The Pinhole Resource Online: What is Pinhole Photography?
What Is Pinhole Photography?
by Richard Vallon Jr.
Pinhole photography is making photographs using a camera fitted with a tiny
hole known as a pinhole in the place of a lens. Any light tight container
that can hold a sensitive piece of film or photographic printing paper can
be fitted with a pinhole to make photographs. ( For detailed instructions
on making and using pinhole cameras see the books
on pinhole photography section of this web page; for pre-made pinholes
and pinhole cameras see the pinhole products
section of this page.)
Early History
Pinhole images can be found in nature. Projected images of the bright
disc of the sun can be seen on the ground under trees when three or more
of its leaves happen to come together in such a way that they form a triangular
or square "hole" (pinhole). Ancient Chinese, Greek and Arabic
scientists noted that pinholes formed projected images and used the pinhole
as a tool for their early researches into the nature of light. By the Renaissance,
darkened rooms with an outside facing wall were fitted with a pinhole and
projected the outdoor scene (upside down and backwards) onto the interior
wall. Modern scientists use the pinhole's unique ability to make images
of radiation sources that cannot be seen with the naked eye ( or lenses
) such as fusion reactor experiments or to take a picture made by gamma
radiation emanating from a dying star.
The Pinhole and Photography.
Practical photography, first invented by L.J.M. Daguerre of Paris in
1839 used "film" formed by chemical reactions on a silver plate
which was not sensitive enough to record the faint images projected onto
it through a pinhole. Early in the history of photography a race began to
produce lenses which transmit large amounts of light and create sharp images.
The progress of lens manufacturing marks the technical history of photography's
early achievements and continues to the present. Between the 1870s and 1890s
more "modern" black and white films came into production and by
1890 these far more sensitive films were used by George Davison of England
to produce his award winning photograph The Onion Field using a pinhole
on his camera. Critics complained that giving an award to a photograph produced
by a pinhole was a slight to the skilled lens maker's art. To understand
this position one must understand the status of photography as a fine art
in the last decades of the 1800s in order to illuminate the source of this
apparently irrational criticism. Photography was then and still is one of
the newest of the visual fine arts. Painting, drawing and sculpture have
long traditions in antiquity and can be traced all the way back to pre-history
in caves such as Lascaux and La Madelaine in France. Photography (unlike
painting and sculpture) has had a difficult time being accepted by the fine
art community because it produced images without the need of the direct
work of human hands on the image. Art photographers in the last century
who were attempting to find photography's identity as a true art form broke
into two distinct camps, those who were more romantic and created less sharp
photographs that tended to look more like drawings or paintings and those
who later championed sharp, ultra realistic images. These images were by
their viewpoint to be accepted for their own unique and purely photographic
properties. The pinhole produces photographs which are not as sharp as those
made by most lenses, but unlike lenses which often create images
where near objects are in focus and far objects are out of focus the pinhole
is "democratic" since both near and far subjects are imaged with
an equal degree of soft focus. This characteristic of equal but overall
soft focus is a strong identifying characteristic of the then (1880's) new
school of Impressionistic painting. Pictorial photographers ( those who
utilized this softer more romantic, painterly approach) found a useful tool
in the pinhole. Soft focus was a standard aesthetic of Pictorialism and
was created by special soft focus lenses. In his early pictorialist phase
Edward Steichen gave the admonition to rap on the legs of the tripod with
a wrench during a long exposure to destroy the inherent sharpness of the
lens produced photograph. Many pictorial photographs though made by lenses
have a "pinhole aesthetic", specifically in their dedication to
overall softness of the image. Commercially produced pinholes and pinhole
cameras appeared during the pictorial heyday near the end of the last century.
When Pictorialism faded in the second decade of the 1900s as the sharpness
of realism came into favor the use of the pinhole in art photography declined
to the status as the subject of science projects for young school students.
Pinhole photography began a long Rip Van Winkle like sleep. By the 1930s
photographers such as Edward Weston gave up their soft focus lenses and
started making straight and sharply focused lensed photographs. Weston and
the other photographers of the group f64 espoused making photographs using
very sharp ( rapid rectilinear) lenses adjusted to have tiny apertures at
their centers. This tiny aperture (designated in mathematical terms as f64)
was like having a large pinhole inside the lens which allowed the photographers
to make images in which near and far objects from the camera appear in equal
focus ( just like pinhole images ).
