Artist – Craftsman

 

 

 

Punctum is a pinhole camera designed with several intentions:

1. Show the whole image circle on the piece of film

2. Camera should be uncomfortably close for normal portrait framing

3. Camera should have to be handheld

4. Film loading / shutter action should not require inordinate amounts of work. The focus should be on taking the picture, not making the camera operate.

5. All components should be functional either literally or conceptually

 

 

 

 

About half of the parts for this camera were salvaged from broken cameras; the rest were fabricated to satisfy the requirements for the finished piece. The 4×5 back is from a Calumet monorail camera. The shutter is from a Polaroid brand forensic camera. The pinhole is approximately f/160, with a focal length of 1 1/4″. I decided to use fire patinas for most of the surfaces and not remove excess solder or refine the edges.

The first four requirements were easy to accommodate with basic design and technical construction, but after initial construction I was left with a useless ground glass. I replaced it with a metal plate describing the use of the camera. When viewed upright, it appears as the alchemic symbol for Sol (the sun). Silver sunbeams pour down from the sun, facilitating the act of creation.

When turned on its side, the plate refers to what is happening inside the camera. The symbol for Sol is an exact copy of the copper/brass plate that the pinhole is set into on the front of the camera. The four brass containing areas represent the confines of the camera, and again the beams of light are creating something new.

 

 

There are two nods to photographic history that are made in the titling and material choice for this piece. “The Silver Sunbeam” is one of the most used practical textbooks of photography published in 1864 by J. Towler. I used silver to represent the rays of light because it is the material we traditionally used to capture it. The title itself, “Punctum,” literally means a “small opening,” but is also a term used the critical theory of photography to describe the small features of a photograph that make it “come alive” to the viewer.