Artist Statement
“Monuments” – 1990
Many of the Gelatine-Silver prints in the Monuments exhibition are hand-tinted and selectively toned. This body of work is exclusively shot onto film with two hand-made pinhole cameras of different formats. The photographs were made over a three-year period while teaching in New Brunswick, then Alberta and finally Newfoundland. They began as my response to and a rebellion against the technology so prevalent at many schools of photography. I concentrated on the subjects that I have always photographed or had attracted my attention. The unique imaging language of a pinhole camera, and its purity of vision, is capable of elevating…
- the ordinary to the status of the extraordinary;
- the forgotten to rediscovery;
- the ignored to face contemplation;
- the ugly to the level of beauty; and
- the mundane to the monumental.
The rest of the pinhole work here also includes Type-C color work shot on 8″ × 10″ color negative film cut to fit the 5″ × 8″ pinhole camera. The hand-tinted images of Evan Penny’s sculptures were shot at the ACA Gallery in 1988-89. The final two were shot in The Lyric Cranium in 2013.