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Pinhole Photography
of Man; the Clifton Observatory at Bristol, England; the camera obscura at
Portmeirion, North Wales; the Giant Camera at Cliff House, San Francisco;
the camera obscura at Santa Monica, California, the camera on the Mount
Oybin in Germany, and others. A few large scale camera obscuras have
been built in the 20th century.
The First Pinhole Photographs
Sir David Brewster, a Scottish scientist, was one of the first to make pinhole
photographs, in the 1850s. He also coined the very word "pinhole", or "pinhole"
with a hyphen, which he used in his book The Stereoscope, published
in 1856. Joseph Petzval used the term "natural camera" in 1859, whereas
Dehors and Deslandres, in the late 1880s, proposed the term "stenopaic
photography". In French today "sténopé" is used for the English "pinhole".
In Italian a pinhole camera is called "una fotocamera con foro stenopeico".
In German "Lochkamera" and "Camera obscura" are used. The
Scandinavian languages tend to use the English "pinhole" as a model –
"hullkamera"/"holkamera"/"hålkamera", though "camera obscura" is also
found, and is the term preferred by myself in Norwegian.
Sir William Crookes, John Spiller and William de Wiveleslie Abney, all in
England, were other early photographers to try the pinhole technique. The
oldest extant pinhole photographs were probably made by the English
archeologist Flinders Petrie (1853–1942) during his excavations in Egypt in
the 1880s. Two of his photographs are reproduced in Renner (1995:39,40).
It should be noted that Petrie's camera had a simple lens in front of the
pinhole.
Pictorialism and Popular Pinhole Photography
By the late 1880s the Impressionist movement in painting exherted a certain
influence on photography. Different schools or tendencies developed in
photography. The "old school" believed in sharp focus and good lenses; the
"new school", the "pictorialists", tried to achieve the atmospheric qualities
of paintings. Some of the pictorialists experimented with pinhole
photography. In 1890, George Davison's pinhole photograph An Old
Farmstead (later called The Onion Field) won the first award at the Annual
Exhibition of the Photographic Society of London. The award was
controversial and led to a schism in the Photographic Society of London
(soon to become the Royal Photographic Society) which resulted in the
formation of the well-known pictorialist group, the "Linked Ring". George
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