Viewpoint Gallery - Sacramento Valley Photographic Arts Center (SVPAC), fine art photography exhibits & photographer education

Visual Edge 2002

Photography's Full Circle:
The Pinhole Perspective

Juried Exhibit, Page 4 of 5

Barbara Snyder
Roberta Bailey
Stefan Killan
Mark Dungan
Darius Kuzmickas
Donna Fay Allen

The images are presented in the order being shown in the exhibition.
The numbers for each print are used as references for the exhibit.
Prices shown are set by the artists

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All images copyrighted by the artist.

Barbara Snyder
Vancouver, BC, Canada

35. Hover $475

36. Float $475

37 Thrive $475

"Still Life"

The three photographic images in this show, "Hover", "Float", and "Thrive", are from a series of images, "Still Life", based on the tenuous balance of nature and technology. All photographs were created with a homemade pinhole camera. Each photograph shows an insect(s) mounted in a glass box (framed in wood) - hence a "stilled life" - placed in an industrial setting. Each image functions as a portrait, a still life, or as a landscape.

Why a pinhole camera?:
Recently, I described to a friend the patience-testing process of building a "good" pinhole camera, estimating exposure time, minimum focusing distance and the added limitation that only one image can be created per exposure. I found myself justifying the "why bother?" question. The nature of the pinhole camera fascinates me. It is a magic box and yet it is nothing. It "stills life" by means of only a light-tight container with a tiny hole in one side, available light and recording film - with some conjuring of the situation by the artist to aid the storytelling.

With this series, I juxtaposed images of nature (the insects stand in for nature in general) with examples of technology (the cement plant, the structure of the bridge, etc). in order to create dialogue on environment - to imply a restless co-existence. If any creature has perseverance, it will be insects. Here, the insects are up front, relatively large in scale, implying they can hold their own. However a reverse message is also possible: the insects are somewhat pale symbols, mortal and trapped in their glass homes suggesting fragility, a "stilled life", a warning. I prefer to think of the perseverance, rather than the disappearance, of nature in the face of technology and globalization. It is one of hope. There is still life.

Roberta Bailey
Elk Grove, California

38. Ruth $125

About a year ago I became interested in pinhole photography, it reminds me of the very early days of photography with its soft focus, romantic and sort of grainy look. The early compositions and subjects were influenced by the paintings of the day; thus they have a painterly look. I like that since I have an art and painting background. I like combining low and high technology, so when taking my pinhole shots I can use strobe lights for studio shots and archival digital prints (Epson 2000P).

At a pinhole workshop I learned that SLR cameras could be used. So I chose a SLR camera (an old Minolta) for my pinhole work. I like the idea of being able to shoot 24 to 36 exposures at a time and having a lab process the film and then making my own digital prints especially since I do not have a darkroom.

Before I knew how to determine the optimal pinhole size for my camera I experimented with three different pinhole sizes. I used three sizes of needles to "drill" holes into the center of three 1-inch squares cut out of a disposable pie tin. Pie tins are of an acceptable thickness and strength. The squares were placed on cork for the drilling and then carefully sanded. I centered the pinholes over 1/4" holes that I had drilled into three camera caps. I used black tape and black marker, not paint, on the inside of the cap to eliminate bounced light. I scanned the three holes along with a metric (mm) ruler before I taped the squares on the inside of the caps. I was able to approximate each pinholes size: large, 86mm; medium, 36mm; and small, 24mm. The experiments proved to me that the smallest pinhole had the sharpest focus. But the other sizes also have merit if a photographer wants extra soft focus photos for a special effect. For my photo of "Ruth", I used Kodak ISO 400 with strobe lights in a very sunny room with a bulb setting for about one second.

Stefan Killan
New York, New York

39. Thunderbolt, Coney Island $350

40. Pam, Brad, Richard and Whitney $350

Both of these photographs were taken with a homemade pinhole camera in this case a small suspicious-looking cardboard box wrapped in black plastic and electrical tape. The camera is designed to hold 110mm film and has a focal length of 30mm and an aperture of roughly f120.

My interest in pinhole photography began in 1988 when a friend gave me a camera he'd made for a photography class he was teaching. My background is in drawing and painting and I had no previous photography experience, but I found that pinhole images had a surprisingly painterly quality and the immediacy of drawings; I was hooked.

Over the years I've found myself pointing the camera at landscapes, people, and architecture. But the ideas I've come back to again and again have to do with relationships and the tension between order and chaos, or between culture and nature. Sometimes I find this tension in the repetition of forms
(often trees) - the visible evidence of our storytelling mind that looks for patterns, rhythm, and repetition in an otherwise undefined world. Sometimes it's in the juxtaposition of human-made objects (often bridges) with nature. And sometimes the tension is just between my formal aesthetic and the messy process of pinhole photography - I usually have absolutely no idea what the final image is going to look like. But whatever the tension, there's always relationship and dialogue, and in that dialogue I find beauty and comfort, and a reflection of our on-going relationship with God.

