About The Pinhole Photographs
I discovered pinhole photography in my final year (1969-70) studying photography at the Philadelphia College of Art (PCA). It drew me in at first contact, giving me the sensation that suddenly I now understood the core of photography and would be able to make it uniquely mine. An illusion, perhaps; but it changed the way I thought about photography from then on. I was taking a class with my beloved and influential teacher, Barbara Blondeau. The class consisted of one week assignments, each introducing a new alternative process. Early on there was an assignment to build a pinhole camera; after that I didn't do any of the other assignments, I just built pinhole cameras and made pinhole photographs. No one seemed to mind and my interest only deepened, so much so, that when school ended I continued expanding my exploration for another five years. I stopped making pinhole photographs the same year Barbara died of breast cancer at age thirty-five, my lessons learned from pinhole photography and from Barbara herself infusing into all I was to do after that.
I made a number of cameras that recorded a view of 180 degrees or more and that produced long (and then not so long) strip images using 2 inch wide film or paper. The first cameras had seven or nine apertures and required that I change the film (one roll for each image) in a darkroom. Around 1972 I added a four aperture camera that freed me from being near a darkroom and let me photograph anywhere. I originally came to make these cameras because of a fascination with nineteenth century panoramic photographs. But unlike those cameras, my cameras captured the panorama with multiple apertures, arranged on a curved plane, projecting multiple scenes on a continuous piece of film. The result was not a smooth uninterrupted view, but a scrambled, pieced-together effect, the pieces fading into each other. I only discovered that effect after I actually made the camera and developed the first negative! It was a puzzling few minutes before I figured out what was happening. Right away I saw that my camera offered possibilities quite different from familiar panoramas. I realized that I didn't need to open all the apertures at the same time, and also that my long exposures meant I could easily walk around to the front of the camera and put myself in the picture. With these images, the way I thought of how space and time were captured by a camera, and were then represented in a photograph, changed. For someone who had regarded Cartier-Bresson's decisive moment as the ultimate photographic objective, it was a big change. Later, when I started to make my light drawings I would say that for me, the decisive moment had become the decisive twenty minutes.
My pinhole photographs were the first where I set up a scene or posed a model. Sometimes I'd take friends along on photographic outings to pose for me. Sometimes I'd ask strangers I encountered on my outings. Often I was my own model, as in Wrestling, the first photograph in which I came out, winking at the camera while two bronze nude Greeks wrestled in the background. With the Susan photographs it was the first time I felt a collaborative relationship with a model, something which would keep happening for years. Susan Welchman and I had studied photography together at PCA and then gone our separate ways, meeting by chance two years later. For several years we hung out together while we tried to discover the things we liked; making my pinhole photographs was one of those things. Susan, giving serious consideration to the task, would dress up in outfits she loved, and I would find locations – mostly vacant lots, roof tops or parking lots – all uninhabited empty spaces waiting to be filled, echoing, I now think, the way we were feeling about our lives then.
I stopped making these pictures, perhaps because I was young and had other things I wanted to do; but also, I was frustrated. Technical constraints prevented the images from evolving in the ways I wanted. For one thing, I wanted to enlarge them and had no way to do that: I would have needed an 11x14 enlarger! Also, besotted by color I had made a lot of these pinholes as Ektachrome transparencies, and I never found a satisfactory way to print or exhibit them. But even with traditional black and white prints, even hand colored ones, I felt I was not always achieving the results I envisioned in my mind.
More than thirty years passed, and then one day in 2006 I got an email from Eric and Nancy Renner of The Pinhole Resource, requesting pinhole pictures for their gallery. I thought, this is just impossible. Mostly I had only one copy, sometimes only one beat up copy, of any particular image; and I had no desire to get into all the printing and exhibition issues that had driven me crazy in the past. Then the obvious hit me. I was at that time (rather late) teaching myself digital photography. I realized that I now had a way to do what I had wished I could have done thirty years before but had thought impossible. I got excited about these pictures again. With digital files of scanned prints, negatives and transparencies, I set to work in Photoshop, finding that I remembered what I had been thinking thirty years before about how I wanted the pictures to look, even down to small details of color and shading. With that knowledge, and a little wisdom picked up in the intervening years, I made prints that fulfilled my original vision and then some. The images of all the pinhole photographs on this website are from these new files.
March, 2013
These new digital prints range from 4” high x @ 15" or 20” long for the ‘short’ images, up to 4.5”x55” for the ‘long’ images. The prints of all the images were finally completed in 2016
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IMAGE: Wrestling, 1974 (detail)