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Jan Kapoor Photography
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Pinhole Resource Photography Collection Joins the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives, Santa Fe, NM

6/21/2012

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Picture
Santa Fe (June 13,  2012)—Mysterious, artistic, and as low-tech as an oatmeal box, pinhole  photography has captivated everyone from schoolchildren to professional   photographers for more than a century. The Pinhole Resource Archives, the   world’s largest collection of images, books and cameras, just joined New Mexico’s largest archive of photography, the Palace of the Governors Photo   Archives at the New Mexico History Museum.

The  collection was a  donation from Pinhole Resource Inc., which is based in New  Mexico and led by  Eric Renner and Nancy Spencer.

 “In looking at other possible repositories for the Pinhole Resource Collection, we felt the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives had a tremendous web presence, which would make the collection accessible to people worldwide,” Renner and Spencer said in a prepared statement. “In addition, with the staff’s enthusiasm and interest in pinhole images we felt the collection would have a good home here in New Mexico."

The Photo Archives  has already digitized hundreds of the images, which can be searched here (http://econtent.unm.edu/cdm4/indexpg.php ); click on “Browse  Pinhole Resource Collection” or type the word “Pinhole” into the
search box. 

“The Photo Archives  and the state of New Mexico is fortunate to be the repository for this  world-class collection of pinhole photography. There is no other collection like  it and is a tremendous addition to the resources made available to the public  through the Photo Archives,” said archivist Daniel Kosharek. 

Even in this digital  age, pinhole photography remains an intriguing medium. Its continued popularity  has been celebrated every April since 2001 with Worldwide Pinhole Photography  Day. The 2010 event drew 3,387 images from 67 countries.

An exhibition of  images from this unparalleled collection of pinhole photographs, representing  images from New Mexico and around the world, is scheduled for April 2014 Poetics of Light willcoincide with Worldwide Pinhole  Photography  Day.

In the 5th  century BC, a Chinese philosopher noted the inverted image  produced through a  pinhole—an effect that led to development of the camera
obscura and serves as  the fundamental quality of pinhole photography.  Renaissance artists Leonardo da  Vinci, Filippo Brunelleschi, and Leon Battista
Alberti advanced the knowledge of  pinhole camera obscura imagery, creating a basis and understand of one-point  perspective. In 1850, Sir David Brewster, a Scottish scientist, took the first  photograph with a pinhole camera.  By the mid-1980s, a variety of pinhole  cameras could be purchased by anyone who wanted to create images without  creating the camera.

In its most simple  description, a pinhole camera is a lens-less camera with a
small aperture. The  interior of the “camera” (which can be, yes, an oatmeal
box…or a traffic cone…or  the human mouth…) contains a piece of film that  records the projected image over  periods of time that can range from a second to a year. 

Pinhole Resource  Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to pinhole photography across the  globe, was formed in New Mexico in 1984 by Eric Renner. He began working in pinhole photography in 1968, while teaching   three-dimensional design for the State University of New York at Alfred. Images from his 6 pinhole panoramic camera were shown in the first exhibition of the Visual Studies Workshop Gallery in Rochester, New York. Consequently, one of Renner’s images was included in the Time-Life Series The Art of Photography, 1971. Through exhibitions and workshops, he met pinhole artists  throughout the world and worried that their work might become as lost as the  thousands of images taken during the Pictorial Movement from the late 1880s to  early 1900s. 

After forming the nonprofit, he created the Pinhole Journal, and in 1989 was   joined by Nancy Spencer, co-director of Pinhole Resource and co-editor of the journal, which ceased publication in 2006. Their collections included images  from Europe, the Mideast, Asia and the Americas, books about pinhole   photography, and dozens of pinhole cameras, one of which dates back to the  1880s. 

The Palace of the Governors Photo Archives contains more than 800,000 prints, cased photographs, glass plate negatives, stereographs, photo postcards, lantern slides and more. Almost 20,000 images can be keyword searched on its website. The materials date from approximately 1850 to the present and cover the history and people of New Mexico from some of the most important 19th- and 20th-century photographers of the West—Adolph Bandelier, George C. Bennett, John Candelario, W.H. Cobb, Edward S. Curtis, Charles Lindbergh, Jesse Nusbaum, T. Harmon Parkhurst, Ben Wittick, and many others.

The Archives actively seeks material from contemporary photographers as well in order to document the past 50 years of visual history in New Mexico. Recent acquisitions include works by Jack Parsons, Herbert A. Lotz, Tony O’Brien, Steve  Fitch, David Michael Kennedy, John Willis, Ann Bromberg, and Cary Herz. 

Image shown above: "The Dark Way", from the Ritual Series by Jan Kapoor; series included in the Pinhole Resource Archives. 4x5 pinhole image, platinum/palladium print.



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