be interesting to see if this delay made a difference.
Here are a few preliminary results:
Above: Looking north from the Snoqualmie Street first floor entrance, Fall to Winter. Right: Winter to Spring, same view. Both images made by Janet Neuhauser
Above: From the third floor (left), looking northeast, Winter to Spring. From the fifth floor,(right), looking northeast, Spring to Summer. These were made by Bang Jing Sun (left) and Janel Kolby (right).
Above: First floor main entrance, left Summer to Fall, Right: Winter to Spring. Both images made by Janet Neuhauser
Above: This one from Kevin Wilson and Laurie LeClair, first floor looking east. Left, Winter to Spring. Right: Fall to Winter.
There are plenty of others. I am just now in the process of sorting them out. We will begin the final season this Spring. Then after another 90 days, I will report back.
Featured image is from the first floor main entrance with a two hole pinhole camera, Fall to Winter.
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.
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