Pinhole Photography

These photographs were made with pinhole cameras, including a fixed-aperture 4x5 Ondu, a Zero Image medium format, and an assortment of homemade boxes. Each one is lensless and without a viewfinder, so composing means pointing the camera in the rough direction of your subject and trusting that the frame will resolve the way you imagined. At apertures this small, exposures stretch from a few minutes to an hour, and every shot is a calculation. You meter far past the edge of the normal scale, account for film reciprocity failure, and wait while the light slowly accumulates. What comes back is never quite what you saw, but often something better, a scene rendered in deep focus and quiet patience.

Pinhole has become a central part of my practice, largely because of what it demands. It has taught me to slow down, to trust my instincts, and to rely on my own understanding of film and light rather than the reassurance of a viewfinder or a meter reading. Whether I am photographing landscapes or city scenes, it has consistently been one of the most rewarding approaches I have found.