Camera-on-Wheels

Photography by Jo Babcock

Famed landscape photographer Ansel Adams once said, “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” According to San Francisco photographer-sculptor Jo Babcock, that’s not good enough. Babcock isn’t satisfied unless he’s also made the camera itself.

During the last 25 years, he’s crafted more than 200 of them, turning everything from coffee pots to suitcases into the DI Y darlings commonly known as pinhole cameras. But the most ambitious of Babcock’s creations are the contraptions he’s fashioned from motor vehicles, including a VW van and an Airstream motor home. What’s next, a 747?

The van-cam works on the same general principle as Babcock’s other pinholes, except that it’s on wheels. A needle-sized hole in the side wall acts as a mini aperture. Light pours in, projecting an image onto photo paper (you can’t find film that large) taped to the opposite wall. No lenses required. But the van also doubles as a proper camera obscura (“dark room” in Latin), thanks to the addition of a lens and mirror on the roof. Because of the tiny aperture, the first van-cam took four hours to expose

a pinhole pic. Using the lens, Babcock can send an image to the vehicle’s floor and develop a paper negative in a fraction of the time.

Babcock, who taught photography at the San Francisco Art Institute and the University of California, Santa Cruz, among other institutions, is a firm believer in the merits of creating his tools from found objects. “You don’t necessarily need newer or high-tech equipment to make better art,” he says.

Fittingly, Babcock’s new book, The Invented Camera, which chronicles his “symbiotic” photos over the years (the coffee-pot pinhole shoots a dreamy coffee shop sign, the suitcase a fuzzy bus station, etc.), mirrors his autonomous approach. To get the book out there, Babcock learned Quark and Adobe Photoshop, worked through the night for weeks assembling the digital page files, then raised the money to print the books by working as an electrician. Up next? A clicker converted from a 2005 Scion xB.

—Megan Mansell Williams

>>Jo Babcock’s website: jobabcock.com

Make: 21