Take a peek through the pinhole camera

Take a peek through the pinhole camera

Visitors to Toi Pōneke Gallery this month get the chance to explore the fascinating process of pinhole photography. The new exhibition – Light and Truth – opens on Friday 28 January and features beautiful photographs taken using pinhole cameras, as well as a large-scale, walk-in camera obscura (an optical device that projects an image of its surroundings onto a screen).

Light and Truth captures moments of local, personal and photographic history, while exploring the process of pinhole photography. Artists Alastair McAra, Shaun Matthews and Deidra Sullivan are all familiar with this method of photography, having photographed with pinholes throughout their careers.

The trio describe themselves as being part of a slow photography movement.

“We’ve collaborated on this exhibition to draw attention to this back-to-basics method. The simplicity and beauty of the process serves as a reminder that not all photography has gone digital,” says Alastair.

Alastair’s work makes use of the ‘otherworldliness’ look that pinhole photography creates to explore nostalgia and childhood memory. Combining recollections from his own childhood and that of his two-year-old daughter, his photographs capture a sense of memory and the daydreams of childhood.

Deidra is interested in the history of photography and has spent time scouring second-hand stores and Trade-me for antique Victorian visiting cards. These were used as social calling cards They feature beautiful decorative designs alongside evocative studio portraits. Deidra documents her collection with a labour-intensive technique using liquid light on glass plates.

Shaun is using hand-tinted, postcard-style photographs to pay homage to the Botanic Garden. “I love the way the photographs look so artificial,” says Shaun. “The Botanic Gardens are already a constructed and controlled environment, and using the postcard style removes the images further from reality.”

To demonstrate the phenomenon of pinhole imagery the artists have also constructed a walk-in ‘camera obscura’ within the gallery space. Visitors will enter through a door into a darkened area at the end of the gallery and be able to see the scene from Abel Smith Street projected onto the wall from a tiny hole.

An artist’s floor talk will take place at 6pm on Tuesday 1 February. They’ll also run a workshop on Saturday 12 February at 10am, where people are invited to get creative with their own pinhole camera.

Light and Truth opens at 5.30pm on 27 January at Toi Pōneke Gallery, 61 Abel Smith Street – just up the road from Real Groovy.

ENDS

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