Pilar3

My new book is Pinhole Bodyscapes, Pinhole Camera Color Nude Photographs. [link]

The prints posted here are from this book as well as for the next.

My bodyscapes are made with two pinhole cameras. Both of the cameras are commercially available for about $50 each. One is the Pinhole Blender Mini 120 and the other is the Holga 120WPC. The Pinhole Blender curves the film and multiple images can be overlapped and blended with feathered edges. The Holga is a wide-angle camera, producing 6x9cm and 6x12cm rectilinear images.

The lighting I use is a single PowerLight 1500SL. This powerful flash unit has to be used at full output to correctly expose 400 ISO film because of the small apertures of the cameras (f/133 for the Holga and f/200 for the Blender). The photos in the book were made using Kodak Portra 400NC 120 film. The Holga was sometimes tripod-mounted and both were usually hand-held. Focus and depth of field are no problem with pinhole cameras which permitted me to position the cameras very close to the models.

My models are all volunteers from Tucson, Arizona. Most are professional models. Their gifts of time and their patient cooperation with my direction for this project are very greatly appreciated.

I bought the pinhole cameras as toys, really, but I was fascinated with the results they gave me. I decided to devote a project to the pinholes, hence my book, and I'm working on volume 2.

They are challenging cameras to use because I have to imagine the photos; there are no viewfinders, and blending images is somewhat unpredictable. There are no lenses and therefore no color correction so colors come out “interesting,” (although I manipulated colors on some photos) and the soft focus effect is just right for bodyscape photos. The large film size minimizes grain, producing a clear, smooth texture except when certain images needed substantial cropping.

I developed my style for bodyscapes some 30 years ago, using students from the University of Illinois as models. Finding my own vision for bodyscape photos was a four-year endeavor. Since that time I have wanted to redo this project. I had to wait for my life circumstances to finally resolve in a way that permitted me to tackle the project again. Meanwhile, some other photographers have picked up on this style.

I wouldn’t have predicted that I would redo the project with toy cameras, but the pinhole cameras enable me to produce photos that are not possible with conventional cameras. Pinhole cameras were the very first cameras but, you know, they make me feel like a pioneer.

--George Arthur Lareau, Tucson photographic artist