Pinhole Point of View

8/4/2019 Pinhole Point of View

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A new generation of photographers i l pUlhing thepossibi li ties: of the simple, old-fashioned techn

taking picture. thTougb a tiny hole i


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P H TOCRAPHER DA IEL KAZIMIERSKI US 0 TO TEACH AT NEW YORK UNIVERSITY, A 0 HEremem ers with irritati n how fixated his students were on fancy camera equipment. "Therewas lots of talk about lens res lution and other annoying stuff that had n thing to do withmaking picture ," he ay. Motivated in equal parts by di gu t and curiosity, the Polish-born photog-rapher began using in his own work a heap amateur camera from China. The device had a simpleglass lens and a small bellows for focusing. "Then I movedto an even Simpler piece of equipment, whi h was a littlebox with a pinhole in it."Pinhole cameras are ai m t mically primitive. Typical-ly h memade, they lack lenses, traditional shutter, lightmeters and focusing controls. Expo ing a sheet of filmplaced inside may require 30 seconds, a couple of minutes,or all day. If you want a telephoto hot, you build a longerbox. "Becausethere is no viewfinder, it allows you to relin-quish your soul to the camera," Kazimierski say with themystical tone common to pinhole devotees. Placing hislensless aperture an inch or two from a saltshaker r ateapot, he transforms these everyday object into mysteri-ous monuments. "When r develop my pi tures, it's alwaysa wonderful discovery to see what the camera saw."Kazimierski is one ~r a growing number of serious artph tographers who now use pinhole cameras, oftenswearing off len cameras altogerher. Where perhaps ahalf-dozen used the technique 30 year ago, today hun-dreds do. This low-tech groundswell has been accompa-nied by a flurry of exhibitions, books , courses, how-to arti-cles, cameras to buy or build, and, of cour e, Websires.

"The popularity of pinhole ph rography among art pho-tographer is in part a reaction against the idea that a seri-ous photographer is someone with six cameras slung overhis neck wh ' con tartly swapping lenses," says Teren ePins, director of the Center for Creative Photography inTucson, Arizona. "There' a trong determination to provethat it's ~he artist, not the equipment, that make theimage..' Besides being primitive, a pinhole camera is cheap(an imp rtant issue for many artists), and it almost guar-anrc e an unu ual result.It 's new to most people that cameras don't need lenses,

but the basic principle of lensles image-making ha beenknown for centuries. Renaissance painters sat in darkenedenclosures to trace the faint, upside-down outline of land-scapes and figures as ca t through a small hole. (Pinholes,like I nses, invert the images they make.) In the l620 ,astronomer Johannes Kepler built a portable version of thisdevice fI r viewing the sun without staring at it directly.He called it a "camera b cura," or dark chamber."Any room with a window open is a camel-aobscura,"says ron-area photographer Abelardo M rell, .. ut the

light orning in i tOOunfocused to make an image. There's

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too much confusion." Consider this: the daylight illumi-nating the wall of a room actually Iorms a jumble of over-lapping images as light bounces off objects outside thewindow. The light on the wall is, in fact, an upside-downprojection of the scene outside your window, JUSta very,very fuzzy one. hrink the window, and you make thiimage sharper, but dimmer.In addition to more conventional lens photography,

Morell create bizarre room portraits by covering a ll ihcwindows in a room save for a sin-gle hole the size of an aspirin. Theopening admits only a single faintcone of daylight int the darkenedroom. The confusion of overlap-ping lighr rays is g ne. Inside thiscamera obscura, Morell leaves alen camera on a tripod ointing atthe far wall for eight hours withthe shutter open. Of the sunlightscattered in all directi ns by the ripof a distant steeple, say, only thoselight ray. that happen to headstraight toward the pill-size holegain entry t M rell' dark cham-ber. Inside, the pencil of light con-unue on and strike a single p ton the fa r wall, forming the tip ofa dim, inverted steeple.In Morell's photographs, a hotel

room wall in Wyoming reveals anupside-d wn portrait of the GrandTetons: the distant horizonbecomes trompe I' e il wains ring.In a Manhattan hotel room, theEmpire State Building prawls,spent, aero s an unmade bed. "Ilove the idea that images are enter-ing your space without yourintending it," Morell says. inexplaining his obsession.After taking in an exhibition of

