In 2015 I started to capture my view with a plastic panoramic pinhole camera using mostly black and white film that I process myself. With the pinhole, I don’t have a lens to look through so the work is about what I am viewing and where I am standing.
When I find a place that is worthy of a slow down, I pull out my panoramic pinhole. This is not my documentation, my experience or even necessarily my story; it is my view.
The panoramic pinhole records the scene in three pieces of film, which makes the sound of the shutter “cha ching” instead of a click. So the view I capture has to have potential for the time I will spend there. The photographs I take with the other cameras are the in-betweens to the panoramic pinhole photographs. They are the documentations, the stories, and the journey. The pinholes are my views and where the other photographs can speak to everyone, the pinholes speak more to me. They serve as my memory.
The absence of the vibrancy from colors with the the use of black and white lets me paint in the hues I want when I look back at them. Everything is in focus and kind of fuzzy at the same time. The detail isn’t sharp and there is a dreamlike haze from the longer exposure. The Earth curves from where I was standing in the center of the photograph. The sun flares and makes my eyes squint as it comes through the opening of the pinhole. Movement is slowed and people are a blur as they go throughout the scene just as my memory thinks of them now. Time is hesitated.