Chris Keeney » Photography: Blog » Words and Images Celebrating the Art of Photography

Thomas Hudson Reeve
Pinhole Photographer / Artist
New York, United States
Website: www.papercams.com

The modern camera is a wonderful thing, but it’s nice to remember how simple the mechanism can be. You can strip away the technology until there is little left but the abstraction on which the machine is based. A simple manipulation of space, a few materials, and a couple of hand tools and the magic (or physics) of it is at your fingertips without sophisticated engineering.
To simplify these cameras as much as possible I made them out of the photo-paper itself. There is no film in the camera because the camera is the film. Like a salad bowl made of lettuce leaf, and consumed with the meal, the camera doesn’t exist after it’s utility is fulfilled. It is more of an arrangement than a thing.
There is no negative because the photo-paper employed creates a direct positive image (It uses a reversal process and is used to make prints from slides). Since it is color paper it is sensitive to the full spectrum of visible light, and there is no “safe” light recommended for darkroom work. In other words each paper box camera is cut, folded, and constructed in the dark and kept in a dark bag until its moment in the sun has come.
The pin-hole in the brass plate is all that is needed to project an image onto the inside surface of the box (more on that later), but light also seeps through the cracks and flaps of the box construction and soaks through the black tape that holds the whole thing together. The streaks and burns and flares that appear on the final image are the result of this ambient radiation and although it can be somewhat controlled it also depends largely on “random” factors.
Back in the dark the brass lens plate is folded back like a hatch-cover revealing the hole in the underlying box flap. A funnel is placed in the hole and the camera becomes more like a leaky juice carton as the chemicals are poured in and sloshed around for a couple of minutes each. Rigorous adherence to optimal chemistry technique is already out the window here, so I decided not to worry about it too much as long as the times and temperatures were in the ballpark.
Finally, with the whole box immersed in a deep pan of water, the black masking tape is peeled off and discarded, allowing the box to open flat and display it’s inner surface.

These are extremely wide-angle pictures. The angle of view seems to be about 170˚ as the image wraps around the inside of the box almost all the way back to the aperture. There is no “fish-eye” optical distortion as with a wide-angle lens because through a pinhole light travels in straight lines whereas a glass lens bends light as it gathers it. The distortion that is evident here is caused by the various planes of the box sides intersecting the sphere of light at different angles. This stretches sections of the field of view like a mercator map projection.
Objects seen in the box are closer than they appear and at the sides you are almost looking over your shoulder. Like a mirror, the scene is flipped left to right, which is why a familiar location may not look quite right.

CK → Imagine looking at a blank piece of paper and then minutes later that same piece of paper has been folded into a working pinhole camera. Tom Reeve has done just that. Tom folds photographic paper into small paper box pinhole cameras called “papercams”. Not only is the processing exciting, but so are the images. And while working with Tom’s wife Kat to put this feature together, I learned that January is Tom’s birthday month… So Happy Birthday Tom and thank you for sharing your amazing papercam photos with us in this feature.

Title: Winter Garden - Color papercam pinhole (lensless) photography - By Thomas Hudson Reeve

Title: Tressel - Color papercam pinhole (lensless) photograph - by Thomas Hudson Reeve

Title: Flat Iron - Color pinhole papercam photo by Thomas Hudson Reeve

Title: Manhole - Color papercam pinhole photograph - by Thomas Hudson Reeve

Title: Bronx Glade - Color papercam pinhole (lensless) photograph - by Thomas Hudson Reeve

Title: Grants Tomb - Color papercam pinhole (lenless) photograph - by Thomas Hudson Reeve

Title: WTC - Color papercam pinhole (lensless) photograph of the World Trade Center buildings - by Thomas Hudson Reeve

Title: River Side Park - Color papercam pinhole (lensless) photograph - By Thomas Hudson Reeve

All photos (C) Copyright 2010 Thomas Hudson Reeve and Reproduced by Permission