Wholesale Poetics Of Light

The art of capturing an image through an improvised pinhole device traces back to ancient China and Greece through the Renaissance, reaching its height of popularity in the 1880s. The era of the modern sharp-focus lens camera marked the end of pinhole photography as a major art form. Three decades ago Eric Renner resuscitated the form with his publication Pinhole Journal that ushered in a resurgence of interest by artists seeking an alternative, often conceptual vision and alternative to sharp-focus photography. Renner and Nancy Spencer have out of this effort built the world's largest collection of pinhole art from 31 countries and 500 of artists comprising 6000 images. Pinhole offers new ways of exploring the world using the simplest, improvised mechanisms fashioned of oat boxes, sea shells, and other surprising materials to create images of mysterious, sometimes disturbing beauty in dreamlike landscapes, portraits, still-lifes, abstractions, and politically charged images.