Self Portrait-Direct Positive Pinhole

In this image, I used a handmade pinhole camera to create a direct positive self-portrait. The slow exposure time (5 minutes) produces motion blur and a spectral doubling of the face and hands, evoking the physical manifestation of existential anxiety. The gesture, hands clutching the throat, suggests both suffocation and awakening, a moment suspended between terror and revelation.

This self-portrait emerged from an experiment in stillness that became an encounter with fear. Working with a pinhole camera, I submitted to the long exposure, the waiting, the trembling, and the inability to hold still, and allowed the camera to witness that threshold. The resulting image is not a performance of death, but a moment of confrontation with it.

The blurred face and uncertain outline of the body register what Becker called the “trembling creature,” the human awareness of its own finitude. Here, the blur becomes a residue of that awareness: a trace of movement within stillness, of life struggling against its own disappearance. The gesture of choking is both literal and symbolic: a confrontation with the impossibility of speaking about death and an insistence on making that silence visible.

In this way, the image serves as a through line of rupture: a visual record of death anxiety that has been changed by the creative process. It is not meant to resolve terror but to give it form—to hold it long enough to see what meaning might arise from the void.

I’m beginning to work in art-based research (ABR). This approach brings creativity into the realm of academia. What is practice-led (or practice-based) research? How does it work? Stay tuned; I’ll show some examples as I write about it a lot in the coming months. It involves my ABR journal—affect fuels the inquiry; exegesis translates it. The arts-based research journal is the site where the two meet, where feeling becomes knowing and knowing becomes art. ;-)

Calotype (Paper Negatives) Made With A Pinhole Camera

This year I’ll be exploring something I played with many years ago. Twenty years ago, I made wet collodion tintypes with a pinhole camera; I called them "pin-plates." I’m going to revisit that idea, but this time I’ll be making calotypes (paper negatives), which will be printed out in a variety of P.O.P. processes.

Why am I doing this? I want to make prints that are more abstract or have more poetry in them. I’m interested in semiotics; I want to evoke the feeling of a dream or memory. Also, adding distortion or "confusion" may be interesting as well. Just as a reference, semiotics is the study of signs and symbols and how they are used to convey meaning, such as the way a red octagon is used as a sign for "stop" in many countries' traffic signals. Largely symbolic.

I’ve been thinking that I may end up using the "vignetted keyhole" approach (see "Plastic Jesus"). I’ve used this a lot in the past. Using an optic (lens) that doesn’t quite cover the plate or film size and creating a circular image, they can be very striking and interesting.

These images always remind me of looking through a peephole, implying that you are witnessing something that you shouldn’t be seeing or that you are seeing something that only you can see. A peephole, also known as a peekhole, spyhole, doorhole, magic eye, magic mirror, or door viewer, is a small, round opening through a door from which a viewer on the inside of a dwelling may "peek" to see directly outside the door. The lenses are made and arranged in such a way that viewing is only possible in one direction. This implies some kind of privilege as well, a potentially great metaphor for my project. The circular shape is also very symbolic to me in reference to the Tabeguache Ute and the "Circle of Life." There are a lot of great reasons to pursue making these images.

My main goal for this work, or any work I make, is to have it act as a catalyst for ideas—to share these theories from anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers, and historians (among other disciplines) in the hope that some of these ideas will resonate with other people. Death anxiety and the denial of death are such universal dilemmas—we will all die. We should all have a stake in understanding ourselves and others through these lenses (no pun intended).