Sheila Bocchine is often credited as the only known pinhole portrait photographer in the world. Here, she explains her love of this old-fashioned style of photography and the secrets of her success...
I studied photojournalism at Columbia College Chicago and when I graduated I was kind of tired of photography and not sure what to do next. I moved to Phoenix and I had this dream that I was using a pinhole camera to photograph the sunsets of Arizona, and they were so beautiful. The dream was so intense that I woke up and spent my last $100 on a camera.
A short while after that, I was in New York city and I had an argument with a friend who claimed it would be impossible to do portrait photographs with a pinhole camera, because the subjects wouldn’t be able to stand still long enough. I really like to be right so that’s where it all began.
At first it was really hard. I didn’t shoot anything worthy or even good for the first two or three years. The thing about pinhole is that you can’t just look through the viewfinder and see what you’re photographing. It was trial and error. I carried a notebook and for every exposure I did I would write down how long the exposure was and how far away the scene was from the pinhole camera. Part of the art is that you have to learn what will fit in the frame. When I first started doing portraits I would cut off a lot of heads. With a regular camera you just click on the button and it automatically knows how long to leave the aperture open for and how wide to open it. With pinhole you have to do all that by hand - it’s completely manual.
The pinhole camera was invented in the 1850s and was actually the first photographic device. At first the pinhole shutter was just used to cast shadows for all sorts of crazy uses, like helping artists study and draw portraits. Soon someone came up with a way of capturing and keeping that image and photography was born. These days pinhole cameras take film – you have to get the right size and everything but it’s basically regular film.
Pinhole photography is always very slow. You have to leave the shutter open for a very long time for the light to record the image on film. If it’s a very sunny day it’s about eight to 10 seconds. If it’s cloudy, then it’s even longer. I encourage my subjects to move. For me, the best portraits are a combination of stillness and movement – that way you get to see what’s happening in the real world. The world doesn’t sit still so why should my images?
I went through a phase of photographing little garden ornaments – I love that series of photographs. I liked to imagine that maybe they had conversations and came alive at night, so I tried to give them personalities. My other favourite series is my sleeping series. It documents all the places I’ve slept over the past eight years – different states and countries, floors, and couches, even beaches. I just leave the shutter open for the entire night, which can be up to 12 hours; dreaming is my second favourite thing to do!
Marketing my work was really hard. No one teaches you how to do that. It’s a full-time job. They teach you how to expose a proper negative and how to think outside the box, but they never teach you to be your own media person – yet it’s so important, if you want to make a career for yourself.
You know, it sounds somewhat silly but the one piece of advice I have is to do whatever the hell you want. Don’t listen to anybody. If you want to do it, then do it. As soon as you start listening to people telling you that you can’t do something, you start to believe it. I can do whatever I want. If it doesn’t work then it doesn’t work, but I have every right to give it a go.
Sheila Bocchine was talking to Katie Jackson