A FIELD GUIDE TO CAMERA SPECIES
Darren Glass
The definitive chronological guide to the 90 pinhole and slit cameras built by Darren Glass since 1990.
Includes a glossary and technical section on how to make your own pinhole camera.
Darren Glass’s photographs result from a blend of rigorously controlled testing and deliberate incorporations of accident. He has constructed a wide array of cameras, from his camera Frisbees which expose photographic film while literally being flung through the air to static sculptural objects built to capture multiple viewpoints of stream banks.
His lens-less imaging devices provide us with an unusually rudimentary form of photography. He says, “like early photographers who transported giant glass negatives in wagon-darkrooms in pursuit of obtaining extreme resolution, I have made cameras that are large, difficult to carry, and often intended for the depiction of remote pictorial sites. I like to think that the work of experimental camera design, begun by 19th century pioneers of photography, is still in its infancy.”
Darren Glass has a growing reputation as one of New Zealand’s most imaginative photographers. This book, A Field Guide to Camera Species, shows that he is also our most innovative camera maker. Never content with just the one-point perspective of the typical pinhole camera, despite the seemingly infinite depth of field, and inducement to explore the world from new angles, Glass experimented with a home-made stereo pinhole camera in 1990. The result, he writes, was an extreme wide-angle camera that had to be placed within two or three centimetres of its subject. (Pinhole photographs are known for the all-over equal un-sharpness with which all objects in the frame are rendered, but can look reasonably sharp to the human eye.) Since then, Glass has made a huge range of innovative cameras, with anything from one to 105 apertures, designed most often to do a specific task and make economical use of unusual film sizes in black & white or colour.
In one case he made a camera to carry a full 70-metre long paper negative. Presented as a chronological catalogue of 90 of the pin-hole cameras he has made since 1990, A Field Guide to Camera Species, shares Glass’s enthusiasm and delight in low-tech photography of the most sophisticated kind.
RIM BOOKS
ISBN 978-0-473-14735-8 (pbk)
2009
114p. ill 96p full colour, 200x130mm
18 page single colour gate-fold section containing a selection of Darren Glass’s drawings.
RRP NZ $60 plus post and packaging
For all wholesale orders and requests info@rimbooks.com