My work merges aspects of photography, sculpture and conceptual art. During the past twenty five years I have created over one hundred and fifty simple cameras from a plethora of recycled objects. Using only a needle, tin foil, black tape and some film, I can make a functional camera out of practicly anything. I’ve made cameras out of coffee pots, maple syrup cans, suitcases, lunchpails, soup cans, file boxes; I even turned a VW van and an Airstream motorhome into giant cameras. On their own, these tools operate in a symbiotic manner photographing subjects which relate to the camera/object.: the suitcase camera photographs a hotel; the maple syrup camera photographs a log cabin; the coffee pot camera photographs a neon sign that reads “Good Coffee”. I use inexpensive lenses or pinholes to make my cameras.

-Jo Babcock

www.jobabcock.com/statement.html

Photo Info:

Last Night of Chanukah

Photo By: Jo Babcock

HP.2012.15.837

I am attracted to alternative ways in which cameras see the world. I was trained as a painter and printmaker. I was asked to teach photography at my school in 1986. I had never previously been in a darkroom but after a year or so of teaching the course, my fascination with photographic possibilities prompted me to give up printmaking for photography. I built my first pinhole cameras about two years later when all my camera equipment was stolen.

I attempt to give a painterly quality to my photographs by modifying them with bleaches, fixer, toners and emulsions as well as exposing them to light at inappropriate times. I am one of many artists who find it a challenge to explore the alchemy of melding dissimilar media, hoping to create a rich kaleidoscopic surface that is as seductive as the image

The largest body of my work consists of pinhole cityscapes; an ongoing series I call “The Bent Cities Project”. Having lived and photographed in urban environments most of my life, I have witnessed the constant flux of cities - the sustained birth and decay of urban spaces.  I have photographed these places many times over the years where at times they have become altered, have declined or have been completely replaced with something new. I mimic this urban change by curving, twisting or angling the negatives in my pinhole cameras to create “bent” cityscapes of an indeterminate time. I want these images to look as if they have become luminous wrecks of a dubious age, leaving surface time maps chronicling the signs and blemishes of extended use - images tainted by humans, the sun, weather and the seasons.

-Walter Crump

waltercrump.com

Photo Info:

Bent North Avenue Bridge

Walter Crump

HP.2012.14.1018