| Marian Roth |
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Artist's Statement For the last fifteen years I have been making pictures with pinhole cameras, most of them from found objects which I convert into cameras. Pinhole photography (as I practice it) is a very idiosyncratic and intimate experiences I create my camera, and then work over months or even years to perfect it. The images in this exhibition have all been made in a 1986 Dodge Caravan which I have turned into a mobile, large format, pinhole camera. I make a photographic ground for the black and white images by painting silver emulsion onto watercolor paper in the darkroom. The color images are made on mural paper (either direct positive or C-41) which I cut and load into light-tight tubes in the darkroom. Then I get behind the wheel of my van/camera and drive around looking for places to work. I love the feeling inside the camera as a picture forms, like a kind of quiet invocation. There is a certain feeling of mystery and timelessness inherent in pinhole imagery, but I try to open time and space even more by bending the focal plane inside the van. While most of us look to photography to accurately reveal something of the world around us, I like to use it to transform the apparent world, to make a new and other place. I yearn for the other side of things, the things I can't see with my eyes but which somehow appear, as if through magic, on those pieces of paper inside my van. ABOUT THE PRINTS: Unless otherwise noted, the color images are one-of-a-kind. The red and yellow images ore the original paper negatives made in the van onto C-41 negative paper. The highly glossy blue images are also one-of-a-kind, being direct positives exposed in the van on Ilfochrome Super Deluxe paper. It is completely archival and will not fade. The black and white prints are completely archival and in editions of 3, though each print is unique. The hand applied emulsion is never the same from piece of paper to piece of paper and I work over many days to get all the pieces in a compound image to work with each other. I would like to acknowledge the support of the Guggenheim Foundation in the creation of this work. |
| All images copyright June Bateman Gallery and individual artists. Reproduction by permission only. |