Revival
In the 1960s a few photographers began independently to experiment with
pinhole photography in a search for something different than the images
produced by the regimented, mass produced factory manufactured cameras fitted
with their ultra sharp lenses. The steep rise of the use of the photograph
in advertising in the 1960s re-awakened mass interest in photography as
an art form. Photography came to be taught as a degreed fine art subject
at many college campuses around the world. In these environments information
on the history of photography and knowledge of pinhole photography became
more widespread. By the late 1960's that quest for something different led
an experimenter such as Eric Renner to built his first pinhole camera. A
six pinhole affair with a large piece of film wound in a circle around a
cylindrical core, the camera took photographs in 360 degrees in an overlapping,
discontinuous fashion. Since the 1970's many more pinhole artists have produced
full bodies of work with their cameras. Many of these pinhole artists have
been trained in painting, printmaking, sculpture and other art mediums.
For many their introduction into art photography has been through pinhole
photography. A general consensus of these artists when posed the question
"Why use pinhole?" is often answered in that there is little need
for technical skill in pinhole camera operation and there is a feeling of
uniqueness when viewing the unusual imagery produced by a hand made camera.
As part of this attitude there is also a proliferation of alternate printing
processes- the making of ones own light sensitive photographic papers to
print the negatives produced from pinhole cameras. Though alternative processes
are not synonymous with pinhole imagery, the large negatives that can be
easily produced at low cost by pinhole cameras do contribute to a strong
connection between the two, particularly among those trained in photography
at a University.
The Present Day
In 1984 Eric Renner founded the Pinhole Resource and Pinhole Journal
magazine to provide information to pinhole photographers and provide a publication
that illustrates bodies of work produced by some of the 500 plus pinhole
photographers actively working in this old-new medium. Today Eric Renner
and Nancy Spencer continue to publish new issues of the Journal and conduct
seminars on pinhole photography. In July of 1995 I attended several workshops
in New Mexico on pinhole photography presented by Eric and Nancy and met
twenty or so pinhole photographers gathered there. Not only was it an amazing
experience for so many pinhole photographers to be in one place, but many
of these people also displayed beautiful portfolios of their unique pinhole
images.
*Postscript
*An editorial commentary by Richard R Vallon Jr. and is not
expressly the views of the directors of Pinhole Resource.
Being a pinhole photographer no longer needs to be for most of us a
near solitary practice as there are now opportunities to exchange ideas
and images through this, other web pages and the Pinhole Journal. Most importantly,
Pinhole photography is a unique and refreshing reborn photographic art form.
To a great extent the art scene in the established photograhic art galleries
has become entrenched by a relatively small number of what were once creative
unknowns of the past few decades. Once truly creative, for some their work
has become tired, commercialized, repetitious and trivial. All too often
these artists are like typecast actors in that they repeat the same "roles"
with their photographs, afraid or unable to create fresh work. The prints
of these "new" artists and the great pioneering art photographers
(many deceased) are collected, sometimes re-printed from original negatives
(in carefully controlled numbers) and then displayed and sold for escalating
prices determined by associated art dealers. Interestingly, Alfred Steiglitz,
who opened the first photographic art gallery at the beginning of the century
saw his magazine Camera Work utilizing the gravure ink printing process
as being an inexpensive way to bring photographic artwork of aspiring photographic
talents to the masses. Today those Steiglitz produced gravures from Camera
Work are sold for thousands of dollars each. Fortunately for afficianados
of photography Stieglitz's dream has been realized as the inventive work
of the great photographers is now published in books on the history of photography
which are sold for a reasonable price. Hopefully even more galleries will
come to display the beauty of the fine Pinhole work of so many near unknowns
now seen in the pages of Pinhole Journal. The gallery instead of being barred
to newcomers is here online and equal access is granted to all. The cutting
edge of any creative art is usually on the fringe and many pinhole photographers
today are right there.
