Jan 14, 2020 | Blog
I spent a month in Civita di Bagnoregio, an Etruscan hilltop town in Italy on a fellowship from the Civita Institute, (civitainstitute.org). Since I arrived home mid-December, I have been scanning and editing images. I am still not done but three days ago, finished scanning the 120 color negative film that I shot in a little pinhole camera called the Zero. It took a beating in Civita, the cobblestones, and the tuff rock outside, and the stone floors in the houses are all unforgiving. I dropped the camera, it broke, I taped it back together and kept going. It gave me 32 rolls of film with about 190 files. I shot so that each image related to the one before or after. This was a difficult thing to do but I wanted to overlap the images so I shot with the camera on a rectangular setting and advanced it as if it were set to a square. This way I did not get any lines between the frames of the negatives–and I made 16 images to a roll instead of 12. I could not see any of these images because the film had to be developed once I returned to the States. Also pinhole cameras do not have a viewfinder and I had to become astute at knowing what the cameras would see. Two things helped me get great negatives: the Pinhole Assist app which enabled me to use my iPhone as a light meter and the wonderful people at the Shot on Film Store in Lake City, WA (www.shotonfilmstore.com/), who developed my film and did a great job.
So what did I photograph? The old Etruscan hilltop town of Civita where people have lived for thousands of years: this is what was before me. The pinhole exposures are at least 10 seconds and no people showed up in my photos. Mostly I photographed every morning at sunrise until about 9:30 when the tourists started to arrive. I photographed the town, the streets (cobblestones with no cars), the landscape, the drop off at the edges of the town, the hilltop and the ancient church, the walls, the stones, the light, the fog, and of course the incredible color. (Overexposure exaggerated it). Doing this was a joy but made me quite nervous at the same time. Was I getting the correct exposure? Did I really think I could overlap the images and it would work? With the amazing amount of wind and rain would anything be discernible? What would the townspeople think of these images? The town is a museum but lived in as well. It isn’t the way it actually is became my mantra. Each day I would photograph with my Zero for a few hours, come back, eat breakfast, clean up the apartment and then go back out around noon to take some more photographs. The afternoon was more difficult with the number of tourists in the town and the light. In late afternoon I would eat some lunch, then work on the computer for a while and as soon as it got dark, go back out again and take night photographs with my DSLR. (see previous blog post janetneuhauser.com/civita-a-month/). Then a nice long Italian dinner and bed.
Now, as I scan and look and scan and look, I am slowly understanding what it was that I did. Mixing the landscape with the architecture made sense, but it was something I had not done before. I am posting thirteen images (including the featured image) that show the variety of the 120 pinhole images that were captured. All are from the Zero camera 120 on color negative film (except the first one, a double exposure from the 4 x 5 large format pinhole still color negative film in which I exposed the full moon outside my kitchen door all night long, then the walkway to the entrance in the fog on the same sheet of film). I find the editing process to be as satisfying as the shooting. Thanks for looking. (PS Click on the first image to get a slide show).
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The featured image is the top of the entrance to the Altar of the Virgin Mary down off the trail by the cliffs. Working titles of the others top to bottom, left to right are:
- Full moon trail and Walkway (Double Exposure/4 x 5 negative)
- Door
- Patio on the Edge
- San Donato #1
- Street, Buildings, Valley
- By Giovanni’s Stairs
- Partly Real
- Lions Gate with the Gate of Santa Maria
- An Imagined Space
- Arch and Fog
- Landscape with Buildings
- Walk to the Cliffs at Sunset (single image)
Dec 13, 2018 | Blog
As director of the Pinhole Project, I am always looking for new ideas and new cameras with which to make pinhole images for both me and the participants. Recently, in the past year or so, I have been using two cameras for myself again and again: a three hole metal can that is a former Dewar’s Scotch container and a smaller squarish can that is a bit bigger than the Altoid tins but has only one hole. I have been working on two series of images with these cameras: the Getaways are images that I expose from a car or truck during a road trip. I have made several of these; and love the way they record the sun trails. The Home series which I have made with the three hole can, are images made within my studio and just outside of it, usually exposed for at least six weeks and they record in triplet a myriad of things both inside and outside the studio. I have also used a smaller tin and a round tin for these images. A friend gave me a Solarcan and I made one with that as well. Since pinhole photography has become something of an obsession with me, I generally have two or three cameras exposing at one time. When I tire of the look or run out of ideas I will try something different. In the meantime, I present some of the images to you, first the Getaways and then the Home series.
The Getaways: All were made from a moving vehicle with the pinhole camera attached either outside the car or on a window facing out. Exposures are usually about 2 weeks. The titles are as follows (top to bottom): To Doe Bay and Back, Oregon Road Trip, To Northern Idaho and Back, To the Grand Tetons and Back, Top of the World, The Sunny Arms from the Parking Lot, Near Seiku, The featured image was made on a road trip to Oregon with the camera on the front hood of the car facing b
Home Series with the 3 hole camera: First two are of the windows in my studio. The next two are from the front windows looking out. The blue image was made with a Solarcan pinhole camera exposed for three weeks. The next image is of the curtains and the window sill made with a regular one hole camera and the last image is with a round can inside the screen doors entering the studio.
There are many more. These are just the most recent. Thanks for looking and if you would like to be a part of the Pinhole Project, go to The Pinhole Project website and send me an email to join.
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
Nov 27, 2016 | Blog
I am happy to announce that the Pinhole Project now has its own website thepinholeproject.org . It went live about a week ago and it is still far from being complete. Over the last three years, we have collected about 3000 images from eager and enthusiastic pinhole photographers all over the world. As you know, these images are all long exposure, in small metal tins, exposed for at least 3 weeks sometimes much longer. I am gratified and humbled by the response and always look forward to opening that tin, seeing the negative and making the scan. The pinhole archive on this site will soon come down and all those images will be transferred over to the new site which has a search box, so users can search their name to find where their image is on the site. While this is a major improvement, there are still some snags to be worked out with that search mechanism. Bear with us, because I think it is more important to be live while the snafus get worked out that to not be live at all. I will now dedicate janetneuhauser.com to my personal photography and that is all! The Pinhole Project site will not contain any of my recent pinhole work unless it is an image that is specifically done for the Project. I plan to use the thepinholeproject.org to celebrate the work of all those pinhole photographers who trust in a tiny metal tin with a hole punched in it, and tend their cameras for long periods of time, sometimes coming back right at the end to find the pinhole bandit has come in his/her stealthy way and taken the camera down.
Please visit thepinholeproject.org and enjoy all the beautiful images there. And come back often because each week more images will be added and soon all 3000 will be up. Oh and don’t forget to put up a camera. The winter months are dark and exposures take a long time!
Here are a few images to refresh your memory about just how fantastic this type of imagery is. Top image is by Greg Staley, made in Maryland, the bottom is by Eric Riedel, made in Washington.
Featured Image: On my Window Sill with Curtains
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, http://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!
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