To avoid offending certain sensitivities, we warn that the site contains explicit content
To avoid offending certain sensitivities, we warn that the site contains explicit content
email: paolo@fotopaoloaldi.it
email: paolo@fotopaoloaldi.it
© 2021 by Paolo Aldi
© 2021 by Paolo Aldi
The pinhole photography technique
The photographs of Portraits in the Square are made using the pinhole photography technique.
These are photographs taken without any lens but simply through a small hole, as big as a period at the end of a sentence. Such a photo can be taken using regular cameras, including digital ones, with a pinhole instead of a lens. You can achieve refined results using cameras specially built for lensless photography. It is very creative, fun, and educational to use a camera you build yourself with common materials like shoeboxes, tomato cans, or tea tins. Any container that can be made lightproof can be turned into a pinhole camera.
Why photograph slowly with a pinhole camera:
Liberation. The feeling of being the master of the images I produce and not a servant-mechanism of the camera.
Magic. Whatever camera is available, whatever the level of technical skill, the result is magical.
World. The world seen through the little hole is a timeless, silent, enchanted world. An unreal and very present world, an effect of disorientation and fascinating tension.
Time. The suspended and rarefied atmosphere that dominates lens-less images is the result of a very special relationship with time. Forget the snapshot: it may take seconds or minutes before the image is captured. The pinhole is the photography of patience, of meditation. With traditional photography, and even more with digital, you shoot and run, you end up seeing the places only later, at home.
Ecology of the mind. Pinhole photographers wait for the little box to do its job and in the meantime look around, think. No more anxiety over a "bad" photo: an unexpected intrusion of light, a diffraction, a blur are accidents that pinhole photographers expect, accept, and even value as a contribution of chance to artistic creation.
Praise of controlled imprecision, a philosophy of respect for the order of the world.
It is an ecology of the image that becomes an ecology of the mind.