Morell's photographs at Boston' .Museum of Fine Arts (his one-man show comes to the ZoellnerMain Gallery at Lehigh Universityin Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, June2 1 ) , Immediately convened myattic to a camera obscura by cover-ing the window with a puncturedsheet of cardboard and hangingbedsheets from [he rafters as a . Sanderson's seed-stage leeks (above).

creen. The neighborhood J .cids now gather in the attic towatch-in wide-s reen full-rn tion colorl+passing clouds,sunlight glinting IT m ripples n the river in the distance,and 0 casionally peopl walking ar und upside down inour yard. If this is tOOelaborate for you, jam a crewdriv-er into th side of a carton to make a hole and hold thebox against your chest outside with a dark toweldrapedover your head. ince you're peeling down into the car-ton, he image has the advantage of appearing right-side

up. Watch out for neighbor .

Pinhole images give a new look to famiLiarsubjects:Thomas Harding's wide-angle view of a 101-year-old schoolhouse in Arkansas (opposite) and Wiley

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NOT A CAMERA FORTHOSE IN A HURRY

A PINHOLE CAMERA GOES A STEPfurther than a camera obscura. Byu ing film, it records the projectedimage for posterity. Its hief draw-back, of course, is [hat it doesn'tadmit very much light-severalth usand times less than a len aninch wide=-s you must waitpatiently as enough accumulateson the film to make a picture. Onthe other hand, the image stays inlocu no matter how far you placethe film from the aperture (though"focus" is a relative term in pin-hole photography; an image pro-jected through even a tiny pinholeis never as sharp as one focused bya de ent len ).

early any light-tight containerca n be made into a pinhole camera:an oatmeal box, a seashell a suit-ca e, a h le in the ground. Germanphotographer Thomas Bachlerplaced 1m in h is mouth, then toodin front of a mirror and brieflypursed his lips to make a self-por-trait. (It didn't look like mu h, buthe deserves an A for eflort .) Pinholepioneer Eric Renner made a pickle-jar camera for underwater work Heonce put a pinhole in a red pepper;the vegetable's translucent fleshacted as a natural safelight.Renner is one of the pinhole'S

most influential advocates. Withhis wife and fellow pinholer,ancy Dize Spencer, he publishesthe thri e-yearly P i n h o l e Journal


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and runs the PinholeResource, ann r fil

archive in I ew Mexi o. "Youreinvent photography every lime

you use a pinhole camera." Renner tellme whcn , sit in on a pinhole workshop he

c -iea he at the An Insritut of Chicago. TRenner, an earnest, sofi-s oken man with unruly hairand rumpled clothes, pinh lc is not a point-and- h oraffair but an ' ploration. ")['5 a strangc way to take a pic-lure," he c ncedes.

SNAPSHOTS FROM A BISCUIT TINTHl! FIR T MORNI G, I J I THE HAI.F-OOZEN T OEr-rfin making ameras from variou ontainers we'vebrought-cigar boxes and cookie tin ,m t ly . To makeur apertures+the pinhol -we gently tincture thinsquares [brass shim stock with sewing needles. Wethen tape the pierced squares ver opcnin we'veur in our xes. After m king rw I' threeeras apiece, we load them with light- nsi-

live paper in the darkr rn, cover th pin-holes with black tape, and fan out int thenei hboring trcets and alley.everal f my fellow students pi k their

way through a weedy courtyard, placing sus-iei u -I king parcel hcre and there amid thevegetation. Around the comer, , recognize a class-m te itring alone on some reps, reading; r finallypy her camera, an eight-foot. eight-aperture card-board tube re ting in the retch of a nearby tree,ilently a umulating light. 'hough I'm a barely competentnapshoorer myself, my dog-biscuit l in in part icular yieldsne surpri ing ompo ition alter another. Because r let thephorographi paper curl ar und inside, [ watch in delighta strangely di t ned wide ngle view f school buses andonstrueti n t emerge from the developing trays. Andbecause the pinholes on my various containers catch every-

thing ncar and far in the same degree of rea-sonably sharp focu , a coin or a ide-

walk plaque rwo inches away is asimposing and well-defined as abuilding behind it.

