[ART]_CONnected

PINHOLE PHOTOGRAPHY AT ITS BEST

Sometimes one can find real marvels browsing in older photo-magazines. Like this pinhole photo objects by Jessica Ferguson.

Jesseca Ferguson is a pinhole photographer, living, working and teaching in Boston, MA. Find more of her work at her website.

“The poetic aspects of pinhole photography are what draw me to it. Although the pinhole camera is ‘blind,’ because it has no viewfinder or lens, I find that it ‘sees’ in mysterious ways. The pinhole camera’s ‘sight’ grants infinite depth of field to the object and images before it, thus allowing us to see the camera’s pinhole vision, which is characterized by the odd clarity of dreams or memory.

Working in my home studio and using only natural light, my exposures often take several hours. I then contact print my images on artists paper using 19th century processes. Often I collage my pinhole images onto antique book boards, incorporating snippets of text and time-stained papers. The resulting ‘photo object’ alludes to the passage of time, and to that private interior library which I believe serves as a paradigm for collective and personal memory.

My work is slow, hand-built, and cumulative, rather like the layering of dust or memories over time.“

A pinhole camera is a simple camera without a lens and with a single small  aperture – effectively a light-proof box with a small hole in one side. Light from a scene passes through this single point and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box.

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