I started making pinhole photographs two summers ago when I was stuck at home, recovering from a hip replacement, and bored senseless. I was pretty limited—only allowed to walk on one leg—so, where I'd usually have gone for long walks around with a camera, I was stuck. You can't hold use a regular SLR camera and stand up with crutches at the same time. I tried, almost dropped the camera into the river, wobbled madly and almost fell in myself. I'd played with pinhole cameras a little before, but never got beyond the "whoa, cool! I made a picture with a cardboard box!" level of ambition. But I figured that using a camera that I didn't have to hold to use was a good plan. In the past, I'd balanced it on benches, tied it to trees, and taped it onto a gate. I dug out the old kit, and thought I'd have a couple of days of fun before the novelty wore off again.
That weekend I took a couple of pictures of Snarl, and a couple of the garden. The instant gratification of dunking paper negs into developer in my high tech darkroom—trays balanced on the cistern in the windowless bathroom--got me experimenting fast. Taking a picture, seeing what you've got, and making another to try to improve it is a seductive cycle.
The next day, I turned the camera on myself. On a practical level, the slowness of paper negatives in a pinhole camera meant I could set the camera up on a table, open the shutter, hop backwards, sit still for a couple of minutes, and then get up and finish the exposure by sticking the gaffer tape over the hole again. The first one that coalesced in the developer almost knocked me off my feet. I always hated photographs of me. Ever since I was about six or seven, I've been hiding from cameras. I never recognized the image as me, and refused to believe that I looked like the person that other people took pictures of. They never matched the pictures in my head. This one, though, this one was different. Through pure beginner's luck I'd managed to make a photograph that looked like my idea of me.
The next few, obviously, were disasters. But I was hooked, and had one of those exhilarating itches that your brain won't let go of until it's properly scratched. I spent the next few months doing almost nothing but making pinhole photographs of myself, trying to work out what worked, and why it worked, and what was going on in these pictures. Being almost immobile was, for once, an incredible advantage, because sitting still was easy. To begin with, I went for the most stillness I could, looking at the way that the tiny unavoidable movements smoothed things out. The anomalies get softened, and you're left with something like a memory of a face. You can never be entirely still—you're always breathing, your expression shifts minutely—and that balance between stillness and life somehow gets stuck into the particles of silver.
One image can hold all the light, all the life, from several minutes. It's a far cry from that flash-frozen 1/500th of a second snap that gets you halfway to a dorky smile. Then I started to play a little bit more: how much movement can you hold in a still image? What is too fleeting and vanishes? What happens when you leave multiple ghosts of yourself in one picture, does it build up a more complete picture of alternate selves? What shows on your face when you think about something in particular for several minutes at a time? What happens when you use fluid movement, and what happens when you move through different states or positions? How can you change, deliberately change, your appearance with nothing but slight movements? Can ordinary mortals shapeshift?
Some images are very carefully planned in advance and staged, but a few exposures into a session, if I'm lucky enough to hit the flow, ideas just start piling on top of each other, and I get a sense of the next step to follow. It's a chain of "what if" that builds on all the ones I made before.
I'm still exploring and playing with all these ideas, but more than anything I'm still trying to make pictures that show how I remember faces.
The image you picked up on, with the swirling, came from one afternoon of playing with extremes. It was the first day for months I'd been able to stand without crutches, and put any weight through my bad leg, so I was in a huge rush of happiness. I wanted to move as much as I possibly could, so I held the camera at arm's length and span around a couple of times, trying to catch a sense of the rush I was feeling at that moment. I love that picture, because it's the closest I'll ever get to expressing how incredibly free I felt that day.
The Balancing Act series comes from the same starting point. I was showing off to Snarl one day: see Katie perform the astounding trick of standing on her own two feet! See her walk, unaided, in a straight line! See her kneel down! See her stand on a tiptoes on a chair! It felt like a slightly insane circus act, more exhilarating than tightrope walking without a net. That turned into a set of pictures I've been working on for over a year now. They began as an odd personal celebration of regaining the ability to control my movement. Rather than using a light metre and timing these pictures based on "correct" exposures, they were all timed on how long I could hold a particular position—not just hold completely still, but hold without stumbling or hurting—trying to make images of the edges of my ability to do normal things. Late last year, as my hip started to fail again, these edges contracted, and just standing up was a challenge. The final picture in the current set was taken a few days before I had to go back into hospital for more surgery, and was made of pure determination to stay upright for a few more minutes. Hopefully in a few months I'll be able to come back around the circle again.
