Preview
SCENE THROUGH A PINHOLE
Runs April 23 to May 30
PhotoSpace Gallery
(#213, 1235 — 26th Ave. S.E.)
In an age where photographic images are measured in megapixels, there is something seductively refreshing about the low-tech world of pinhole photography.
That’s why 15 students gathered recently at PhotoSpace Gallery for a two-part workshop to learn more about this form of photography from local pinhole guru Dianne Bos. Their results are being exhibited at the gallery until the end of May.
"It’s Zen and the art of pinhole photography," says Bos.
The Zen portion of pinhole photography comes by way of the process. Where the essence of conventional lens photography was once summed up by famed photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson as " the decisive moment" in a 1952 book of the same name, Bos describes pinhole photography as an art form that employs the most rudimentary equipment and simplest of methods to capture "a passage of time."
Starting off with almost any container that can be sealed off to create a light-tight chamber (including coffee cans and cigar boxes), the "camera" is then pricked with a needle to allow a trace amount of light to strike the film or photographic paper that has been placed inside. Once an exposure is made the paper or film is developed to produce an image.
Setting up the pinhole camera and then letting light filter inside of the box, exposing whatever truths lie in front of it, creates an experience between photographer and subject that is not replicated in any other form of photography. The magical aspects of pinhole photography are heightened because of the time required to expose the film or paper. "You spend time looking at the subject," says Bos.
The participants in the workshop found out exactly what Bos means. With exposures that took from several minutes to several days, the photographers were spurred on to discover a type of photography that is a triad of art, science and meditation.
James Holroyd, a local photographer and instructor at Bow Valley College, is one of the workshop participants with images on display. His photo Three Days in the Lives of Two Daffodils was taken using a cardboard box pinhole camera. As the title of the photo suggests, Holroyd’s exposure took three days to complete, thereby allowing the daffodils to continue to grow as the image was being captured.
Holroyd is an accomplished photographer who has often used conventional equipment, but he is also drawn to pinhole photography as an alternative to the world’s obsession with hi-tech gadgetry.
"It is far too easy with lens photography to get obsessed with the technology," he says. "Making sure you have the lens with the best optics can, I find, get in the way of the intuitive image-making process. The fact that there is literally nothing between the object being photographed and the light-sensitive material gives a directness to the process…. Rather than just being a recording of the reality around us, pinhole images seem to emerge directly out of memory."
Celebrate worldwide pinhole photo day
Dig out a stray shoe box, an empty coffee tin or anything else that you can turn into a light-tight container and join in on the fourth annual Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day on Sunday, April 25.
The event, which happens every year on the last Sunday of April, is staged by organizers based in Trento, Italy to, in their words, "take some time off the increasingly technological world we live in and participate in the simple act of making a pinhole photograph."
Last year, more than 1,000 pinhole photographers from 43 nations participated and the numbers are expected to swell this year as pinhole photography enters a renewed era of popularity.
If you need help learning how to make a pinhole camera, there are a lot of resources on the web, including www.Kodak.com and www.exploratorium.edu. Once you have constructed a pinhole camera, taken a photo and processed the negative, you can scan the image and submit it to the official WPPD4 website (www.pinholeday.org) where people from across the world will be able to view your work at the online gallery.
There are a full set of rules at the website, but the essentials are: no pornography, only previously unpublished work, images must be made from a "lensless device" and the photographs must be taken and submitted during the 24 hours of April 25.
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