About pinhole

Pinhole photography is lensless imaging. The equipment can be simple- a box with a tiny hole on one side, a piece of tape over the hole to act as a shutter, and a support to steady the box. Most light sensitive material can be used in a pinhole camera and the resulting negative contact printed or enlarged. The ancestor of the pinhole camera is the camera obscura, a device used by Renaissance artists to study perspective. By the 16th century, lenses to sharpen and brighten images were placed in camera obscuras. In 1839, when the ability to chemically fix an image projected onto light sensitive material in a camera obscura was perfected, modern photography was born. Beginning in the 1840's, some artists have chosen an alternative to imaging with a lens and prefer to use the pinhole system.

A photogram is a photographic image made without a camera by placing an object directly onto the surface of a photosensitive material such as photographic paper and then exposing it to light. Making a photogram can serve as a lensless creative medium. It was the first photographic method employed and is still practiced today by many artists.

Combines is my name for the narrative compositions I create using several lensless techniques. My pinhole photographs, scanned vintage photographs, and items used as photograms are the raw materials. The final resolution of combining the component parts is scanned, changed to a negative by a computer program, and printed on transparency material. The resulting negative is contact printed in the darkroom as a gelatin silver print.