CRAFTER

from such inspired finds as old coffee urns, shoe polish tins, and toolboxes.

Pinhole aficionado Tom Persinger of Pittsburgh, Pa., who runs the photography forum f295.com, says: “You can craft your camera to fulfill any vision. Many pinhole photographers find greater satisfaction in crafting their cameras than in taking their pictures.”

VanCleave agrees. “Many pinhole photographers have a general dissatisfaction with technology and want to discover a purer avenue to explore the photographic art,” he says.

“Some are more focused on the engineering of the cameras: their pinholes precisely drilled to perfect circles of exact size. Then there are many of us who aren’t so interested in how sharp the image is, but in how it feels, the intuitive side of the art. Pinhole photography can be blurry and gritty, producing soft images, sometimes barely recognizable, yet they are emotionally very involving and very satisfying.”

 

“With a long exposure, you’re

very much in the moment,

aware of every bird that flies

across your landscape …”

 

Simplicity is not for everyone, of course. San Francisco photographer Jo Babcock converted a vintage V W bus and a classic Airstream motor home into mobile pinhole cameras, producing giant images on his travels (see MAKE, Volume 08, page 21, “Camera-on-Wheels”). Others have crafted cameras from ceramics, Lego, and even a 150-year-old skull.

VanCleave’s photography reflects the stark beauty of the New Mexico desert around his home in the shadow of the Sandia Mountains, where he lives with his wife, Andrea. “It’s a very scenic part of the Southwest, with majestic vistas and dramatic landscape,” he says. “It certainly helps.”

It also allows him to break away from the sterile, high-tech semiconductor chip production plant’s clean room where he works as a technician.

His garage, which is not quite so clean, has been converted into a camera-building workshop and darkroom.

A hobbyist photographer since the early 1980s,

craftzine.com/03/vancleave

VanCleave started out with 35mm cameras and then climbed the technology treadmill to medium-and large-format cameras. But then he realized that, for him, it wasn’t about the gear, but about the art of putting light on film.

“In the early 1990s I started learning about pinhole photography. The light in my pinhole camera is very pure — it’s not been filtered through any lens, translated into binary code, or turned into pixels. It’s very primal — just light on film. I enjoy its simplicity.”

VanCleave’s first pinhole camera was a cardboard box that he got at a craft store. “I didn’t even make a proper pinhole. Some people make crafting the pinhole into a complex blend of engineering, metallurgy, and science,” he says. “I’m more do-it-yourself. I use really thin sheet brass, make a dimple in it with a sewing needle, and then sand it with really fine sandpaper, which produces a really sharp hole.”

The downside VanCleave found to his camera was that after one shot you had to take the film back to the darkroom to process it.

“I wanted to make a camera holding multiple sheets of paper, so I designed a falling plate camera, made of oak,” he explains. “The film is mounted on sheets of metal, and after each shot I turn a knob that allows the exposed sheet to fall flat, and reveals a fresh sheet behind it. I can pre-load ten of these at once.”

The fundamental technology has barely changed since Scottish scientist Sir David Brewster took the first pinhole photographs in the 1850s. “It’s very similar to 19th-century photography in some ways,” says VanCleave. “Exposures can take five or ten minutes, or more. With a long exposure, you’re very much in the moment, aware of every bird that flies across your landscape, every movement that becomes part of your image, like ghosts and shadows.

“You don’t just get the sliver of a moment,” VanCleave says, “you get a larger slice of history — through a hole the size of a pin.” ×

 

Read “Pinhole Panoramic Camera” in MAKE, Volume 09, page 92, for instructions on how to make your own pinhole camera.

British expatriate Peter Sheridan has worked for the past 20 years in Los Angeles as a foreign correspondent, covering the West Coast for publications in the United Kingdom.