Aug 7, 2014 | Blog
First let me say that there are no bad pinhole images. Of all the pinholes in the archive, there is not one single bad one. People fret about where to place the camera but ultimately it does not matter. Each image is a wild ride with light and shape and time. These exposures record long periods of time, the path of the sun, subtle comings and goings of the populace in the landscape and of course the light. The long simple slowness of the whole process records memory more than moment. Each are photographs filled with so many moment they become the antithesis the single decisive moment. And yet they remain simple little landscapes, lightly or brightly colored, aglow on a screen where they have landed after simple beginnings in an a simple metal tin. The miracle of pinhole photography!
As I look at the archive, I am struck by the the light again and again. In the past year, pinhole project photographers have experimented and become adept at using all types of cameras. They have built two hole and four hole cameras, round cameras, round panoramic cameras. Several people have done 10 plus images. I thank all you pinholists who come back again and again. I promise you we will have a way to search for your image in the archive soon. Given that, I ask you dear reader to go to the archive and let me know which ones are your favorites. I will do another blog later in the fall with viewers favorites if we get enough response. Enjoy these standouts below. Some are mistakes, all experiments, most at least three week exposures a few much longer.
Eric Riedel
Carina Laukatis. 4 hole camera
Ryan Cox 2 hole camera
Aerin Amore Looking Up
Amanda Siefert
Chase Lehotsky
Chiara Carcano. 2 hole camera.
Gregory Staley
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
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/
Jul 4, 2013 | Blog
I am happy to post this solstice to solstice pinhole image done with two cameras outside my front door. One faced due west, the other due south; they were placed at right angles to each other. I put them up on the winter solstice, which was December 21st and took them down on the evening of the summer solstice, June 21st. They were placed under an overhang, on our little patio, covered from the wind and rain of the Pacific Northwest winter. About mid-April my neighbor put up the umbrella that covers our summer table. It is odd that this large umbrella, which sways in the wind, did not register on either of the images. If you look closely at the left hand image (which faced south) you can see the pinhole camera that is exposing toward the west. You can also see the domed base of the umbrella stand which was moved only once over the six month period. The trails of the sun across the sky are, as always, miraculous. The colors are vibrant and mysterious. The west facing camera, whether it had more heat exposure or not, recorded the some of sun trails as yellow and much more pinks and magentas were recorded as well. I do not understand why these colors are recording on the black and white enlarging paper. The negatives expose directly onto the BW enlarging paper, and are not enhanced in Photoshop after the scan. The colors and the light are perhaps my two most favorite things about this process. That and the fact that these images are made in simple breath mint cans with pinholes hand drilled in brass shim stock. We live in a wonderful age of photography where such a simple image can live in digital media!
Mar 13, 2013 | Blog
Today when I got to work at Bainbridge High School, I found the pinhole camera the students and I had put out on 12.21.2012 intending to leave it up until 6.21.2013, solstice to solstice. At some point, the camera fell off the wall. The tape and metal were both wet, the pinhole rusty and face up in the newly mowed grass. I could feel water sloshing inside. But scanned! The 81 day exposure revealed a vast trail of the sun rising and setting, forming an ever larger arc across the sky, incredibly beautiful. I am positive that vivid sun trail did not exist in reality, that such brilliant light was not visible to me as I went to work five days a week for those 81 days. Tomorrow, we hang up another camera in the same spot and hope it makes it to the solstice. Here are a couple more long exposures and the featured image is our first very long exposure, the one I talked about.
The first image is by Maggie Miller, the second image by Nicole Mingo.
