Self Portrait
2 seconds
f/138
Zero Image 6x6cm pinhole camera
Ilford Delta 3200 b/w film

Artist Name:
Scott Speck

Artist Website:
www.scottspeck.com

Artist Email:
scott_speck@yahoo.com

Artist Statement:
The pinhole camera provides an elegantly simple imaging technique, rendering scenes onto film via straight-line projection through a minute circular hole in the front of the camera. There are no glass lens elements, no refraction of light through optics, and everything in the photograph is in focus.

Through the pinhole, I am challenged to express my vision more powerfully than through complex, expensive glass lenses on traditional cameras. With the pinhole camera, I can exaggerate perspective, enhance three-dimensionality, excite and heighten sensations to reveal essences more effectively than by any other photographic means.

This process requires patience. I cannot compose a photograph through my camera since I cannot view a scene through the pinhole. From outside the camera, I rely on my own inner vision, my pinhole vision, to compose and initiate second-long to hour-long exposures that will surround the viewer in a scene both intimate and impactful.

Pinhole photography amplifies my reality - it draws me up a series of massive stone columns to a geometric nexus; it envelopes me among walls of glistening granite; it records the textures of roughly cast metal with tactile intensity. No other photographic modality seems so elegant, so expressive, and so right to me.

by Scott Speck
USA