After class oneday, I chat withMary Tobin, one ofihe worksh p' old-er and more erious

parti cipants. T bin hasalready exhibited her

lens-camera work in several

recent shows in the hica area. he just ordered a new10,0 0 medium-format camera with high-quality Zeilen es, she tell me, "It's supposed to be the new wowie-zowic camera, but f ' 1 I use it only on e in a while." ver-all, he prefer the pinhole. "Art should be an inruirivcprocess. Idon't want my i rnel lc t to take over and ruinthing." A can happen, ~ r instance, when immer ingne elf in the details of operating a S10,OOOcamera.ne of the an' m r a ompli hed practitioners.

Arkansas photographer Thomas Harding, fashioned hisfirst pinhole camera in the 1970 with a toilet-paper roll andblack tape. A n time portrait photogra her for Bachra htudi s in Manhauan, Hardin took up the m re contcm-plativc art of "pin graphy," a he calls it, when he retiredto Little Rock. "1 gues I've built r reused more

than 1 5 pinhole mcras by now," ys Harding,till taking pi rures at I' a , cries of

ph t graph f one-room Ihouse , hec nsrructed a pinhole camera using twpie s of plyw and an air-release shut-ter , His largc-f rmat bla k-and-white POI'-traits lend a stately, otherw rldly grace Ithe often crumbling and long-forg ttcnrrucrures. '" n read of everything beingso hard-ed ed and minutely defined, itgives a s r r n [0 the image, which Ithink is appealing."Harding and thcr pinholcr , like TomBaril, james Romeo and the late Marcia heel',

have favored ubjccis that stay put-land-pes, buildings, till lites+during their ameras' long

ex : ure times. me enthusiasts, however, prefer to playwith the ironies of a low camera in a fa t w rld. Canadi-an ph tographer Dianne B o , whose exposures are often 20minutes long, gravitates toward much-ph t graphedtouri t SPOtS like Mayan pyr mids and oirc Valleychateaus. "A couple of hundred people may have whippedaround me snapping dozens of pictures in the time I'vetaken one," she says. "It's made me slow down and reallyobserve where Iam." More vcr, object in motion (liketourists) bounce so li ttle il lumination through her camera'tiny opening that they fail t ppear on her fllm at all; ineffect, they erase themselves from the pi rurc, "When y uremember visiting the Eiifel T wer or the cine, you tendto block out all the car noises and the swarms of Ameri-cans in turquoise jogging suits. You have a oft-focus.

Wiley Sanderson, a pioneer in the r vival of pinhole art, has buillsome 50 cameras, including (top to bottom) a cardboard panorama,a 3 1J2-inch rondo for taking round pictures and one for landscapes,

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Abelardo MorelllUms a near-empty room into a camera obscura for his upside-down image of midtown Manhattan.

black-and-white memory of th c place. 0 when peoplesee a pinhole photograph with all that removed. they say.'\Vow, that's how [ remember it!'"Possibly the olde t pinhole photographs that still existare pictures f the Egyptianpyramids and thcr aruiquitiesmade in the early 1880 by the English archaeologistFlinders Petrie. Like Dianne Bos, Petrie made good use ofthe pinhole camera's tendency to eliminate wanderinghumans. With a camera of his own devising made from atin box (for reasons unknown, he used a lens in additionto a pinhole). Petrie photographed newly unearthed arti-factsin a passageway leading to the camp's me s hall. Thehalf-hour exposure he required let him ignore the paradeof hungry Egyptologi ts passing in from of his camera. F rhis outdoor shots, the pinhole arnera made perfectense: the Egyptian un was bright, and the pyramidsweren't going anywhere.For rno t 19th-century photographers. however. thecombination of a tiny aperture and the slow-acting photo-graphic emulsions of the day would have been excruciat-

