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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

Dec13

My sewn body of work was created using large black and white silver prints produced from pinhole cameras. The images are captured on film by using either a 4x5 Leonardo pinhole camera or a pinhole camera made from a Tide detergent box. Both these cameras are modified to allow the attachment of a Polaroid 645 film back. Since the camera lacks a viewfinder, I rely on Polaroid Positive Negative 55 film to produce a positive ‘reference’ image–this particular Polaroid film also provides a black and white negative at the same time.

After the silver print is made, I build upon each print by using various art mediums such as painting, drawing, and image transfers. Often, multiple photographs are juxtaposed together to evoke narratives connecting one image to another, not unlike chapters in a book. I feel most comfortable photographing possessions associated with my home, family and everyday life. Occasionally, I incorporate hand or machine-sewn verses or writing into select areas of the print to act as dialog. The writings, both from personal journals and verses from popular 20th century poets, push the narrative capabilities of the image. All of my finished pieces are distinctive works on paper that move beyond the boundaries of a traditional photograph.

-Rebecca Sexton Larson
http://sextonlarson.com

Photo Info:

Mournful Widow

Photo By: Rebecca Sexton Larson

HP.2012.15.1252

Dec12

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

Dec12

The Trinity Site Atomic Bomb Test is not an image using X-ray film to photograph high-energy particles as they explode–it is probably the first pinhole image of the atomic bomb mushroom cloud in New Mexico, undoubtedly made with a view-camera with a pinhole attached to its lens board rather than a lens.

With the advent of nuclear energy in the 1940s, pinhole cameras began to find their way into nuclear physics to image high-energy particles because it was discovered that a photographic lens absorbs rather than projects high-energy X-rays or gamma rays, whereas a pinhole will produce an image.

-Eric Renner

Photo Info:

Trinity Site Atomic Bomb Test

Photo By: Los Alamos National Laboratories

HP.2012.15.775

Excerpt from:

Pinhole Photography: From Historic Technique to Digital Application

by: Eric Renner