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Pinhole Photography
the University of Georgia and taught pinhole photography from 1953 to
1988. During that period his students built 4356 pinhole cameras (Renner
1995:53).
Two scientists were also working with pinhole photography, Kenneth A.
Connors in the USA and Maurice Pirenne in Great Britain. Connors did
research on pinhole definition and resolution. His findings were printed in
his self-published periodical Interest. Pirenne used the pinhole to study
perspective in his book Optics, Paiting and Photography (1970).
In 1971 The Time-Life Books published The Art of Photography in the wellknown
Life Library of Photography and included one of Eric Renner's
panoramic pinhole images. The June 1975 issue of Popular Photography
published the article "Pinholes for the People", based on Phil Simkin's
month-long project with 15,000 hand-assembled and preloaded pinhole
cameras in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (People came into the museum,
picked up a camera, made an exposure. The images, developed in a public
darkroom in the museum, were continually displayed in the museum.)
In the 1970s pinhole photography gained increasing popularity. Multiple
pinholes became rare. Many pinhole photographers experimented with
alternative processes. A number of articles and some books were published,
among them Jim Shull's The Hole Thing: A Manual of Pinhole
Photography. Stan Page of Utah, a leading historian of pinhole
photography, collected 450 articles on pinhole photography published after
1850. In the USA, however, critics tended to ignore pinhole photography in
art, whereas Paolo Gioli and Dominique Stroobant received more attention
in Europe. In Japan Nobuo Yamanaki started making pinhole camera
obscuras in the early 1970s. Although pinhole photography gained
popularity, few of the artists were aware of the others' images. A diversity of
approaches and cameras developed.
In 1985 Lauren Smith published The Visionary Pinhole, the first broad
documentation of the diversity of pinhole photography. The first national
exhibition of pinhole photography in the USA was organised by Willie
Anne Wright, at the The Institute of Contemporary Art of the Virginia
Museum in 1982. In 1988 the first international exhibition, "Through a
Pinhole Darkly", was organised by the Fine Arts Museum of Long Island.
Cameras and images from forty-five artists were exhibited. A second
international exhibition was organised in Spain the same year, at The
Museum of Contemporary Art of Seville, comprising the work of nine
photographers. A third international exhibition followed at the Center for
Contemporary Arts of Santa Fe in New Mexico, also in 1988. According to
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