It was a couple of years ago that I first saw a digital camera. The person wielding it was zealous about it, saying, “The photos look better than the real subject you’re shooting.” This seemed to me not such a good thing, another in the series of technological breakthroughs (or marketing coups) that help convince us that faster is better; that mistakes need no longer be part of any creative process; that e-mail is better than a handwritten note. With a digital camera, you know exactly what you’re getting, and that’s fine, to a point. But lately there has been a renaissance of photography’s oldest and most hands-on form: the pinhole camera. The camera that captured these images is a simple wooden box with a tiny hole that ushers light onto a piece of film. It uses no lens, and the shutter is a little sliding panel. Each exposure takes anywhere from a second or two to minutes or even hours, and, given that there’s not even a viewfinder, every picture is a surprise and a wonderful mystery. In this get-your-pictures-in-an-hour world, pinhole images like these, which were taken in southwestern Michigan, seem more like paintings than photos. They offer, it can be argued, a more intimate, almost contemplative view of life’s delicious details.
