Why I Use a Pinhole Camera

Back in 1977 shortly before I began my professional career, I had visions of being a black and white photographer like Ansel Adams.  I was enamored with his tack sharp luminous landscape photographs.  I bought a Calumet Cambo 4x5 view camera, Schneider lens, 13-pound Bogen tripod, and taught myself Adams’ Zone System.  I then spent a couple years producing some of the worst photographs of my lengthy career.  Things improved, but the photographs didn’t speak to me.  I was no Ansel Adams and would never be.

One summer day, feeling depressed while sitting on the curb in front of my rundown rented house, I concluded that Adams’ style (and that of others) was not in my future.  If my own photographs bored me, I couldn’t expect viewers to feel anything but indifference.  Three months later I stumbled blindly into photojournalism, thinking I knew what I was doing, but didn’t have a clue.

Jump ahead to 1994: a friend tossed me a cardboard box 4x5 pinhole camera and said, “Try it.” I didn’t. Instead, it gathered dust on a shelf.  In 1995 I began a two-week residency at Rocky Mountain National Park and on a whim pulled the camera off the shelf.

One late afternoon during my residency I was standing on a small bridge over the Big Thompson River looking at the setting sun. Why not?  I pulled the pinhole camera out of my bag.  I muttered to myself, “How can I compose a photo if I can’t see what I am doing?” I bagged the photo regardless.

Later, as I pulled the negative out of the rinse water, there it was: the landscape I had been looking for from the beginning.  Contained within the negative was a soft, luminous image that spoke of time, light, and beauty.  The Big Thompson River gently curved across the moraine toward a cleft in the distant mountains.  The long exposure turned the rushing river into a gaussian echo of creation, smoothed by the ages.  That moment of revelation has followed me for over thirty years.

Why a pinhole camera? My sense of the wilderness has always appeared mysterious and ethereal. A pinhole landscape photograph is not about fine detail. Rather, the landscape is reduced to light, form, and, in many situations, movement. Indistinct forms heighten mystery.

Ansel Adams would not approve of the “Pictorialist” view that the pinhole suggests.  In fact, in 1932, Adams and fellow photographer, Edward Weston, formed Group f/64 to return photography to what he felt was photography’s greatest aspect: the rendering of fine detail. In a letter to the Pictorialist William Mortensen, Ansel Adams confessed his disdain for Mortensen’s approach, calling it the stuff of “shallow vision and oblivion.” In his autobiography, he went on to write that Mortensen “was and has remained synonymous with the opposite of everything I believe in and stand for in photography.”

Sorry Ansel, in my universe “straight” photography plays to assumed reality.  That’s not to disparage photographers who favor straight photography.  No, it is the viewer that too often assumes that a photograph is a window into reality.  In photography, a carrot is not a carrot, but a photograph of a carrot. That is a philosophical matter that I will address at some later date.

I don’t see detail.  Rather, I see light and form.  I see the Garden of Eden.  I see Sacred ground.  The pinhole erases clues of place, of the machinery of man.  In fact, the pinhole landscape photograph is so effective that I can look at a negative from twenty-four hours earlier and have no idea where the photo was made.  Unless there is a recognizable feature, like the Big Thompson River, I have very little to guide me.

In 1977, I sought to apprehend something for which I had no word or understanding.  Indeed, my photographs of that time show my misunderstanding.  I still have a box of my early landscape photographs.  I took notes back then.  One note said “I am indifferent.  It is a mystery as to why I even took this picture.”  Like it or hate it — just don’t look away. Indifference is the deepest cut, and through the pinhole I ask the landscape to remember me kindly.