PINHOLE PHOTOGRAPHY WAS A GIFT OF THE PANDEMIC. I probably never would have focused on pinhole work as intently as I have if I wasn’t looking for something – anything – to do with my time and energy while the world shut down and work went away. Which is my cue to say that, now that this phase of history is over, it’s time to look back and assess.
And normally that’s what I’d do; I began using the winter doldrums to take stock of my progress nearly thirty years ago, when the thrill of the steep learning curve began to flatten out. Which is precisely why that’s not what I feel like doing with pinhole work at the moment – the learning curve is still looming in front of me whenever I pull a pinhole optic from my camera bag, and I feel like I’m still a lot of photos away from reaching a point where the work can pleasingly fill a wall.
Pinhole work does for me what shooting with a view camera might do for another photographer. When I know I have a potential pinhole in front of me and unclip my tripod from my backpack, the gears begin to shift and I slow down to get ready for the moment when I press the shutter release. Because like shooting with a 4×5 bellows camera and loaded film backs, there’s an awful lot of fine tuning going on – the ratio of squinting to clicking is seriously out of balance, and like shooting with a view camera, there’s that moment where you think “Is that it?” You never feel like you’ve taken enough frames given the effort leading up to that shutter click.
Three years into the pinhole experiment, I’ve collected an interesting little palette of optics. Which is amusing since what I have is essentially a collection of tiny holes. Only I can see the need for three (actually five) different holes that transmit light into my camera. There’s the Pinhole Pro X I bought on Kickstarter before lockdowns – a kind of Swiss army knife of pinhole optics that’s actually a zoom pinhole.
Then there’s the Lensbaby Obscura, which has three different kinds of non-lens optics (pinhole, sieve and zone plate), and the original Pinhole Pro S I bought when I needed the widest angle of view I could get. They cover pretty much every possible aspect of pinhole-to-digital photography I can imagine right now, though I’m deep enough into this that if someone comes up with a compellingly unique new variation on the pinhole I might expand my collection.
The most unexplored venue for pinhole work right now is portraiture, and though I’ve tried to use a pinhole in nearly every portrait shoot I’ve done since I acquired my first optic (admittedly not as much as I’d have liked), I don’t think I’ve scratched the surface of what’s possible with pinhole in portraiture. The shot above is a kind of halfway point between a portrait and a landscape, and barely a feint at what I think I can accomplish with this idea.
The pinholes have taken a place that my Holga camera used to occupy – a kind of shooting that forces me to think less about fine technical details that I can control and concentrate instead on light and composition. It’s the sort of creative practice that was popular in photo school (or so I’m told – I never went), though I’d say that it’s more useful to a photographer later in their career, when habits and preferences have worn a rut in your working methods.
It’s hard to describe just what the appeal is; my pinholes sometimes evoke a painting, at other times the 19th century pictorialist photography I love so much. Whatever the case, they’ve plugged into some photo I have in my head and need to get out – some sort of dreamlike, bleary image that was waiting to be discovered in my memory.
I can’t help but be pleased with my progress in pinhole work (though there are peers and family who are vocally dubious about the whole endeavour). I can’t help but note that, barely a year into taking up the pinhole, I managed to get my work published in a book, which is as satisfying as it’s vindicating. I think I have a lot more to accomplish with my pinholes, though it feels like I’ve reached a fork in the road in terms of what to attempt next, though that might just be a way of getting myself pumped up for the new year from the depths of hated winter.
Rick McGinnis Photographs 
Which one in what book, Rick? You might have drawn attention to this on Facebook but I can’t recall.
I enjoyed reading this. And looking at your photos of course!
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There should be a link in there to a post called “Publications”, from last year. It was a book called Inside 2020, published in Italy – a collection of pinhole photography from around the world. I had about a half dozen shots in there.
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ah yes, missed the colour of the hyperlink, thanks! Another interesting read!
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