Pam, Brad, Richard & Whitney is a photo of my friends Pam and Brad taken at a retrospective of Richard Avedon at the Whitney Museum in New York. I have no idea what the exposure time was, but would guess something like 30 seconds. I was probably holding the camera against a wall, which is what I use to steady it when I don't have a tripod.

Thunderbolt, Coney Island is a photo of the old roller coaster that was just torn down last year. In this case my "tripod" was the inside of a tall wire-mesh fence that surrounded the roller coaster, though even with that help I didn't manage to keep the camera still. The exposure time was probably around 7 seconds

Mark Dungan
Logan, Utah

41. Centurian With Go Cart $260

42. Stonehenge $260

My images are part of an ongoing series documenting "roadside attractions" throughout the United States. Most are located on major highways that are now mostly bypassed by travelers in favor of faster (and duller) freeways.

The processes used are cyanotype ( a process that produces a Prussian blue color) and Van Dyke Brown (a silver process producing a delicate brown image). Both techniques require that the artist select a paper and apply the chemistry with a brush. The negative is placed in contact with the paper in a printing frame and placed outdoors in sunlight for a period of time. Then the images are developed. With the cyanotype, development is in water; the van dyke brown is rinsed in water then fixed in a weak solution of sodium thiosulfate. It is then washed for 30 minutes.

I use a Kodak 2A. I have removed the lens and replaced it with a pinhole. The working f-stop is 256. Exposure times are three to six seconds on a bright sunny day. I use Ilford Pan-F developed in HC-110.

Darius Kuzmickas
Las Vegas, Nevada

43. Pinhole 20, Ocean III $300

44. Pinhole 30, Movement 2 $300

Most often I work intuitively and spontaneously. That is, I don't have an agenda at the beginning. However, in my work I try to create something that is visually stimulating, exciting, and, perhaps that has never been done before but has some visual cohesiveness giving each photograph it's own sort of life. Such photographs could be appropriately placed in a particular category of "art photography" that is worthy of aesthetic obser-vation and contemplation. They are about the wonder of visual form in all its variety and how it can be rendered photographically. There are several approaches that presently capture my interest when making an image: by using the centuries old pinhole camera that allows objects to quietly draw their own portraits and produces warm intimate images which cannot be generated by electronic meters and a perfectly ground lens, and Polaroid SX-70 manipulations which make a fuzzy line between photography and painting and provide quite impressionistic images. These are beautiful things photographed in beautiful ways. Sometimes it is a picture of a grand landscape, a great, majestic sweep to a far distant horizon, or an intimate image taken at close range, or perhaps a single move through a constantly changing kaleidoscope of scenic images. And even more, it could be a still life image presenting an object as it is found or the one that has been carefully selected and arranged for greater aesthetic interest.My photographs show the formal elegance obtainable from the simplest and most ordinary objects. However it may seem, my photographs are more than a mere record of place, location or an object, because it always involves individual perspective and focus on aesthetics along with technical proficiency.

Donna Fay Allen
Roseville, California

45. Tea for Two $125

This image is one of 13 in the "Ancestral Portraits" series which combined my interests in photography and genealogy. The old photographs I have used in the prints are all my ancestors, and were taken before I was born. These are people I never knew. Young people who had hopes and dreams and ideas for a life that were probably quite different than the life they ended with. The pinhole camera was the perfect technology for my illustrations. It wouldn't seem right to me to make crystal clear studio table top shots of these altars to my ancestors. It would be like my saying I really knew these people and their lives. In fact I only had a fuzzy, indistinct impression of these lives. And, if a light leak created a "ghost" on the film, well...who knows. I was encouraged by the qualities the pinhole camera brought to the old photos, and I loved combining the photos with objects and settings which were personal to my experience, but which could tell many other stories depending upon the viewer's imagination.

I used a pinhole camera fashioned from a candy tin and Polaroid Platinum 600 film. The ISO of the film is 640 and the fast speed resulted in 15 second exposures in the studio using 2, 300 watt lights and a daylight blue gel filter. Or exposures from 15 seconds to one minute in available daylight.

This image was scanned from the original polaroid and is a Fujix Pictrography 3000 print.

Main Exhibit Page

Eric Renner and Nancy Spencer

Linda Pearson

Martha Casanave

Page 1 of Juried Exhibit

Page 2 of Juried Exhibit

Page 3 of Juried Exhibit

Page 4 of Juried Exhibit

Page 5 of Juried Exhibit

All images copyrighted by the artist.

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