Hidden aspects of our world are revealed from within the black box
Millions of hyperreal photos are taken with a simple click of a cellphone camera. The slow, careful process of pinhole photography, by contrast, is unforgiving or magnanimous, discovering images that would otherwise be invisible.
Carla Crafford has been teaching pinhole photography at the University of Pretoria since 1998 to art and design students. She recently published a book (which she also designed) with the students’ and her own work titled Light for Art’s Sake: From Inside the Black Box. A total of 86 students’ and ex-students’ works are shown in the book alongside Crafford’s own experimentation with the medium. Some of the students featured are well-known and established artists now.
Pinhole photography is taking a photo with a camera without a lens but rather a simple small aperture (hole). There are many different ways to create pinhole photographs but almost all the photographs in this book were taken with a camera made by the students themselves from a paper box, black paint and a small metal aperture.
The process requires the artist to make a camera, “load” light-sensitive paper into the camera, find or create a scene they want to capture, place the box camera, open the aperture, expose the paper for the required time (which can be anything from 40 seconds to hours), then close the aperture, take the box to the darkroom to develop the light-sensitive paper, which creates a negative of the scene, and then create the positive image by exposing light through that negative on to another light-sensitive paper. Only then what happened inside the black box becomes visible. In a time when billions of photos are taken by the simple click of a shutter on phones and digital cameras, this process seems slow, complicated and inefficient.
But it is this slow process and the necessary long exposure times that reveal hidden aspects of our world. Even our breathing and blinking become visible. It also renders moving subjects unseen or as “ghost figures”. Subjects need to stay still for the whole exposure time to register fully on the image. If they move too much they can disappear completely. One of the students featured in the book, Colijn Strydom, says: “Pinhole photography is slow; it necessitates studies and planning. In some ways, it is the opposite of the camera phone. It requires tests, is unpredictable, unforgiving and sometimes magnanimous.”
Crafford concludes: “Every time I see a meticulously crafted photo-realistic painting, I think with admiration of photographs wherein the images appear painted. Whereas the former is accomplished by the artist’s dedication, the latter depends on nature’s gift of light – along with the artist’s observation and skill. And at times a bit of luck.”
It is this slow process and the necessary long exposure times that reveal hidden aspects of our world. Even our breathing and blinking
become visible