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ingly tedious. nly with the pread of the quicker dry-plate photography in the 1880sand 18gosdid the pinholecamera enjoy its first vogue. Popular manuals extolled thetechnique, and thou ands of hobbyists bought commercialmodels. These included. aptly enough, the world's first dis-posable camera, which featured a single glass plate and alinfoil pinhole. (Camera ob cura rooms built at scenicoverlooks were also a popular Victorian amusement,though many of the e actually u ed lenses.)FUZZINESS HAS ITS APPEAL

DE PITE THE PINHOLE CAMEIV\S REPUTATION AS A OVHTY,leading pictorial photographers around the tum of the cen-lUry were intrigued by the way its output mimicked thegently blurred ugures and placid. I t-focu landscapes ofImpressionist paintings. eorge Davison stunned the artworld in 18gowhen his gauzy pinhole photograph ' TheOnion F ie ld won the highest honors at a major Londonexhibition. A bemused critic for the Times observed. "It iscertainly a saure on the labours of the pu ian that aftero N A N


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With a film cartridge pinhole camera tucked in his mouth and his finger as a shutter, Justin Quinnell immortalizes his bath.

the resources of s ience have been exhausted to produce aperle t lens, the best work can be produced with no moreelaborate optical instrument than a bit of sheet metal witha hole pier ed in it."

"EVERY IMAGE IS A SURPRISE"TilE PINHOLE AMERA'S CURRENT REDI C VERY A, BEtraced to a handful of photographers, mo r of whom beganexperimenung with Ienslcss optics in the late 19605: EriRenner. Willie Anne Wright, David Lebe, Wiley ander-son, and in Europe, Gottfried Jager and Paolo Gioli. A sem-inal event in the technique's revival was a do-it-yourselfextravaganza at the Philadelphia Museum of An in 1 9 7 5 .Conceptual artist Phillips Simkin provided more than12,000 prcloaded cardb ard pinhole cameras free to visitorsover the cour c of a m nth, inviting "an exchange of per-ccpti ns," then mounted a rotating display of the results.Pinh le artists today are more apt to exploit the

process's oddities than its painterly possibilities. nan Wolff,an [ raeli-Dutch phorogra her living in France, haswra ped film inside the back of tilted cylindrical contain-er to produce weirdly distorted images of bridges,

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bedouins and i rys apc . "Evely image i it urprisc, whi hfascinates me," he says. Vv'hy take ,I picture, he a ks, if youknow exactly how it will turn lit? Working with hbek-and-white photographic paper, he" Id sepia t ncs or usescolor paper to reate aurora-like glow, of red and orange.He recently convened a van into a riling inhole camera,"I have hole 11 borh sides, on the ba k and on the r I,"Wolff ays. The roof hies he u e for poster-size portraitsof buildings like the ever-photogenic iffcl Tower. Toompose his hots, he' forced to do ~ I r of illegal park-ing, he cheerfully admits. "I get man ti kcts, bur I JUStadd these to the price o r rhe photographs."For mo t pinh Ie photographers, what's rewarding is the

thrill of building an imago.:with an empry homemade box,big or small, n r the result. "It's s dire land yet so magical,"says prinrmakcr-turned-pinholc-ar isi arah van Kcurcn,echoing rhe sentiment of pinhole people everywhere... rnehow I'm just taken with it over and over again," !Doug S ewart, a regular contributor to this ma9azine and an amateurp ho tog a ph er , is convert inq his hous e into a gallery o f c am e raobscures, rOOIl1 b)' room.

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Pinhole Point of View