Seeing light is a metaphor for seeing the invisible in the visible, for detecting the fragile imaginal garment that holds our planet and all existence together. Once we have learned to see the light, surely everything else will follow.
-Arthur Zajonc, Catching the Light, Oxford University Press
Photo Info:
“Exodus”
Photo By: Georgia Krawiec
HP.2012.15.496
Excerpt from:
Pinhole Photography: From Historic Technique to Digital Application
by: Eric Renner
Because it is red, this pepper simulated a small darkroom as a natural safelight for black and white photographic paper. The darkest red pepper worked best.
-Eric Renner
Photo Info:
“Red Pepper Pinhole Camera”
Photo By: Eric Renner
More Info:
Pinhole Photography: From Historic Technique to Digital Application
by: Eric Renner
I am fascinated by the purity of gesture in ‘frugal’ photography, with no optical barriers, no view-finder, no shutters or distances or heights and the equally pure but not at all frugal-on the contrary, clamorous-image reflected. Volumes and geometric perspectives take shape through a pencil mark made ‘transparent’ by a pinhole and, by looking ‘through’ it, an image with a peculiar ‘fidelity’ of its own may be seen.
-Paolo Gioli
Photo Info:
La Giostra Stenopeica, Italy
Photo By: Paolo Gioli
Excerpt from:
Paolo Gioli, Pinhole Journal (1996)
More Info:
Pinhole Photography: From Historic Technique to Digital Application
by: Eric Renner
I had always done portraits as a lithographer-for years and years. I began to realize that a pinhole photograph provided a composite image of a person-like what you get when you’re drawing a model over a period of time. It’s a collection of expressions. The body slumps into a characteristic pose if I’m doing a full figure during the 6 or 7 minute duration of my indoor exposures. You don’t get a fleeting expression of someone’s face…To me it seems to get at a certain inner truth-like a psychological X-ray.
-Sarah Van Keuren
Photo Info:
“Untitled”
Photo By: Sarah Van Keuren
Excerpt from:
Sarah Van Keuren, “Interview,” Pinhole Journal, Vol. 3#3 (1987): 18-19
More Info:
Pinhole Photography: From Historic Technique to Digital Application
by: Eric Renner
I say that the front of a building-or any open piazza or field-which is illuminated by the sun has a dwelling opposite to it, and if, in the front which does not face the sun, you make a small round hole, all the illuminated objects will project their images through that hole and be visible inside the dwelling on the opposite wall which should be made white; and there, in fact, they will be upside down, and if you make similar openings in several places in the same wall you will have the same result from each. Hence the images of the illuminated objects are all everywhere on this wall and all in each minutest part of it. The reason, as we clearly know, is that this hole must admit some light to the said dwelling, and the light admitted by it is derived from one or many luminous bodies. If these bodies are of various colors and shapes the rays forming the images are of various colors and shapes, and so will the representations be on the wall.
-Leonardo da Vinci
Photo Info:
“Camera Obscura: Outside In”
Photo By: Darius Kuzmickas
Excerpt from:
Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, ed. Jean Paul Richter (NY: Dover Publications, 1970)
More Info:
Pinhole Photography: From Historic Technique to Digital Application
by: Eric Renner